Last week, Egypt finally succeeded in brokering a long-awaited agreement whereby Hamas would accept $15 million from Qatar in exchange for an end to eight months of low-grade violence and rioting. But on Friday—after the cash-filled suitcases had already arrived in Gaza—a terrorist from the Strip snuck into Israel and burned down a greenhouse before being apprehended. On Sunday, an Israeli commando unit operating in Gaza—most likely on an intelligence-gathering mission—got into a shootout with Hamas operatives in which an Israeli officer was killed. Hamas then launched hundreds of rockets into Israel yesterday afternoon. David Horovitz comments:

The riots and the tunneling and the rocket fire [orchestrated by Hamas] amount to extortion. If Israel does not end the security blockade it maintains on Gaza, Hamas vows, then Israelis will have to continue to endure rocket and mortar attacks, the threat of cross-border terror tunnels, arson balloons burning its fields. But if Israel does ease the security blockade, of course, Hamas will exploit this to import more weaponry to cause still-greater harm. . . .

In repeated flareups since the 2014 warfare, Israel has sought to avoid the loss of life and devastation that a resort to deeper conflict will entail. Israel is also well aware that “defeating Hamas” may sound straightforward but is immensely complex. The military challenge is profound, though emphatically not beyond the capabilities of Israel’s military forces. But Israel does not want to reconquer Gaza and reassert responsibility for two million hostile Palestinians.

Yet Hamas will not rest, and will not change, and sooner or later, therefore, must be faced down. And in the battle between a sovereign state that is obligated to ensure security for its citizens, and a ruthless, cynical terrorist organization, backed by Iran and committed to Israel’s destruction, there can and must be only one winner.

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.