The Syrian civil war has already spilled over into Lebanon, where it has mainly been confined to the northern part of the country. There, over the past few months, the al-Nusra Front—a local al-Qaeda affiliate—has made multiple attempts, supported by Lebanese Sunnis, to capture the crucial port city of Tripoli. Although the attacks have been repulsed thus far, Lebanon’s government is deadlocked and its military could easily fracture along sectarian lines. Jacques Neriah writes:

[O]ne cannot overestimate the importance of the fate of Tripoli to the Sunni jihadis. Its fall would mark the beginning of the disintegration of the Lebanese state as a nation-state and the awakening of the old sectarian fears that could provoke its implosion and partition into Christian-Maronite, Shiite, and Druze enclaves facing a Sunni entity related either to al-Qaeda (if conquered by al-Nusra) or to Islamic State. Such a situation would undoubtedly represent the beginning of a new civil war that could end with . . . a redrawing of the regional map already heavily transformed since August 2014 by the establishment of the Islamic State (IS) caliphate. The possible fall of . . . Kobani . . . in Syria would definitely fit the current scenario of establishing an IS nucleus from the Mediterranean to the very doors of Baghdad.

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.