While Israeli, Egyptian, Qatari, and American diplomats gathered in Doha last week, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas was in Ankara, addressing the Turkish parliament. His speech began with the usual condemnations of Israel and continued with calling the U.S. a “plague.” As Elliott Abrams notes, America has given the Palestinians over $674 million in the past year, more than has any other country.

One wonders if the State Department—so sensitive these days to the speeches of Israeli politicians—has condemned Abbas’s statement. One wonders what the average American would say if confronted with those words from Abbas, and then asked if American tax dollars should continue to flow to that man. Well, actually, one does not wonder; it’s crystal clear.

The United States will be treated this way by Abbas, and others, as long as they think they can get away with it.

Abbas should not get away with this. A retraction and apology should be demanded, and until it is received not one more dime should move. No self-respecting country should permit itself to be treated this way. We are happily past the ages when such comments led to duels among men or wars among nations. But paying for such insults ought to be out of the question.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].