At the end of last month, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that shortages of medicines, food, and other basic supplies mean that the coronavirus pandemic is apt to have a “catastrophic impact” on the northeastern portion of Syria. But the WHO has largely ceased its operations in the area since the beginning of this year, caving to pressure from Bashar al-Assad’s government and from his most important ally, Russia. The UN too has ended its policy of funneling funds to private charities there, now only supporting those groups approved by Damascus. Seth Frantzman comments:

The way the UN works makes it so that no one who is not loyal to the Syrian regime receives aid in Syria. For instance, the UN’s World Food Program conducted air drops to the Syrian-regime-held city off Deir Ezzor when it was under siege by Islamic State between 2015 and 2017. . . . But there were no UN-supported air drops for people in the cities of Raqqa, Qamishli, Kobane, or Idlib, or in refugee camps or areas outside Syrian regime control.

[Now] the Syrian regime [has] a veto over aid to eastern Syria and a way to use it as a weapon. Turkey and Russia collaborated in the effort, as Turkey turns off water to 460,000 people in eastern Syria, and Russia supports the Syrian regime. [In] eastern Syria, an area of millions of people who are recovering from Islamic State’s atrocities, . . . the WHO also works through the Syrian regime rather than providing equal access to people [in need]. The pandemic has only made matters worse.

The larger context is that Russia, Iran, and Turkey want the U.S. to leave eastern Syria.

By making life more difficult in areas where there remains an American military presence, Frantzman concludes, these countries are hoping they can force Washington’s hand.

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.