While Israel has already had two elections this year, and may possibly have a third in 2020, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has not held elections in fourteen years. But Mahmoud Abbas, the PA president, has recently changed his tune, calling for parliamentary elections to take place in the West Bank and Gaza, to be followed by presidential elections at a later date. Hamas, which till now has opposed such proposals, also supports the idea. Michael Milstein comments:

The [Palestinian] public has become increasingly alienated from the PA for a number of years, criticizing governmental corruption and the paralysis in the political system under Abbas’s centralized administration. . . . It appears that the current public protests in Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq, which focus on economic concerns and governmental corruption, are uncomfortable for Ramallah, given the basic resemblance of the situation in those countries to the state of affairs in the PA. The proposal of elections may be designed as a preemptive measure—a demonstration of apparent readiness to take internal corrective measures before broad-based public protest aimed at overthrowing the existing order develops on the West Bank.

It is possible that the change in Hamas’s attitude toward elections, at least on the declaratory level, is a result of fear that the popular regional uprising will [likewise] spread to the Gaza Strip, where the situation is far more explosive than that in the West Bank.

From Israel’s perspective, so long as elections are held solely on the West Bank and without participation by Hamas, there is no need to prevent them. They will not provide Abbas with substantial genuine legitimacy, [nor] will they involve a concrete risk for Israel, either in the sense of strengthening Hamas in the West Bank and its integration in the governmental establishment or by enabling Hamas to gain control over parts of the West Bank. Israel will have to intervene, however, if agreement begins to emerge between the PA and Hamas on general elections [in which the latter fields candidates].

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.