During the mass protests along the Gaza Strip’s border with Israel last weekend, sixteen Palestinians were killed. Western leaders like the EU’s foreign-policy chief, Frederica Mogherini, and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders responded as if the IDF had opened fired on peaceful protestors. But, writes Eli Lake, this was not at all the case:

It’s not just that the Israeli Defense Force claims to have video showing peaceful marchers interspersed with militants wielding Molotov cocktails and burning tires. The organizers of this civil disobedience, Hamas, are themselves devoted to bloodshed. As the Qassem Brigades, [a Hamas military unit], helpfully announced on Sunday, five of the sixteen marchers killed . . . were [its] members. [Israel identified five more as known terrorists.] . . .

Bernie Sanders . . . tweeted, [in reference to the demonstration], “it is the right of all people to protest for a better future without a violent response.” [But] the organizers of the march, Hamas, do not allow Palestinians to “protest for a better future.” As the sovereigns of Gaza, Hamas authorities arrest Palestinians for spreading rumors online. They have cracked down on male barbers for cutting women’s hair. If you are deemed a
“collaborator,” Hamas has been known to drag your corpse behind a motorcycle.

All of that aside, even if Hamas were committed to nonviolence—which it clearly is not—its aims should horrify Western progressives and conservatives alike. Hamas does not seek a two-state solution; it seeks to replace the world’s only Jewish state with one ruled by fanatics. The title of the weekend’s event, “The March of Return,” is a giveaway. The idea is that every Palestinian family and its descendants have a right to return to the Israeli territory that Palestinians fled during the 1948 war for independence. Such a return would overwhelm the existing Jewish majority.

And this is why it’s so dangerous to treat last weekend’s march like the Arab Spring or the brave demonstrations in Iran a few months ago.

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.