Every year, the European Union channels millions of dollars to Palestinian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), many of which are connected to, or simply branches of, terrorist groups. The EU has at last instituted new regulations to ensure that its funds cease going to such groups, but, writes Khaled Abu Toameh, these regulations are unlikely to accomplish much:

This opaque language [of the new funding guidelines] means that even if a Palestinian NGO applying for EU grants is an affiliate of terrorist groups, or employs individuals from these groups, the EU will [nonetheless] provide it with taxpayer funding—whether designated for emergency responses to COVID-19 or for regular programs.

But even these small steps have aroused Palestinian ire:

In a nutshell, the Palestinian attitude regarding Western funding has always been: “You Westerners owe us this money because you contributed to the establishment of Israel after World War II. Thus, you have no right to set any conditions for the funding. Just give us the money and shut up. Any refusal to comply with our demands will result in our rage, and possibly terrorism and other forms of violence, not only against Israel, but also against you [non-Muslims] in the West.”

The EU “anti-terror” clause thus has drawn sharp criticism from . . . dozens of NGOs based in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Their main complaint is that they cannot accept “politically conditioned funding” from any party, including EU donors. . . . It remains to be seen whether the Europeans will cave to Palestinian threats of retaliation and drop their demand that EU money actually feed hungry people rather than feed Palestinian terrorists’ hunger for Jewish blood.

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.