In an extensive study of the role played by social media in fomenting and abetting the ongoing wave of deadly attacks on Israeli citizens, Gilad Gamlieli draws some important conclusions:

[Disinformation about] Israel’s measures on the Temple Mount [in September 2015, a few weeks before the attacks began,] generated numerous presentations in [Palestinian] social networks, . . . which did much to provoke the outbreak and incite whole sectors. This incitement was not confined to claims that Israel was changing the status quo on the Mount.

As it evolved, [the incitement] dealt more and more with . . . the increasing glorification and commemoration of the perpetrators of attacks, the legitimization of these attacks, and the portrayal of details of the attacks—[sometimes, paradoxically,] denying that they were being committed at all. This content was disseminated by Palestinians across the political spectrum, from pages identified with Hamas to those identified with Fatah. It is also clear that much of the incitement issued from pages originating in Gaza.

An important element of these incendiary contents is how the Israeli “aggressor” is portrayed. In many of the presentations, the Palestinians view their enemies on the Temple Mount compound as IDF soldiers (or other security forces) and ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are quite often depicted with the use of [classic anti-Semitic tropes]. . . . It is no surprise, then, that large percentages of the victims of the stabbing attacks are soldiers or ultra-Orthodox Jews. This is clear testimony to the fact that these incendiary presentations, which have spread throughout the social networks, have influenced the perpetrators’ perceptions and shaped their actions.

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.