The appearance of the Palestinian Authority president at an Israeli state funeral came as a surprise to many. According to Eran Lerman, it’s possible that his attendance signifies a shift in strategy, albeit a hesitant one. If so, Abbas may be realizing that his campaign to use international institutions to delegitimize Israel and achieve recognition of a Palestinian state has been no more successful at achieving territorial concessions than his predecessor Yasir Arafat’s campaign of terror. Lerman suggests that if the Palestinian leader really does want a state, he will need to convince Israel’s citizens that he is serious about peace:

[Coming to Mount Herzl] took courage, which Abbas does not often possess. Here was a man in fragile health—he underwent a coronary bypass a week after the funeral—and besieged by Arab plans to bring in his hated rival, Muhammad Dahlan, either as his successor or as the power behind his successor. It was not an easy moment at which to ignore bitter criticism.

Yet he did attend the funeral, and was seated in the front row amidst Israeli flags at the very pinnacle of Zionist symbolism, the sacramental spot . . . where Israel marks its sorrows and joys. . . .

If Abbas does wish to reach out to the Israeli people, the effort cannot end with one symbolic act. Moreover, the traditional Palestinian approach to the Israeli political arena—trying to mobilize the committed Israeli left against their right-wing government—will no longer suffice. It would therefore be wise of Abbas to revisit the actual text of President Obama’s speech [at the funeral]. It made very clear that Israel is indeed, by right, the embodiment of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. . . .

Sadly, the State Department largely vitiated this possibility by counter-factually suggesting yet again that Jerusalem is not in Israel. This exercise in futility can only make it harder for sober Palestinians to hear what Obama explicitly said about the Zionist project, as well as about young people in the Arab world being raised to hate. But if they are ever to engage seriously with the Israeli mainstream, those words are precisely what they should take away from this extraordinary event.

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.