With Syria, Russia, and Iran engaged in a major offensive to subdue the northwest Syrian city of Idlib and its environs, the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has increased his country’s support for the rebels there. He has recently requested that the U.S. supply his army with Patriot missiles to defend against Russian air power. Last year, however, Erdogan rejected an opportunity to receive Patriots, opting instead for the Russian-suppled S-400 anti-aircraft missile system, which has essentially made close military cooperation with the U.S. and NATO impossible. Bobby Ghosh considers America’s options:

[T]here is a strong possibility that [Erdogan’s] request is a ruse, and that the message is meant for Moscow, not Washington. Erdogan may be signaling to President Vladimir Putin that the new Turkish-Russian relationship is at peril over Idlib. The symbolism is hardly subtle. Erdogan’s decision . . . to buy Russian S-400 missile-defense systems instead of the Patriots offered by the U.S. marked Turkey’s turn away from its allies in NATO, and toward their adversary. He may now want Moscow to believe that Russia’s actions in Idlib could force Turkey back into the Western fold.

President Trump should set firm conditions for the Patriots. Turkey should mothball—ideally, return—the S-400 systems it has received, and agree not to order more. Erdogan should commit to peace talks with U.S.-allied Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria. And he should stop threatening to unleash waves of refugees on Europe. (For good measure, Trump should call on the Europeans to provide greater assistance to Turkey as the fighting in Idlib sends hundreds of thousands of refugees across the border.)

If Turkey’s request for Patriots is indeed a bluff, Erdogan will reject these demands. He must then lie in the bed he has made in Syria. But if he genuinely wants to bring Turkey back into the Western fold, in spirit as well as in theory, the price for readmission must be clearly posted at the entrance.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.