It’s recently been rumored that Qatar, the longtime headquarters of Hamas, is planning to expel the terrorist organization’s leader Khaled Meshal. Hamas denies it; but there’s little doubt that if Meshal were to leave, he would relocate to Turkey, which already provides Hamas with a base of operations and financial support. Moreover, the expulsion of Meshal would be a purely symbolic gesture, since other important Hamas figures would remain in Qatar. Jonathan Schanzer and David A. Weinberg explain:

Last month, Qatar and Turkey inaugurated a bilateral “Supreme Strategic Committee.” This was an agreement jointly to pursue aggressive foreign policies that the two countries have embraced separately for the better part of a decade. Hamas is undeniably a significant part of that joint agenda, which means that it matters little which Hamas headquarters Meshal ultimately chooses to call his home.

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.