On Sunday, Ari Fuld, a forty-five-year-old dual Israeli-American citizen, was stabbed to death by a Palestinian. Bassam Tawil argues that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, provoked the attack with his most recent speech accusing Jews of trying to pray at the al-Aqsa mosque:

In a speech before the PLO executive committee in Ramallah on September 15, Abbas repeated the old libel that Israel is planning to establish special Jewish prayer zones inside the al-Aqsa mosque. . . . Abbas’s allegation was quickly picked up by several media outlets in the Arab world, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. The headlines that appeared on websites affiliated with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad . . . claimed that Israel was planning to permit Jews to pray inside the al-Aqsa mosque.

Needless to say, there is no Israeli plan to allow Jews to pray inside the mosque. However, in the past few years, Jews, like all other non-Muslims, have been allowed to resume their perfectly legal visits to the Temple Mount. Thousands of Jews have toured the holy site under police protection, despite provocations and violent attacks by Muslims. It is worth noting that any kind of prayer or “religious displays” by Jews or Christians anywhere on the Temple Mount are completely forbidden by the Israeli police.

Why is Abbas’s false accusation significant and dangerous? Hours after reports were published of Abbas’s allegation, a seventeen-year-old Palestinian from the town of Yatta in the southern West Bank fatally stabbed Ari Fuld. . . . According to Palestinian terrorist groups, the terrorist, Khalil Jabarin, decided to murder a Jew in response to Israeli “crimes” against the al-Aqsa mosque in particular and Islamic holy sites in general.

In other words, the terrorist was influenced by Abbas’s incitement, and this is why he decided to set out on his deadly mission. There is no doubt that the terrorist saw the reports quoting Abbas’s claim that Israel was planning to allow Jews to pray inside the al-Aqsa mosque. . . .

Abbas’s false claim was not the first libel of its kind. . . . It was Abbas who sparked the 2015 “knife intifada” with his accusation that Jews “with their filthy feet were defiling the al-Aqsa mosque.”

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.