At the age of eighty-two and reportedly in poor health, the Palestinian Authority (PA) president faces declining popularity, yet has made no effort to appoint a successor. He has also taken a much harsher line with Hamas, slashing payments for fuel and, more recently, for hospitals—perhaps out of concern with the threat the organization poses to his rule. Grant Rumley analyzes Abbas’s position with respect to the most recent outbreak of violence:

The [recent rioting in Jerusalem] was finally resolved when Israel removed the security cameras and metal detectors and re-opened [the entrance to the Temple Mount] where the initial terrorist attack took place, but the impact of this near-catastrophic escalation will linger. Palestinians see the massive protests that rocked Jerusalem as the reason for Israel’s acquiescence. When tensions flare again, they’ll look to a political leadership willing to support them in these tactics.

And they may start to look elsewhere for [that] leadership. . . . Abbas has . . . clamped down on political expression, regularly arresting students and shutting down websites critical of his government. To top it off, he spends most of his time outside the West Bank. His people have responded with varying levels of unrest: a majority of Palestinians want him to resign, and refugee camps in the West Bank have become flashpoints for clashes with the PA. The Balata camp in Nablus and the al-Amari camp between Jerusalem and Ramallah have seen sustained fights against PA forces in recent years.

Abbas’s policies [toward Hamas] have also come under heavy scrutiny. . . . A majority of Palestinians view Abbas’s actions as a cruel punishment of everyday Gazans. . . .

Many Palestinians—including his own allies and rivals—have begun to plan for the post-Abbas era. The events of the past month have Palestinians convinced that wide-scale, coordinated protest is the way forward. At some point, they’ll want a leadership that fully endorses it.

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.