As brutal crackdowns have failed to put an end to popular unrest in Belarus and mass protests have broken out in the Siberian city of Khabarovsk, dissatisfaction with the status quo in Lebanon is at its height. Anna Borshchevskaya argues that all three pose problems for Vladimir Putin, who is invested not only in maintaining his rule over Russia, but also in propping up the current regimes in Minsk and Beirut. To Putin, the present situation in Belarus is an ucomfortable reminder of the “color revolutions” that swept through former Soviet republics in the 2000s, and removed pro-Kremlin dictators:

Putin’s fear of [democratic] revolutions always encompassed the Middle East, even though it has received less attention. Indeed, the color revolutions swept the post-Soviet space in early-to-mid 2000s also touched the Middle East, with Lebanon’s Cedar revolution.

Current events in Lebanon may seem remote compared to protests closer to Russia. But Lebanon also matters directly to Russia’s policy in Syria, where Putin’s intervention in 2015 both saved the dictator Bashar al-Assad from losing power and elevated Russia’s status—in the eyes of many Western and regional officials—of an indispensable player.

It is not just that that Moscow never labelled Hizballah as a terrorist organization (unlike Western countries), and that overall Moscow leans closer to the Iran-Hizballah-Syria axis in the Middle East. That in and of itself is enough for Moscow to support [the current] Hizballah-backed government in Beirut. But some Russian experts [have also] observed that Lebanese banks could serve as Syria’s connection to the outside world, facilitating reconstruction in a manner that keeps Assad in power.

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.