Although the Lebanon-based terrorist organization is currently focused on defending Bashar al-Assad’s control of Syria and Lebanon, recent statements by its leaders are reminders that it has not lost sight of its core mission of destroying Israel. Hizballah has staged a number of small-scale cross-border attacks, and may also be ramping up its old strategy of attacking Jewish and Israeli targets outside the Middle East. Matthew Levitt writes:

This much is clear: Hizballah remains an immediate threat to Israel, even while it is bogged down in Syria. That much [its leader Hassan] Nasrallah wants us all to know. To be sure, roadside border bombings will continue from time to time, and Hizballah may even claim responsibility for some of these. But because of its desire to avoid opening a second front with Israel at the present time, the Hizballah threat to Israel today is in some ways more acute oceans away—in places as far afield as Thailand and Peru—than it is along its northern borders.

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.