Soeren Kern documents Spain’s long-running pattern of hostility to the Jewish state, including monetary assistance to the boycott, divest, and sanction movement (BDS):

[The current] center-right government continues to pursue policies, [inherited from its socialist predecessor], that are antagonistic toward Israel . . . [and] that largely coincide with the objectives of the BDS movement in Spain and elsewhere.

In March 2013, for example, Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel García-Margallo announced a plan to open a Spanish consulate in Gaza, [thus granting diplomatic recognition to] Hamas. He backtracked after learning that the EU classifies Hamas as a terrorist organization. . . .

In August 2014, the Spanish government announced an arms embargo against Israel aimed at forcing the Jewish state to halt its military operations against Hamas. . . . In November 2014, García-Margallo praised the Spanish parliament for voting overwhelmingly to recognize “Palestine” as a state. . . .

Between 2009 and 2011, the Zapatero government funneled more than €15 million ($20 million) of Spanish taxpayer funds to Palestinian and Spanish non-governmental organizations that are among the leaders in ideological campaigns aimed at delegitimizing Israel via BDS, lawfare, and other forms of demonization. . . .

[For instance, an] exhibition, organized by the Autonomous University of Madrid [and partially funded by the Spanish Foreign Ministry], displayed a map of Israel covered with a swastika, as well as a picture of the late Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who was falsely quoted as saying, “I don’t recognize any international laws. I swear I will burn every Palestinian child that is born in this zone.”

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.