On March 10, Mahmoud Abbas appointed Muhammad Shtayyeh the new prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA), replacing Rami Hamdallah who had tendered his resignation in January. Pinḥas Inbari explains the political considerations behind Shtayyeh’s appointment and the challenges he faces in forming a new government. At issue are the tensions between Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction and the other groups that make up the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO):

Shtayyeh is not [considered] a Fatah “fighter,” [since he has not] spent time in an Israeli prison. . . . Fatah’s main concern now is that its senior officials be promoted to key positions [in preparation for] the day after Mahmoud Abbas [dies or otherwise leaves office]. . . . The reason Abbas is not interested in promoting any of the senior Fatah fighters is to avoid inflaming the succession struggle now.

Instead of a Fatah government as such, Abbas is more interested in a PLO government [that includes other factions] due to his struggle with Hamas over the legitimacy of the PLO’s authority. . . . But here lies the main problem: [the other] leading PLO organizations, including the Popular Front, the Democratic Front, and Islamic Jihad, are aligned with Hamas rather than with Ramallah. It is now taken for granted that they will not join Shtayyeh’s new government. . . .

It is [nevertheless] expected that Shtayyeh will “open the door” to those organizations, which are terrorist according to every conceivable definition, thereby putting the continuation of international financial aid to Ramallah at risk. . . .

All of the above is linked to the Jerusalem issue. Ramallah wants to make the fight for Jerusalem the leading national struggle, while for Hamas, the central battle is along the borders. Abbas’s aim is to attract the PLO organizations to join Ramallah at the expense of Gaza.

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.