Citing new evidence it claims to have collected, the Associated Press recently repeated its charge that during last summer’s war in Gaza, Israeli airstrikes “killed mostly civilians.” Richard Behar argues that these statistics are little more than Hamas propaganda:

The article in AP is focused on “a particular subset of the fatalities—those killed while inside houses ostensibly targeted by the Israelis,” defense analyst [Eado] Hecht told me on Friday. “I write ‘ostensibly’ targeted by Israelis because something in the order of 2,600 Palestinian rockets and mortar bombs were fired deliberately (most of them) or by mistake into Palestinian residential areas. The deliberate fire [was directed at] Israeli soldiers in that area—but without warning local civilians to move out.” . . .

[N]o one knows exactly how many houses were targeted by the Israelis, but UN studies . . . claim severe damage to thousands of buildings (one figure is 20,000 destroyed or severely damaged). The percentage of civilians killed in 247 houses alone [cited by the AP] is only indicative of someone choosing specific houses to count while ignoring other houses that did not suit the specific slant they were trying to give. Especially since the total count of children, women, and elderly men given by the Palestinians themselves is a total of 943. In other words, in just over one percent of a total of some 20,000 buildings destroyed or severely damaged were inflicted 508 of all the 943 [civilian casualties claimed by Palestinian sources].

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.