A week ago, the Palestinian Authority (PA) prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, after spuriously accusing the Israeli government of violating the Oslo Accords, announced that the PA will henceforth begin to build housing in Area C—the part of the West Bank that the Accords leave under exclusive Israeli control. Yoni Ben-Menachem writes:

It appears that . . . the PA has begun a process of disengagement from Israel and the agreements with it. This means that any attempt to build homes in Areas B and C in breach of the Oslo Accords could lead to clashes between the IDF and Palestinian civilians engaged in the building, and possibly also between the IDF and the Palestinian security forces. With these decisions, the PA is trying unilaterally to take over parts of the West Bank and to establish facts on the ground—not through negotiations and in blatant violation of the Oslo Accords.

Last month Prime Minister Shtayyeh visited Jordan and Iraq and signed a series of economic agreements in the fields of trade, health, energy, and natural resources. The PA has also stopped sending patients to Israeli hospitals for treatment [in order] to stop adding to these hospitals’ revenues. Shtayyeh is also planning to visit Egypt shortly and sign economic agreements there.

Israel must not fall asleep at the wheel; it needs . . . to warn the PA publicly that unilaterally ignoring the division of the West Bank into three areas stipulated by the Oslo Accords is a grave infringement and will lead to harsh Israeli reactions. . . . The PA must not be allowed to establish facts on the ground that will affect the final status of the West Bank.

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.