The White House is reportedly planning to slash funding to UNRWA, the UN organization that supports Palestinian refugees and their descendants; at the same time, it appears that Washington is prepared to start circumventing Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, who after fifteen years in power has proved himself unwilling to negotiate with Israel. David Weinberg praises both steps, beginning with the latter:

At a meeting of the PLO Central Council [on August 19], Abbas called on Palestinians to “keep the ground aflame with popular resistance” against Israel—code words for violence, if not terrorism. Abbas’s main foreign-policy deputy, the PLO secretary-general Saeb Erekat, went on to lead the council in declaring support for “heroic” Hamas-led attacks against Israeli troops and civilians across the Gaza border, while condemning Hamas for negotiating a truce with Israel. . . .

Abbas has fled from real negotiation and compromise with Israel at every opportunity over the past fifteen years. He has espoused maximalist positions, stoked hatred of Israelis and Jews, inculcated a culture that denies Jewish history and national identity, venerated terrorists, and pushed the criminalization of Israel internationally. He has driven most Israelis to the realization . . . that there is no reasonable peace deal with the Palestinians to be had at this time. . . .

[Thus] it’s no wonder that the emerging American peace initiative seeks to bypass Abbas and his PLO rejectionists and perhaps to initiate a long process in which Palestinians act to replace their past-sell-date rulers—effectively, dictators focused on their own survival in power—with more reasonable leaders. . . .

To this end, the Trump administration’s hardnosed approach to the Palestinians, including its cut-off of aid to UNRWA, is useful. . . . UNRWA is a root problem. It perpetuates the Palestinian dream of return to homes in Jaffa and Haifa, ultimately destroying the Jewish state. . . . Change also must come in Israeli policy. The IDF’s coordinator of government activities in the territories has been UNRWA’s main defender in recent years—because the defense establishment believes that international aid dollars flowing through UNRWA buys quiet in the territories. . . . Such Israeli short-sightedness must be replaced by a longer view, which means phasing out the agency.

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.