Thursday night, Islamic Jihad, an Iran-backed group based in Gaza, fired rockets at the area around Tel Aviv; the IDF responded promptly with airstrikes, and the rocket-fire soon ceased. Hamas, which governs Gaza, canceled the weekly Friday border riots out of apparent eagerness to avoid a confrontation with Israel. Meanwhile, Gazans have begun protesting their declining standards of living and lack of freedom, leading Hamas to suppress the demonstrations with live ammunition, arrests, and beatings. Eyal Zisser writes:

Iran, which controls [Islamic Jihad] and its leaders, and which gives it money and provides it with the type of missiles used in Thursday’s attack, is directly responsible. Iran doesn’t hide its desire to spark a conflagration in Gaza with the aim of sabotaging and even halting Israel’s efforts to dislodge
the Islamic Republic from Syria. The Iranians also want to embarrass Israel . . . by exploiting the fact that this is a sensitive period, ahead of the upcoming April 9 general election.

Hamas, however, is also responsible for the missile attack, because it hasn’t taken action against Islamic Jihad and other recalcitrant groups in Gaza, which continue targeting Israel. Hamas lends a hand to the escalation along the border [in the form of weekly riots and the launching of explosives carried by kites and balloons] as a matter of routine, hoping to improve its negotiating position with Israel and to receive aid dollars from Qatar.

In this regard, the missile attack [near Tel Aviv] indicates the collapse of this conception and essentially of the illusion—created by Hamas and Israel alike—that it’s possible to control the flames Hamas is fanning along the Gaza border and prevent them from spreading. At the end of the day, those who shoot at Israeli communities near Gaza will also shoot at Tel Aviv.

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.