In response to the new U.S. plan to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict by creating a Palestinian state in Gaza and parts of the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas called for a “day of rage.” This reaction, writes Abe Greenwald, “gets to the heart of the matter.”

Palestinian leaders will take a day of rage over a decade of peace every time. And it’s their very refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist and to negotiate in good faith that’s doomed the long-suffering Palestinian people. Palestinian officials have refused to meet with Americans since President Trump announced the opening of the American Embassy in Jerusalem in 2017.

For decades, such self-defeating obstinacy found support among other Arab leaders in the region. This kept the Israel-Palestinian issue at the center of any discussion about Middle East stability. But that has unofficially come to an end. With Iran’s increased aggression against its Sunni neighbors—and Barack Obama’s mistaken effort to strengthen the Islamic Republic—Saudi Arabia and other Sunni kingdoms have formed an unspoken alliance with Israel against Tehran. They have more pressing concerns than Mahmoud Abbas’s latest tantrum. And without the undying support of the Saudis and other critical allies, the Palestinians have lost much of their leverage.

This is in part why the U.S. felt no pressure to wait for Palestinian input before rolling out its framework. And it’s also why, if Palestinian leaders once again fail to seize the opportunity before them, everyone will get along just fine except the Palestinian people.

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.