In January, the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh visited Iran after promising the Egyptian government that he would not. Cairo responded by cutting exports of cooking gas and tires to the Gaza Strip. Facing a possible domestic crisis, the terrorist group recently resumed sending balloon-borne explosives into Israel, and allowed other jihadists to fire rockets. The move succeeded, despite retaliatory strikes by the IDF, writes Elior Levy:

[Hamas] sought to create an atmosphere of confrontation with Israel, until both Cairo and Jerusalem understood that the situation was not sustainable. It is also safe to assume that Hamas knew that since Israel isn’t looking for a full-scale military conflict so close to elections, the country’s response would be moderate.

A few days have passed, and Egypt has resumed imports of gas into the Strip, while Israel also offered to supply Gaza with huge amounts of gas . . . to appease Hamas and prevent any further escalation. . . . The attempts to appease Hamas didn’t end [there], as just after the escalation on the Strip started, Israel had approved a few precautionary measures for Gaza after years of refusal. For example, Israel has decided to allow the import of tires into the Strip, which it had banned since they are frequently set alight during riots. Israel has even allowed 6,000 tires into Gaza in January, despite unceasing incendiary-balloon attacks.

This is how, in the span of a mere five weeks of attrition, with a few well-placed rocket launches, hundreds of balloon clusters, and tensions with Cairo, Hamas managed to blackmail Israel into giving it a string of unprecedented measures of relief not seen in years.

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.