This week, high-ranking Palestinian Authority (PA) officials will meet in Ramallah to discuss how to respond to the possibility that Jerusalem will apply sovereignty to parts of the West Bank. Reportedly, one of the options they will consider is withdrawal from all written agreements with Israel. Khaled Abu Toameh believes that the PA president, Mahmoud Abbas, would happily threaten to take such a drastic step, but will never follow through:

In the past few years, Abbas and some Palestinian officials have threatened to abandon the agreements, including the 1993 Oslo Accords, and revoke the PLO’s recognition of Israel. On several occasions, Abbas has also threatened to dismantle the PA in response to Israeli and U.S. policies. [But], besides boycotting the Israeli government and the administration of President Donald Trump, Abbas has failed to carry out any of his other threats, and he has good reason not to do so.

The PA was created by the Gaza-Jericho Agreement, pursuant to the 1993 Oslo Accords. The termination of the accords will lead to the dismantling of the PA and its institutions, with Abbas losing his status as its president. In addition, such a move is likely to result in a sharp decline of international financial aid to the Palestinians, who will be left without a governing body. This is a move that the Palestinians can’t afford, particularly during an economic crisis resulting from the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.

Under the terms of the Paris Protocol of 1994, the PA and Israel work together on various trade and economic projects that are significant for the Palestinian economy. If the Oslo Accords are cancelled, Israel, for its part, would no longer be obliged to issue work permits for Palestinians and could halt the import and export of Palestinian goods.

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.