Last summer, the Palestinian Authority president made serial threats to resign, to dismantle the PA, to end security cooperation with the IDF, to sue Israel in the International Criminal Court, and to tear up the Oslo Accords. He has since backed down from all of them and even seems to be trying to end the “knife intifada,” which his own party played a large role in instigating. Yoni Ben Menachem examines his motivations:

[T]he main consideration guiding eighty-one-year-old Abbas is to remain in power while seeking an appropriate successor, one who will allow him to retire honorably and will ensure the well-being of his family and his two sons’ economic interests.

Abbas is not looking for diplomatic adventures. He is sticking with his strategy of internationalizing the conflict; hence, he supports the French [peace] initiative. That initiative could lead to an international conference by the end of the year while entailing a minimum of risk to Abbas’ rule. . . .

Particularly worrisome to him is the [possibility now being considered by the Israeli Defense Ministry] of opening a dialogue with Palestinian academics and businesspeople. Abbas sees this as going over his head to find a new Palestinian address, thereby undermining his legitimacy as leader of the Palestinian people. . . .

As Abbas sees it, [this] new plan poses a threat to his continued rule. . . . According to senior Fatah officials, from now on he will take great care not to give the Israeli defense establishment pretexts to take measures to undermine senior PA senior officials as well as Abbas himself, such as invalidating their official VIP travel documents, lifting the easier conditions at the border crossings, and so on.

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.