Fatah—the ruling faction of the PLO that controls the Palestinian Authority—is holding its seventh party congress this week. According to Grant Rumley, Mahmoud Abbas likely sees the occasion as a capstone to his ongoing purge of the party ranks:

In recent years, Abbas has launched an all-out inquisition into dissenters within his own party. He’s fired rival Palestinian officials, stripped his rivals in parliament of their immunity, and even sent his Palestinian Authority security forces into unruly refugee camps to quash dissent. He has fueled his consolidation of power by summarily excommunicating party members. . . .

A bloc of Fatah dissenters met last month in the al-Amari refugee camp in Ramallah to discuss how they would react to the upcoming party congress. When Abbas got wind of the meeting, he ordered the PA security forces into the camp to break up the meeting. . . .

Abbas has taken unprecedented steps to silence dissent [at the congress itself]. . . For one, he has reduced the number of delegates attending from over 2,000 [at the last congress] in 2009 to 1,400. For another, he has changed the location from a hotel in Bethlehem at the last conference to his headquarters in Ramallah, [where security forces loyal to him can keep watch].

The congress this week will allow Abbas to solidify his purges of dissenters within his own party. At the last congress, members of Abbas’ presidential guard roamed the balloting areas and in one instance instructed a delegate on who was “the president’s man.” This time, . . . Abbas will be able to reward his loyalists and sideline his rivals. As Dimitri Diliani, a member of Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, told me: “We used to call Arafat a dictator, but compared with [Abbas], Arafat was a champion of democracy.”

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.