On Saturday, a bomb exploded near an Israeli unit patrolling the border with Gaza, injuring four. Separately, an Israeli tank opened fire on a group of Gazans trying to sneak into Israel. The IDF has responded to the bombing with airstrikes on targets in the Strip connected to terrorist organizations. Eyal Zisser comments on the situation:

So far, no one has claimed responsibility for detonating the explosive device, . . . and the IDF has also avoided pointing an accusatory finger at any of the power players in the Strip. But . . . an attack like that could not have been executed without Hamas’s approval, even if merely tacit.

In any case, even if Hamas didn’t know a thing about the bomb, its lack of response against the perpetrators proves the group’s willingness to tolerate such attacks and even to welcome them. After all, there is a clear working order in Gaza. Seeking to preserve its rule, Hamas avoids carrying out terrorist attacks in order to prevent Israeli military responses. But all the while, Hamas continues to dig terror tunnels and improve its missile arsenal.

Hamas leaves the dirty work of perpetrating terror attacks to the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad, whose command center is in Damascus. . . . There are also a number of terror groups operating in the Gaza Strip that refuse to accept Hamas’s authority. . . . In addition, terror cells affiliated with the Islamic State group in Sinai are also active there. Hamas tolerates the activities of all of these groups and does nothing to counter them.

The border incident on Saturday proves yet again what we learned during the 2006 Second Lebanon War: when you tolerate provocations along a border for too long, such as protesters “just” trying to breach a border fence or “just” throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers, you can be sure that terror attacks are never too far off.

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.