Last week, Hamas issued a statement praising Human Rights Watch (HRW)—an international organization that under its current leadership has demonstrated an obsessive interest in libeling Israel. HRW earned the terrorist group’s praise for a report alleging that Arab Israelis face a “housing shortage” due to “discriminatory land policies.” Bassam Tawil comments:

The HRW report focuses on only three Arab towns in Israel, . . . with a total population of 50,000. It deliberately ignores the other two million or so Arab Israelis. Moreover, the report fails to mention that the housing crisis affects not only Arabs, but also Jews. The good news is that Israel has been working hard in recent years to solve the housing crisis—for both Arabs and Jews. In 2015, the Israeli government decided to implement the Economic Development Plan, a multi-year plan of about $12.3 billion, targeting issues such as planning, employment, transportation, and education in the Arab sector.

Hamas, meanwhile, has done virtually nothing to solve the debilitating housing crisis of the two million Palestinians living under its rule in the Gaza Strip. The truth is that Hamas cares nothing for either the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip or the Arabs living in Israel. Hamas has one single concern: advancing its goal of destroying Israel and murdering Jews.

Hamas’s war against Israel is waged with rockets and suicide bombings; organizations such as HRW wage war against Israel with propaganda designed to dismantle the state by making it unable to defend itself. Welcome to the unholy alliance between Muslim terrorists and anti-Israel human-rights organizations in the West.

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.