“Damn your money!” shouted Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, as he delivered a two-hour tirade before the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Council this month.

Furious about the ongoing public scolding he had been receiving from President Donald Trump and Nikki Haley, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Abbas unleashed his rage, uncensored. American threats to withdraw financial support for the PA and certain aid organizations operating in the West Bank and Gaza were just too much.

“This (Israel) is a colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness,” Mr. Abbas said. “The Jews were used as a tool under the concept of the promised land — call it whatever you want. Everything has been made up.”

This is the man labelled a “moderate” by many Western leaders. They say he is opposed to terrorism and violence generally against Israelis. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Abbas has very capably maintained the signature doublespeak mastered by every Palestinian leader

Abbas’ conspiracy theories are nothing new. His PhD thesis, defended in Moscow in 1984, was a hard-baked anti-Semitic libel. He claimed that the scope of the Holocaust was exaggerated by Zionist leaders who colluded with Nazis to murder Jews, thus furthering their plot to generate global sympathy for the need for an independent Jewish state.

And, as PA president, Abbas has very capably maintained the signature doublespeak mastered by every Palestinian leader. He tells the West he wants peace, but promotes violent incitement in school curricula. Forty per cent of his government’s budget is allocated to paying generous lifetime stipends to the families of terrorists — imprisoned or dead. He celebrates violence civically by naming playgrounds, schools and public buildings after terrorists. The Fatah-controlled media encourages murderous violence against Israelis and praises successful attacks.

Yet, still, Abbas is respected as a man of peace. But America, it seems, has had enough of him.

Abbas clearly objects to the new reality, one in which Trump and Haley insist he start behaving like a responsible leader and begin to prioritize the interests of the people he purports to represent.

“Israel does want to make peace,” Trump said at the World Economic in Forum in Davos last week, but he openly questioned Palestinian commitment to negotiating an end to conflict, stating of the Palestinians: “They are going to have to want to make peace too, or we’re going to have nothing to do with it (the peace process) any longer.”

For all President Trump’s bluntness, Haley conveys the same message with a more powerful finesse. Speaking last week to the UN Security Council, she bore down on Abbas’ vitriolic rant several days before, condemning his indulgence in “outrageous and discredited conspiracy theories” and reinforcing the president’s main message to the Palestinian leadership: start negotiating now, and in good faith, or America will stop funding your programs.

Abbas is clearly furious that Trump and Haley have suddenly changed the terms of engagement

For decades, U.S. presidents have played along publicly with Palestinian doubletalk and blame-shifting. Abbas is clearly furious that Trump and Haley have suddenly changed the terms of engagement. They refuse to turn a blind eye to the fact that the PA brazenly funds terror and is rife with corruption. Abbas himself admits to having a $100-million fortune but is reputed to have assets of more than $1.5 billion. His predecessor, Yassir Arafat, left an estate worth billions when he died in 2004.

Average Palestinians have watched as their leaders pilfered funds provided by the United States and other Western nations, including Canada, to support institution-building, education and health programs. Billions in Western aid has been diverted over decades by so-called leaders and their cronies to feed unconscionable personal greed and support global Palestinian terrorism.

Abbas assumed that la dolce vita would continue. Business as usual. No wonder he feels cheated. The rules of the game have suddenly changed.

President Barack Obama and his key officials, including his secretary of state John Kerry, were much more amenable to enabling Palestinian disingenuousness. Their propensity to distort reality was no more embarrassingly apparent than in 2013–14, when Obama dispatched Kerry to fix the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all.

By all accounts, Kerry worked doggedly to bring the two mistrustful parties to the table. He was bullish on his prospects for success. But, as recounted in an article in The American Interest last year by Israeli Brig.-Gen. Mike Herzog — who has been involved in every significant peace negotiation between the Palestinians and Israelis since 1993 —Kerry was hopeless.

Herzog portrays Kerry as having been weighted by hubris more than an understanding of the parties and their complex, nuanced relationship. He was in way over his head yet was convinced his brilliance would solve everything.

He seems to have learned nothing. Earlier this month, Kerry was reported to have inserted himself into this imbroglio, telling a PA negotiator and longtime confidante of Abbas’s to advise him to resist Trump and “hold on and be strong” because the president would likely be out of the White House within a year. Kerry denies the report (as he has before when similar leaks have backfired).

• Vivian Bercovici: Dear Mr. Ambassador, why is Canada funding anti-Semitism?
• Vivian Bercovici: It took Trump to expose the stupidity of denying Jerusalem’s reality

Haley hasn’t addressed the alleged nuisance meddling of former Obama officials. She’s focusing her sights on the only person who can effect real change in the stalemate between Israel and the PA: President Mahmoud Abbas.

“Where is the Palestinian Anwar Sadat?” asked Haley in the Security Council Chamber, referring to the Egyptian president who took bold risks to make peace with Israel. “If President Abbas demonstrates he can be that type of leader, we would welcome it. His recent actions demonstrate the total opposite.”

The Trump administration isn’t being patronizing to Abbas. On the contrary, it is finally treating him as an equal, a leader capable of so much more than sowing corruption and misery. One can only hope that he recognizes the importance of this moment and can muster the strength of character to end the cycle of cowardly deception.

Vivian Bercovici was Canada’s ambassador to Israel from 2014 to 2016. She lives in Tel Aviv.