In the past few days, balloon-borne explosives and incendiary devices have landed near Israeli villages adjacent to the Gaza Strip. The launching of such missiles from Gaza was commonplace earlier this year, then ceased for several months, and began again in the past few days. David May and Joe Truzman describe one of the groups behind these attacks:

Humat al-Aqsa (HAA), or the Defenders of al-Aqsa, [is a] small but violent organization [and] a proxy of the Hamas terrorist group. . . . HAA is not yet sanctioned by the U.S. government, but it should be. . . . By employing [it] as a proxy, Hamas can carry out terrorist attacks while maintaining plausible deniability, [part of its effort] to rebrand itself as a pragmatic, moderate force despite its oppressive rule in the Gaza Strip and its commitment to destroying Israel. HAA lets Hamas pursue its [murderous] aspirations without being held to account.

No one should be fooled by Hamas’s ruse, however.

HAA is [also] operating out of civilian areas. This effectively turns nearby Palestinians into human shields. The use of human shields is a war crime and is sanctionable pursuant to the Sanctioning the Use of Civilians as Defenseless Shields Act of 2018.

Part of what distinguishes HAA’s novelty is its brazenness; it is the only Palestinian group known to have used its emblem on a video taking credit for launching explosive balloons at Israel. HAA doesn’t only threaten America’s ally Israel, it threatens the United States and its interests. Many American expatriates live near the Gaza border. In November 2019, a Washington, DC-based law firm filed a lawsuit on behalf of American citizens harmed by rockets, mortars, and incendiary devices launched from Gaza. And American vessels often dock at the port of Ashdod, less than twenty miles from the border with Gaza.

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.