Examining recent survey data, David Pollock comments on Palestinian perceptions of the current pandemic:

A reliable Palestinian . . . poll taken last week shows that two-thirds of the public in the West Bank, Gaza, and eastern Jerusalem state their support for “cooperation between Israel and the Palestinians to prevent the spread of coronavirus.” This proportion is significantly higher than the roughly half of the Palestinians who reported supporting economic cooperation with Israel in another poll conducted by the same organization as recently as mid-February.

At the same time, however, the new poll demonstrates the lure of conspiracy theories surrounding this plague: 47 percent of Palestinians reported that they “believe a foreign power or other force is deliberately causing the spread of coronavirus.” The other half (51 percent) say it is “a natural mutation.”

[T]he Palestinian public gave local authorities fairly good marks for handling this crisis so far, which can help explain the relatively calm situation there. Two-thirds rated the performance of their public-health authorities as “very good” (24 percent) or “good” (43 percent). A narrower majority said the same about “the performance of the security services in controlling matters and not causing panic and fear among the Palestinian public at present”: 23 percent categorized the performance as “very good,” along with 39 percent who say just “good.”

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.