As of last week, nineteen cases of coronavirus have been reported in the Palestinian Authority-controlled city of Bethlehem, while Israel has confirmed some 76 cases in its own territory. Meanwhile, Jerusalem has transferred some 250 coronavirus test kits to the Palestinians and is organizing joint training sessions for Israeli and Palestinian medical professionals to collaborate in responding to the virus. Yet Palestinian Authority officials have not ceased libeling the Jewish state, writes Khaled Abu Toameh:

On March 7, as Israel was helping dozens of foreign tourist groups leave Bethlehem, . . . the Palestinians revived yet another one of their old libels against Israel and Jews: the one claiming Israel uses wild boars to drive Palestinians out of their agricultural fields. . . . The report claimed that Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers have been releasing wild boars in parts of the West Bank to destroy Palestinian crops and to intimidate Palestinian villagers and farmers.

Needless to say, none of the Palestinians interviewed for the report managed to provide evidence that Israeli soldiers or settlers were behind the spread of wild boars in the West Bank.

By continuing to spread defamatory reports [about] Israel and Jews, particularly while Israel is working around the clock to save Palestinian lives from the coronavirus, the Palestinians are once again demonstrating how they repay those who assist them.

Israel is training Palestinian medical professionals to combat the spread of a dangerous disease at the very moment that Palestinian leaders are continuing to poison the hearts and minds of their people against the very people working to help them. While this sort of perverse Palestinian payback is nothing new, it nonetheless ought to interest anyone in the international community who is considering contributing to the Palestinian cause.

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.