In 2014, despite the overall failure of its tactics, Hamas showed that its leaders had learned important lessons from previous conflicts with Israel. The IDF, writes Mitch Ginsburg, must adjust its own tactics to keep up:

[Since] the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 peaked with the deportation of Yasir Arafat and the PLO to Tunis, Israel’s sub-state enemies have adhered to the doctrine of “victory through non-defeat.” In other words: continue firing rockets and make sure you aren’t cornered and deported and you may declare victory. This was the case in Lebanon in 2006 and in Gaza in 2009.

Part of the rationale was the assumption that Israel’s citizens are soft-spined bons vivants who will pressure their leadership to make concessions in order to stop the fire. That backfired [last] summer. On the contrary, Hamas saw that the longer the duration of the war, the more assets it lost. . . .

[However], the large tunnel attack that was thwarted at the start of the [2014] war is indicative of a doctrinal shift toward offensive action and initiative rather than responsive attacks. The implications of this shift are considerable. Israel, for instance, will have to take into account a Hamas offensive that aims to push the fighting into Israel before Israel has so much as inserted troops into Gaza.

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.