During the war against Islamic State, Iran-backed militias fought alongside the Iraqi army, while also terrorizing Iraqi Sunnis. Now these militias—known as the Popular Mobilization Units—have sought to integrate themselves into the country’s security forces while remaining loyal to Tehran. Yoni Ben Menachem comments on the new Iraqi prime minister’s continued failure to rein them in:

On June 25, 2020, Iraqi forces raided the Baghdad headquarters of the Hizballah Brigades, a militia loyal to Iran, and arrested fourteen operatives on suspicion of planning and carrying out rocket attacks on U.S. targets in Iraq, including on the American embassy in Baghdad and Iraqi army bases where U.S. troops are stationed. The raid also captured a workshop manufacturing . . . rockets.

The raid was ordered by Iraq’s Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi. . . . However, shortly after the raid, pro-Iranian militia members . . . began issuing threats, . . . and the fourteen [militants] arrested in the raid were swiftly released. As soon as they were freed, they went to the center of Baghdad to celebrate, where they trampled images of Prime Minister Kadhimi and set fire to Israeli and U.S. flags.

The obvious conclusion is that the release of the Hizballah Brigades operatives and the surrender of Prime Minister Kadhimi to the Popular Mobilization Units’ pressure indicate that the pro-Iranian militias can effectively veto any political decision they do not approve of. Kadhimi’s capitulation is [a] political mistake that [will] be very difficult to correct.

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.