Hamas is now rated as the world’s second-richest terror group, just behind the oil-soaked Islamic State. It has amassed its wealth through smuggling, donations large and small, and protection rackets. Nor have its leaders missed the opportunity to line their own pockets. (The extensive holdings of Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas, include several high-rise buildings in Qatar.) Ultimately, according to Moshe Elad, the terror group’s fortune is the product of a political culture of corruption and patronage:

The race to obtain powerful positions in the Palestinian Authority began in 1994, with the implementation of the Oslo accords. The government that emerged from that process looks more or less like that of most Arab regimes: it is centralized and corrupt, it lacks effectiveness, bribery plays a very important role in society, and nepotism is prevalent, with just a few families or relatives benefiting from state monopolies on basic services and commodities. . . .

By June 2007, after Hamas took over Gaza through a violent coup, more significant amounts of money began to arrive from the same Islamic countries, reflecting the donors’ desire that Gaza should be run according to Islamic sharia law. A huge fundraising campaign was also launched in Western countries, mainly the United States and Europe, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars that passed through the hands of Dr. Mousa Abu Marzook, the chair of the Hamas political bureau at that time.

According to a Texas federal court record from 2003, Abu Marzook was convicted of illegal funds transfer to every single district in the West Bank, from Jenin in the north to Hebron in the south. Beginning in the 1990s and during every fiscal year, he has transferred millions of dollars, claiming that these funds were for welfare and relief projects while in fact they have been used to compensate suicide bombers’ families and to rehabilitate wounded and invalid terrorists.

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.