Israel has recently arrested employees of both World Vision, a major U.S.-based humanitarian organization, and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) for actively diverting funds to Hamas. To Elliott Abrams, these are not mere isolated instances of corruption:

What we can now see clearly is that none of these organizations—UNDP, World Vision, or UNRWA [the UN subsidiary tasked with caring for Palestinian refugees, about which similar allegations have surfaced in the past]—was ever going to find the facts, fire people, clean out the Hamas agents, and solve these problems. . . .

The larger question is [that of] the culture of foreign aid to the Palestinians, much of which [is a product of] what President George W. Bush once called (in an entirely different context) “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and some of which [is a product] of terrorism, threats, and plain fear [of Hamas violence]. . . .

It’s likely that some percentage of local employees [of World Vision and UNDP] in Gaza are sympathetic to Hamas—and it seems likely to me that administrators don’t want to know about it. If they came face to face with [such information], what would they do? Fire [these employees]? Turn them in to the Israelis? Start difficult and likely very long back-and-forth communications with headquarters, which likely doesn’t want to know and won’t thank the employee who insists on revealing the truth? Simpler to be blind to what is happening.

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.