The Palestinian Authority’s president has devoted years to stunts ostensibly aimed at gaining recognition of a Palestinian state, the latest of which is his new plan to sue Britain for issuing the Balfour declaration in 1917. But, Benny Avni writes, he has shown little interest in actually creating such a state:

Abbas has already raised a Palestinian flag at Manhattan’s First Avenue UN headquarters and received blessings for a Palestinian state in places like Geneva, Sweden, Mauritania, and the back pages of U.S. party platforms. Yet he has proved completely useless in creating a state on the West Bank.

And his attempt to pretend that the last century of history—in which Jews created an independent and thriving state—never happened raises suspicions that Abbas never really was all that comfortable with the existence of Israel on lands Arabs consider their own. . . .

So all those who get so exercised about how the two-state solution is represented in American party platforms had better relax. America, Britain, Europe, and even Israel won’t prevent Palestinians from peacefully living and thriving in an independent state. As they always have, only Palestinians will.

As for that other side of the vaunted two-state solution: [Abbas] can’t turn back the clock to 1917, or any other time in history. So Israel will continue to flourish, with or without Palestine by its side.

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.