Jordan, Israel’s neighbor and important strategic ally, is a member of the U.S.-led anti-IS coalition and provides crucial tactical and strategic support. But there is a great deal of sympathy for IS in Jordan, and domestic pressures could combine with economic woes and the destabilizing influx of Syrian refugees to change King Abdullah’s course. David Schenker writes:

According to a poll published last month by the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan, only 62 percent of Jordanians consider IS—and a mere 31 percent the Syria-based al-Qaeda affiliate Nusra Front—to be terrorist organizations. Even more stunning, just 44 percent of Jordanians surveyed say that al-Qaeda is a terrorist group. Given these sentiments, it’s not surprising that many Jordanians oppose their military’s participation in the campaign targeting IS and Nusra Front.

In fact, objections to a Jordanian role in the anti-IS alliance emerged before the state signed up. In the beginning of September, 21 members of Jordan’s parliament sent a memo to its speaker rejecting the Kingdom’s participation. “This war is not our war,” the representatives wrote.

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.