Last week, the Libyan legislature formally requested Egypt’s military intervention in its civil war—a request its Egyptian counterpart assented to yesterday. Cairo has for some time supported the Libyan legislature, and the warlord Khalifa Haftar, in their ongoing conflict with the country’s president and his Government of National Accord (GNA). Simultaneously, Turkey has been increasing its support for the GNA. Jonathan Spyer describes this explosive situation:

A cluster of additional international players are gathered around the two warring sides. The GNA has the additional support of Qatar and Italy. Haftar, meanwhile, enjoys the backing of the United Arab Emirates, Russia, France, Saudi Arabia, and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria.

The events in Libya reflect the depth and intensity of one of the key strategic rivalries in the Middle East. This is the contest between the camp consisting of Turkey, Qatar, and a variety of Muslim Brotherhood-associated forces in the region, including Hamas’s Gaza fiefdom, and the rival [entente] of Egypt, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. There are, of course, other elements engaged in the complex Libyan strategic space. But these two camps are the central players. [The] GNA in Tripoli and Haftar and his allies in the eastern part of the country are their respective proxies.

This rivalry is not solely geostrategic. It relates also to modes of governance. Turkey had hoped to emerge at the head of a bloc of democratically elected Islamist governments in the region, following the outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2010. For a while, things seemed to be going well. The election of the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt in 2011 was the high point. Turkey strongly backed the government of Mohamed Morsi. It similarly threw its weight behind the Sunni Islamist insurgents in Syria. For a moment, the prospect of a bloc of Sunni Islamist governance stretching from Ankara to Cairo (and incidentally, threatening Israel from north and south) looked like a real possibility.

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.