Last week, terrorists from the West Bank—at the apparent direction of Hamas—carried out multiple attacks that left at least three Israelis dead. These attacks follow on the heels of an Egypt-brokered cease-fire agreement between Israel and the Hamas government in Gaza, as part of which the terrorist group received millions of dollars from Qatar. Khaled Abu Toameh comments:

Hamas and its allies are openly encouraging the eruption of a new anti-Israel uprising in the West Bank; [furthermore], Hamas and its friends have been emboldened by the recent failure of the UN General Assembly to adopt a U.S.-sponsored resolution condemning Hamas and other Palestinian groups for firing rockets at Israel and inciting violence. . . .

Every dollar and every concession made to Hamas will only increase its appetite to . . . extend its control beyond the Gaza Strip. From Hamas’s point of view, its plan has won legitimacy from the UN and important players in the region such as Qatar and Egypt. So long as Hamas feels that it is marching in the right direction, we are likely to see an increase in armed attacks and other forms of violence in the West Bank.

Now that Hamas is getting what it wants in the Gaza Strip—millions of dollars and no war with Israel—it is seeking to shift its attention to the West Bank, all with the help of its friends in Tehran. This [policy] has a threefold goal: to undermine or overthrow Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, inflict heavy casualties on Israel, and thwart any peace plan brought forward by the U.S. administration. In other words, Hamas and Iran now have their sights set on the West Bank, and this is reason not only for Israel to worry, but for Abbas to worry as well.

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.