The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) recently announced that, for the first time in 50 years, infant mortality in Gaza has increased. Its report states that the cause of the rise can’t easily be determined, but goes on to blame the Israeli blockade. Claudia Rosett writes:

Was there, perhaps, some overarching development—unmentioned by UNRWA—that shaped events in Gaza during the interval in question, from 2008 to 2013?

Here’s a one-word answer, which does not appear anywhere in either the UN press releases or in the underlying UNRWA report: Hamas—which has ruled Gaza since 2007. . . .

[A]ssuming that UNRWA’s infant-mortality statistics for Gaza are remotely reliable, for decades—while UNRWA deplored Israel’s presence in Gaza—infant mortality rates in the enclave were declining. Then, in 2005, Israel withdrew. In the Gaza elections in 2006, Hamas won a legislative majority. In June 2007, in a bloody coup, Hamas evicted the rival Fatah forces of the Palestinian Authority. Since then, Gaza has been under the boot of Hamas. . . .

UNRWA, for its part, uses this kind of report as leverage to collect hundreds of millions in donations every year for its welfare operations in Gaza (the biggest contributor being the U.S.). That further frees Hamas to devote its resources not to decent governance, but to terrorism.

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.