Officially formed in 1987—at the beginning of the first intifada—Hamas was built on a Muslim Brotherhood network that had existed in the Land of Israel since before 1948. Sean Durns presents a brief history of the group, arguing that it truly came into its own when it won the support of Tehran:

[In the 1970s], the Brotherhood began filling a void left by the Fatah-dominated PLO, which was busy carrying out terrorist attacks abroad from its home base in Lebanon and later from Tunis. . . . The year 1989, however, enshrined Hamas’s ascent. Beginning in January, Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) sought to wrest control from the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, which served as the principal organizing body during the intifada.

Perhaps most importantly, on November 16, 1989, Hamas announced that it had formed an alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Relations between the two would wax and wane over the next three decades, but Tehran’s support has been crucial to Hamas’s power. Without Iranian largesse, it is unlikely that Hamas would have survived, much less grown to mount a full-scale challenge to Fatah, eventually seizing the Gaza Strip after besting the older movement in 2006 elections.

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.