On Monday, a federal court ordered the Palestinian Authority and the PLO to pay $655.5 million to ten American families whose relatives were killed in terror attacks in Israel during the second intifada. Grant Rumley writes that the landmark ruling will have a major impact on the PA, and not only because it is already facing financial problems:

[T]his ruling . . . threatens the Palestinians’ convictions that their best weapon against Israel is the international community and specifically the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The PA is itching to get in the court and respond to this early loss by filing suits against Israeli leaders. The recent rhetoric out of Ramallah has focused heavily on blaming Israeli officials for possible war crimes committed this past summer in the Gaza war.

But now that the PA has been found culpable for the actions of even its most loosely-affiliated foot soldiers, questions may arise over whether the PA has the stomach for its ICC strategy. PA President Mahmoud Abbas signed a political agreement with Hamas in April, and a few weeks later the two sides formed a consensus government that was ostensibly charged with governing Gaza shortly before the outbreak of the war. Can Abbas and other PA officials now be held responsible at the ICC for rockets fired by Hamas?

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.