Since the United Arab Emirates made public its desire to normalize relations with Israel, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and his associates have vociferously condemned the move, and have likewise condemned Bahrain for joining in. David Horovitz reflects on Abbas’s current position:

Abbas self-righteously declares that he does not want to go down as the leader who sold out the Palestinian cause, as the leader who betrayed his people’s interests. But that’s precisely what he has done over the sixteen years since he succeeded the late Yasir Arafat, that duplicitous participant in a previous White House accords ceremony.

Unlike Arafat, Abbas hasn’t directly orchestrated terrorism. But he and his establishment have relentlessly incited against the Jewish state, deriding its historical legitimacy, and serving as a prime instigator of what President Donald Trump, in his speech [at the recent signing ceremony], accurately nailed as constant lies “that al-Aqsa was under attack.” . . . While he has mostly refused to negotiate, and, when briefly negotiating, has held to positions such as the untenable demand for a “right of return” to Israel for millions of Palestinians, his hand has grown weaker,

I wonder what was going through Mahmoud Abbas’s head on Tuesday [as representatives of Bahrain, the UAE, and Israel met on the White House lawn]. Does he really want to throw in his people’s lot with Gaza’s terrorists (who saw fit to fire rockets into Israel during and after the ceremony), Hizballah, and Tehran? Is he waiting for Trump to lose, and if so in the hope that a President Biden would do what exactly?

Was he even watching?

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.