Still reeling from the effects of COVID-19, Tehran is requesting relief from economic sanctions, although existing sanctions do not prevent the Islamic Republic from obtaining food or medical supplies. Jonathan Schanzer and Bradley Bowman urge the U.S., and other countries, to refuse Iran’s pleas, as it will inevitably use the benefits of sanctions relief to expand its arsenal of precision-guided missiles:

Tehran, along with its violent proxies in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, is now working assiduously, even during the coronavirus pandemic, to convert an arsenal of unguided rockets and missiles into smart ones. Unguided rockets often miss their targets. Missile-defense systems can easily knock them out of the sky. But Iran’s new precision-guided missiles can potentially maneuver in flight, evading air defenses. If enough are fired, they can also overwhelm current defenses.

Official sources suggest that Hizballah may be producing a guided missile or more each day, accruing an arsenal measured in the dozens or hundreds. That may not seem like many to readers, . . . but to Israel and its citizens, it could be a matter of life and death.

Combining a barrage of thousands of unguided missiles and rockets with hundreds of precision-guided missiles could enable Hizballah to penetrate Israeli defenses. The result could be a catastrophic attack on Israel’s chemical plant in Haifa or Ben Gurion International Airport with the relative impact of a tactical nuclear or chemical-weapons strike.

Sanctions relief would simply provide the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism more money to fund its guided-missile project. . . . It’s also important to note that [this] project costs money—tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Tehran’s efforts to train engineers, purchase parts, and funnel [these] parts into Lebanon by way of Syria and Iraq all cost money. This is money the regime could have spent on its own people. This was money that the regime now cynically says it doesn’t have in order to fight the virus.

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.