Recently, public institutions—including hospitals—in eastern Jerusalem have reported that they have stopped receiving funding from the Palestinian Authority (PA). Meanwhile, Al-Quds University, a Jerusalem-based Palestinian institution, split with the PA by applying to join the Israel’s Council for Higher Education. Pinḥas Inbari explains that these developments suggest that Arab Jerusalemites—whose legal status is intermediate between that of Palestinians and that of Arab Israelis—increasingly see themselves as distinct from West Bank Palestinians:

Saudi Arabia [has] refused to recognize travel documents that are not proper passports. This means that residents of eastern Jerusalem need to choose between a Palestinian or Israeli passport, and they are choosing the Israeli option. The Saudis [have likewise called] for Jordan to give full citizenship to many Palestinians who are not yet considered Jordanian nationals, and that Lebanon is obliged to absorb its Palestinian refugees. . . .

[Meanwhile], the PA headquarters was particularly incensed by the fact that on the “global day of rage” marking the transfer of the [U.S. embassy to Jerusalem], Arab Jerusalemite and Arab-Israeli youths partied with drinking and dancing [at unrelated celebrations in the West Bank city of] Rawabi instead of attacking IDF checkpoints.

As a result, [the PA] government circulated an order requiring Israeli Arabs and residents of eastern Jerusalem to report to the police if they want to rent an apartment in Ramallah or the West Bank in general. In other words, for the first time, the Palestinian Authority has recognized that residents of eastern Jerusalem are part of the Israeli Arab community and could be potentially recruited by Israeli intelligence against the Palestinian Authority.

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.