Over the course of the past year, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and several Palestinian organizations have been propagandizing against the anticipated White House peace plan, the content of which remains unknown. In fact, the PA president, Mahmoud Abbas, has made clear that he has no intention of even considering it. Bassam Tawil comments:

Abbas has . . . repeatedly announced his rejection of the unseen “deal of the century,” [as President Trump once dubbed it]. He has referred to the plan as a “conspiracy” and the “slap of the century.” How then can he turn to his people and suddenly accept it—or any deal that might recognize Israel’s right to exist? . . .

[PA officials as well as] anti-Israel activists in the Arab and Islamic countries appear worried that, should they make peace with the “Zionist entity,” their people might be exposed to democratic values and freedom of expression. They seem concerned that Arabs and Muslims will wake up one morning and start demanding free and democratic elections like the ones held every few years in Israel. . . .

The anti-Israel campaign in the Arab and Islamic world sees peace with Israel—and not failed leadership, bad economic policies, and corruption—as the biggest threat to Arabs and Muslims. . . . Yasser Qadoura, who represents a Lebanon-based group called the Popular Committee for Palestinians in the Diaspora, says that his organization is now making a major effort to educate Arabs and Muslims about the “dangers” of peace and normalization with Israel. He said that his followers and he are planning to publish a “list of shame” containing the names of Arabs and Muslims who are caught . . . trying to make peace with Israel.

Anyone whose name appears on the list will immediately be denounced by Arabs and Muslims as a “traitor.” Treason, in many of the Arab and Islamic countries, is a charge punishable by death. The “list of shame” would therefore be seen by Arabs and Muslims as a license to kill anyone who dared even to talk about peace with Israel.

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.