In the past several months, the Trump administration has taken a number of measures that make clear that it will no longer turn a blind eye to the misbehavior of the Palestinian leadership, the most recent being the decision to shutter a Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington. Elliott Abrams applauds all of these measures but one:

The decision to close the PLO office in Washington was correct. . . . The PLO is not a state with which the U.S. has diplomatic relations, and the PLO has a long history of support for terrorism. Today, PLO funds pay terrorists pensions and rewards in accordance with the seriousness of their crimes and the length of their sentences; that is why Congress passed the Taylor Force Act that requires an end to U.S. funding of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and PLO unless payments for terror stop. . . .

The decision to cut aid levels was correct, given the refusal of the PA to stop its payments to terrorists and its glorification of terror, and given its increasingly authoritarian rule in the West Bank. . . . But [there should be] one exception: Augusta Victoria hospital in eastern Jerusalem, and the East Jerusalem Hospital Network of which it is a part. . . . Defunding [these hospitals] does not harm the PA or PLO, does not punish the Palestinian leadership that is making terrible decisions, and does not help Israel, but does potentially harm Palestinians who have no role in Palestinian politics.

I don’t understand why the administration decided to cut the hospital funding. [But] mistakes can be rectified, and . . . I hope the administration reconsiders and provides the funds.

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.