At a recent press conference, Barack Obama trumpeted the support the Iran deal received from the Jewish state’s “military and security community.” Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s defense minister, responded by comparing the deal to the Munich agreement of 1938, provoking a kerfuffle that ended with conciliatory words from Benjamin Netanyahu and an apology from Lieberman. While the whole exchange was most likely aimed at domestic audiences, the episode, according to Emily Landau, is revealing:

This mini-crisis inadvertently shines a light on two important themes: first, how the [Iran] deal is in fact perceived in Israel and how statements of Israeli security figures have been misrepresented in the internal U.S. debate; and second, the nature of U.S.-Israel relations and their importance to Israel, especially compared with attempts to intervene to prevent a nuclear Iran. . . .

[T]he relevant credentials for making an authoritative evaluation of the nuclear deal [should be] expertise [in nuclear proliferation] and intricate knowledge of the deal—not necessarily the fact that one served in the Israeli military or security establishment. . . . And yet, the voices in support of the deal [of former generals and intelligence directors] were immediately incorporated into the internal U.S. debate, as if to say to American critics: how can you question the nuclear deal when these top security people in Israel say they are fine with it? . . .

What the Obama-Lieberman episode also underscores, however, is Israel’s order of priorities when weighing the relative importance of stopping Iran against the importance of U.S.-Israel strategic relations. Indeed, if there is one insight that seems to have been clarified over the past year, it is that the order of priorities for Israel places U.S.-Israel relations at the top. And this seems to be behind [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s notable lack of public advocacy against the deal since last autumn.

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.