Earlier this month, Hussam Khader, a member of the Palestinian Authority (PA) parliament, was thrown in jail for criticizing the PA president, Mahmoud Abbas, on Facebook. Stephen Flatow explains why Khader’s imprisonment should matter to those in the West concerned over the Palestinians’ fate:

I have no sympathy for Hussam Khader. He is a veteran terrorist who has served time in Israeli prisons. But his arrest tells us a lot about the nature of the Palestinian Authority.

Crushing strikers and arresting dissidents, including members of the Legislative Council, has become routine under Abbas. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Critics of the regime are routinely tortured. Unions are intimidated. Women are treated as second-class citizens. Abbas’s “Cybercrime Law” mandates prison sentences and fines for anyone who establishes a website that might “undermine the safety of the state or its internal or external security.”

As for Abbas himself, he refuses to hold elections for his position. Incredibly, he is now in the fourteenth year of his four-year term as head of the PA.

The Jewish “peace” groups that shout in protest if they think Israel has mistreated an Arab rock-thrower are conspicuously silent when it comes to the PA’s daily trampling of the rights of the Palestinian public. Jewish advocates of Palestinian statehood don’t want to talk about this. Acknowledging that the PA is a fascist dictatorship would mean acknowledging that a sovereign Palestinian state would certainly be a fascist dictatorship, too. Too bad for Hussam Khader.

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.