Despite repeated protestations from Washington, the Palestinian Authority (PA) continues to pay generous salaries to perpetrators of terrorist attacks and stipends to the families of those killed while carrying them out. Much of that money ultimately comes from the EU and the U.S., which provide the PA with a large portion of its annual budget. Daniel Schwammenthal comments:

Last year, the Mideast Quartet, composed of the EU, the U.S., the UN, and Russia, for the first time clearly stated that Palestinian terror and incitement “are fundamentally incompatible with a peaceful resolution.” . . . In the U.S., the Taylor Force Act, which is making its way through Congress with strong bipartisan support, would extract a steep economic price from the PA if it continued subsidizing terror. What can the EU do?

To be sure, [neither the West, the Palestinians, nor Israel] would gain from the financial collapse of the PA. Nevertheless, public EU criticism of the PA could well trigger a change of policy. If that doesn’t work, the EU could consider deducting from its aid the 7 percent of the budget the PA pays to terrorists, and let the Palestinian people know the reason.

Or the EU could announce it is willing to spend that money on NGOs dedicated to fighting incitement in Palestinian society. Such credible threats might be enough. These and other measures designed to help change Palestinian internal discourse and policies won’t bring peace overnight, but may lay the foundations for a future agreement. What is certain, however, is that if the West follows the same worn-out peace-process formula that simplistically sees the Israelis as all-powerful and chiefly to blame for the conflict, and the Palestinians as innocent victims without agency, their efforts will be no more successful than previous attempts.

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.