In December of last year, Hamas held a celebration of the 31st anniversary of its founding. While photographs of the event showed a public square packed with enthusiastic participants, Hillel Frisch argues that the terrorist group isn’t nearly so popular as its leaders want people to believe:

Hamas refrained from holding its commemoration in Gaza’s largest square, the Square of the Unknown Soldier, choosing instead a smaller [venue] near the Islamic University, a Hamas stronghold, with an area of 21,000 square meters—compared to over 60,000 for the former.

Specialists in traffic flow . . . point to a two-person-by-square-meter measure as the high-end threshold of crowd safety. [A close look at pictures of the event therefore suggests that] the number of those participating could not have exceeded 42,000. . . . The number attending also explains why Hamas chose the smaller square. The shadow (and real) Hamas government has on its payroll 51,000 military and civilian employees, many of whom are beneficiaries of the $30 million in cash from Qatar distributed in Gaza. . .

Rest assured that these employees returned part of the money they received to Hamas to organize the event. These employees, as reluctant as they might have been to part with precious cash, no doubt realized that Qatar provided these funds because of Hamas’s feud with the Palestinian Authority—which has become wrapped up in Qatar’s own feud with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—rather than on humanitarian grounds. There are far needier Gazans than Hamas employees.

The crucial question is whether the organization will privilege meeting the needs of its bureaucracy, and thus keep the peace, [thanks to which Israel has allowed Qatari money to enter Gaza], or stick to the path of aggression it renewed in April 2018, with the March of Return demonstration. Qatar wants a tamer, but independent Hamas, [while] Iran wants bloodshed on Israel’s southern front. The problem is that Hamas needs the financial aid of both.

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.