Iran, writes Benjamin Runkle, has developed formidable capabilities for electronic spying and hacking, and has carried out sophisticated cyberattacks on Saudi Arabia, the U.S., and Israel. Nor is the Islamic Republic the only Middle Eastern threat to American cybersecurity: Hizballah, Islamic State, and the self-styled Syrian Electronic Army (which works for the Assad regime) are all engaged in cyberwarfare. Runkle writes:

[W]hereas Russia and China have the resources to build conventional [military forces] unthinkable for most Middle Eastern actors, the entry costs to acquiring a significant cyber capacity are low enough to allow the Middle East’s weaker states—or non-state actors—to obtain capabilities that threaten U.S. and allied interests. . . .

[C]yberattacks [also] allow potential adversaries to bypass America and its regional allies’ military forces in order to target civilian infrastructure and economic targets directly. . . . Iran’s hackers are targeting critical infrastructure and developing the ability to cause serious damage to the U.S. power grid, hospitals, or the financial sector. . . . In fact, recent history suggests that Tehran’s offensive cyber capacity has dramatically evolved in sophistication and scope. . . .

In sum, Iran’s demonstrated willingness to conduct destructive cyberattacks, its ability to offset U.S. and allied military superiority in the region through cyberwar, its dearth of equivalent targets for deterrence or retaliatory attacks, and the Islamic Republic’s strategic culture favoring asymmetric or indirect conflict over conventional war mean that it poses at least as great a threat of initiating a “catastrophic” attack against U.S. or allied critical infrastructure as [the otherwise] technically superior Russian and Chinese hackers.

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.