Earlier this month, Beirut announced that it intends to default on billions of dollars in foreign-currency bonds. It is now seeking Western assistance for its burgeoning financial crisis, which will no doubt be worsened by the coronavirus. Tony Badran and Jonathan Schanzer contend that such relief would be a gift to Hizballah:

The Lebanese system is built on graft. Its political class is corrupt beyond redemption. And at the center of it all is the Iran-backed terrorist group Hizballah.

In February, the government, [dominated] by Hizballah and its allies, asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for technical assistance . . . to restructure the Lebanese banking sector, which holds a sizable chunk of the debt. . . . Yet the government so far has rejected the IMF’s conditions for assistance. This obstinacy stems mainly (though not only) from Hizballah. As Hizballah’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, put it, . . . “Lebanon must not fall under anybody’s trusteeship or hand over its financial and economic administration” to outside parties. To put it another way, if Lebanon opens the books, the IMF would see how Hizballah’s illicit finance has infected the entire economy.

Hizballah’s illicit finance . . . accounts for a significant source of foreign currency for the Lebanese economy. . . . Since [2011], U.S. sanctions have increasingly constrained Hezbollah’s ability to launder money through Lebanon’s banks, leading to a precipitous drop in the flow of foreign currency. The terrorist group initially tried to keep a lid on the crisis by pumping dollars from its reserves into the market while doing its best to continue paying employees across all of its operations, military or otherwise.

Offering Lebanon help with COVID-19 testing kits and other medical gear is one thing. But a bailout without structural reform will mean perpetuating Lebanon’s corrupt system, on which Hizballah’s criminal enterprise depends. Underwriting pro-Iranian political orders is not in the U.S. interest.

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.