The Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas has, countless times, threatened to stop coordination between his security services and Israel’s. But last week, in response to the possibility that Jerusalem will extend its sovereignty to parts of the West Bank, he announced that he had actually done so and, moreover, that he will cut all ties with the Israeli government if it actually goes through with these plans. Elior Levy evaluates the situation:

In practice, . . . relations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel are structured in such a way that leaves Ramallah with no real option of severing ties with Jerusalem and continuing to function independently. The cooperation between Israel and the Palestinians was built gradually and with great effort since 2008 and has withstood several trials and tribulations over the years.

This mutual effort . . . focuses mainly on routine civilian functions, such as allowing Palestinian emergency services to travel back and forth between PA- and Israeli-controlled territories, and authorizing the transfer of goods.

Routine official meetings between Israeli and Palestinian security officials have been brought to a halt, but it is unlikely that cooperation between high-ranking officials, such as the upper echelons of the intelligence services, would do the same just because of an order from Abbas. The Palestinians severed ties with Israel during the 2017 Temple Mount crisis, but reinstated them a few weeks later.

Israel has now left the ball in the Palestinians’ court, for the time being, in order to [avoid letting] these overblown threats materialize. Meanwhile, Palestinian security agencies must also deal with growing restlessness among civilians, especially in refugee camps, who are growing tired of the lockdown imposed on them due to the coronavirus outbreak.

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.