Last week’s attack on Israeli forces near the Lebanese border was motivated not merely by revenge or deterrence, argues Tony Badran. Nor was it simply the latest round in Hizballah’s sporadic war with the Jewish state. Rather, it represented a signal to the U.S., from Tehran, regarding the Syrian civil war. Writes Badran:

The U.S. and Iran are already partners in Iraq. Now, through its Hizballah arm, Iran is positioning itself as an interlocutor with the U.S. regarding security on the border with Israel. If Washington wants to keep that border quiet, it needs to talk to Tehran. And, the way the Iranians see it, insofar as the Israelis (and the Jordanians) are U.S. allies, the White House needs to lean on them to make sure that Syrian rebels don’t approach southern Lebanon.

Hizballah is playing a dangerous game. It has already brought Lebanon to the edge. Sooner or later, it’s bound to push it over.

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.