While the Palestinian Authority (PA) has been threatening a financial meltdown over the U.S. decision to withhold aid and its own refusal to accept taxes collected by Jerusalem, the residents of the areas under its control have been flourishing. Dan Zaken explains why:

Exports from the West Bank to Israel have grown and Israelis—mainly Israeli Arabs—are coming to West Bank cities to buy goods. The shopping malls of Jenin, Tulkarem, and Kalkilya are packed every weekend with tens of thousands of Israeli Arabs who come to buy in the stores and eat in the restaurants. Jerusalem Arabs go shopping in Ramallah and Bethlehem. . . .

[P]erhaps most significant of all is that the Palestinian economy is based mainly on the private rather than the public sector. . . . [T]he 130,000 Palestinian workers employed in Israel [have an] average salary of over 5,000 shekels ($1,400) per month, two-and-a-half times the average salary in the Palestinian autonomous areas. Income in this sector . . . is even rising, as are the number of requests for licenses to work in Israel. The number of Palestinians working in Israel, [whether in Jewish areas of the West Bank or in other parts of the country], also is rising constantly. New facilities at the border checkpoints have shortened lines and waiting times at the crossings from hours to minutes.

The continual growth of construction in Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, after years in which new building was frozen, has also . . . provided more work for Palestinians. Moreover, it’s easier and quicker for a Palestinian to get a work permit for such work, which pays “Israel-level” salaries.

On a tour of Bethlehem, I met several merchants and industrialists who said that while the Israelis continue easing their regulations and requirements and the Palestinians don’t make problems, then the economy will prosper. . . . The Palestinian public has no real motivation to resume rioting and the confrontation with Israel from an economic point of view. They have too much to lose. That does not mean to say that there won’t be terrorist attacks or that the situation is marvelous, but it is very far from being an incendiary situation about to explode.

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.