Earlier this month, agents of Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction apprehended a Palestinian businessman named Khaled al-Atari and subjected him to a violent interrogation; he is currently in hiding. Atari’s crime? He had purchased a three-story house in east Jerusalem from an Arab family and then sold it to a group of Jews for $17 million—in violation of a Palestinian Authority (PA) law forbidding any sale of property to Jews. Atari’s apprehension, writes Yoni Ben Menachem, is part of a larger PA crackdown on land sales in eastern Jerusalem; it is also a violation of the Oslo Accords:

On October 20, 2018, the Jerusalem police and the Shin Bet apprehended Adnan Gheith, the PA’s Jerusalem governor, and Jihad al-Faqih, director of the PA’s intelligence office in eastern Jerusalem. . . . They were arrested on suspicion of abducting [an Arab resident of Jerusalem], a realtor . . . whom they suspected of selling a property in the area of Herod’s Gate in the Old City. The realtor is an Israeli citizen who also holds a U.S. passport. According to Palestinian sources, he is still incarcerated in an interrogation cell of the PA General Intelligence Service in Ramallah.

His family has submitted a complaint to the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem regarding his arrest, but according to sources in Fatah, . . . Abbas has instructed that the realtor should not be released from custody. [Moreover], he wants to create a policy of deterrence against the sellers of land and property to Jews in the Old City, and he is looking [to make an example of someone].

According to the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian security forces are not allowed to operate in east Jerusalem. However, the PA has been openly violating [this aspect of the agreement]. As a result, the PA security forces have been playing a game of cat-and-mouse with the Israeli police and the Shin Bet. Residents of eastern Jerusalem relate that during 2018, after President Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the PA security forces stepped up their operations in the area. They are threatening residents on a daily basis and summon them to interrogations in the offices of the [PA’s] Jerusalem district governor. . . .

[T]he abduction of an Israeli citizen with U.S. citizenship is extremely serious. . . . This type of incident has not occurred in Jerusalem for many years. . . . It is time for Israel to take a strong stand against the Palestinian security services, who are violating the Oslo Accords in east Jerusalem to strengthen Abbas’s position.

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.