With Ankara facing a worsening economic situation, it turned to fossil-fuel-rich Doha, which stepped in to save the Turkish lira from freefall, expanding on a 2018 bailout-cum-investment deal. Burak Bekdil explains what’s behind the alliance between these two nominal U.S. allies:

The ideological kinship between the two Sunni Muslim countries, which is based on passionate political support for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood (and a religious hatred of Israel), seems to have produced a bond that threatens Western interests.

In 2014 Turkey and Qatar signed a strategic security agreement that gave Ankara a military base in the Persian Gulf emirate, which is already home to the largest U.S. air base in the Middle East. Turkey stationed some 3,000 ground troops at its Qatari base in addition to air and naval units, military trainers, and special-operations forces.

In 2017, in a Sunni-vs.-Sunni drama in the Persian Gulf, a Saudi-led coalition imposed a blockade on Qatar accusing it of supporting terrorism and fostering ties with the rival Shiite force, Iran. Turkey immediately rushed to Qatar’s aid, sending cargo ships and hundreds of planes loaded with food and essential supplies to break the blockade. . . . The next year, 2018, was payback time for the sheikdom. Doha pledged $15 billion in investment in Turkish banks and financial markets when Turkey’s national currency lost 40 percent of its value against major Western currencies in the face of U.S. sanctions.

In other words, one U.S. ally in the Middle East was financially helping another U.S. ally evade U.S. sanctions.

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.