Since the 1920s, writes Alex Joffe, Palestinian leaders have sought to internationalize their conflict with Zionism, variously seeking support from other Arab and Muslim countries, from pan-Arab and pan-Muslim organizations, from the UN and related institutions, from the Soviet Union, and from leftist and anticolonial movements. The result has been the subordination of Palestinians’ interests to other causes, as Joffe explains:

Palestinian efforts to internationalize their conflict with Jews, Zionism, and Israel is emblematic of the Palestinian elites’ century-long effort to mobilize international support in place of, and as a means of, nationalizing the Palestinian masses. In the process, however, they lost control over these processes, which became partially driven by the political needs and inherent anti-Semitism of Arab and Islamic countries, as well as by global geopolitics. . . .

[The most recent iteration], in the age of leftist anti-globalization, . . . is the BDS movement. . . . [T]he true origins of the movement go back at least to the 1940s. The Arab League boycott of Israel and American Arab anti-Zionism are important foundations, as are the contributions of the General Union of Palestinian Students (founded in Cairo in 1959 to make Palestine the focus of Arab student life in the Middle East and then Europe)—out of which Students for Justice in Palestine emerged in 2000.

But the contributions of the New Left and especially the Jewish left of the late 1960s and 1970s (partially co-opted by the KGB and the PLO), and the American Muslim Brotherhood network, which has effectively taken over American Muslim institutions since the 1980s, cannot be ignored. The Communist-backed Palestine Solidarity Campaign, founded in London in 1982, and the Hamas-sponsored (and thus Muslim Brotherhood-sponsored) Palestine Return Center in Britain in 1986, are also important.

The BDS movement is thus a red-green synthesis in which Palestinians are figureheads. Arguably, the movement is merely the spearhead of a larger anti-Western juggernaut, in which the dialectic between Communism and Islam remains unresolved. In this sense, the Palestinian cause matters little, except as a means to gain entry and thus dominate institutions such as the UN, international labor, churches, and educational systems. Shared anti-Zionism is a thin fig leaf for shared anti-Semitism and anti-liberalism, messages consumed with increasing vigor by hollowed-out Western institutions.

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.