On November 1, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), an Iran-backed terrorist group based in the Gaza Strip, launched a barrage of rockets at nearby towns in Israel. The IDF responded by striking military targets in the Strip and, yesterday, in the wee hours of the morning, killed Baha Abu al-Ata, one of PIJ’s senior commanders. The terrorist group responded by launching some 200 rockets over the course of the day, sending Israelis to bomb shelters not just in the immediate vicinity of Gaza but also in the center of the country and as far north as Tel Aviv. Khaled Abu Toameh analyzes the political calculations of both PIJ and Hamas:

Hamas [seems] very cautious in its response to the assassination. By Tuesday afternoon, it remained unclear whether Hamas has officially joined PIJ and other groups in firing rockets at Israel. Hamas is reluctant to engage in a new war with Israel because it knows that would mean the end of its rule.

In recent months, Ata was among PIJ leaders who visited Cairo a number of times for talks with Egyptian intelligence officials on ways of preserving ceasefire understandings reached between Israel and the Gaza-based Palestinian factions earlier this year under Egyptian auspices. The invitation to Cairo came after the Egyptians realized that PIJ and its patrons in Tehran were not too pleased with the ceasefire understandings.

The PIJ leaders are reported to have told the Egyptians that their group is not interested in an all-out military confrontation with Israel, at least not at this stage. [Instead] their group has decided to endorse a strategy of “engaging the enemy” [by] pursuing sporadic terror attacks in order to keep Israel “busy” and show that PIJ is not part of any ceasefire understandings.

PIJ is one of the few groups in the Gaza Strip that does not hesitate to challenge Hamas openly or to disagree with it on crucial issues. . . . The assassination of Abu al-Ata puts Hamas in a difficult situation. On the one hand, the last thing Hamas leaders want is to be seen preventing Palestinians from launching rockets at Israel to avenge the killing of a top military officer. On the other hand, the assessment among Palestinians yesterday afternoon is that Hamas will not allow PIJ to drag the Gaza Strip into a military adventure with Israel. Hamas’s leaders, Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar, are also aware that the IDF is capable of making them meet the same fate as Abu al-Ata should Hamas join the PIJ rocket attacks on Israel.

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.