At the end of last week, Palestinians gathered in the Gaza Strip to protest the failing economy and the Hamas government’s onerous taxes, enacted as other sources of funding have dried up. Bassam Tawil comments:

The unprecedented protests . . . apparently caught the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip by surprise. . . . That may explain Hamas’s response to the mass protests, which by all accounts was . . . extremely violent. Within 24 hours, Hamas militiamen and security officers had opened fire on hundreds of Palestinian protesters chanting: “We are hungry!” and “Save Gaza from starvation!” . . . It is also worth noting that many of the Palestinians who were brutally beaten by Hamas were children. . . .

Meanwhile, . . . instead of calling out Hamas for its crimes against its own people, the hypocrites at the UN, the international media, and other international forums continue to point an accusatory finger at Israel for simply defending itself against rockets and missiles that are fired toward Israeli civilian centers on an almost daily basis.

Recently, in a grotesque allegation, UN human-rights “experts” claimed that Israel may have committed war crimes by shooting at Palestinian demonstrators who tried to breach the Gaza-Israel border fence and infiltrate into Israel. The demonstrators who were shot were mostly Hamas and Islamic Jihad members, as both organizations have openly admitted. In other words, Israel is being accused of war crimes for defending its border against terrorists attempting to infiltrate it in order to murder or kidnap Israelis. . . .

It is the leaders of Hamas, and only Hamas, who are violating international law in and around Gaza. They are committing war crimes against Israelis, and they are committing crimes against their own people. It is time for the human-rights “experts” and foreign media to wake up to facts.

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.