Yesterday, the Israeli government reached a ceasefire agreement with Hamas, which has been raining makeshift incendiary devices, and occasional missiles, on Israeli border towns since August 6—sending residents running to bomb shelters and starting severe forest fires. Noa Shusterman and Udi Dekel investigate the reasons for this most recent round of fighting:

Hamas initiated a limited campaign and conducted a measured and calculated escalation in order to attain its goals, but was mindful to maintain intensity below the threshold that would lead to an [all-out] Israeli military campaign. Hamas does not want to jeopardize the achievements of its military buildup, especially its infrastructure for manufacturing rockets, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other weapons. . . . Israel also prefers to postpone a military operation, and has attacked Hamas military infrastructure targets in response, taking care not to cause fatalities.

Hamas’s guiding strategic goal is to make it clear that the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’s political platform has failed, and that challenging Israel with resistance led by Hamas is what will score points for the Palestinian people. Gaining achievements by escalation in Gaza is Hamas’s way of making this point.

Moreover, Yahya Sinwar—the Hamas operative who rules the Strip at the behest of the terrorist group’s Turkey-based politburo—has his own political calculations:

Sinwar’s assertive and aggressive actions and willingness to go to the edge of war can also be attributed to the internal elections process in Hamas scheduled for the end of the year, and the need to fortify his status as leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Sinwar is in dire need to showcase his achievements.

While this round of fighting may be over, Shusterman and Dekel are certain that, sooner or later, the cycle will repeat itself.

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.