After voting down a resolution to boycott Israeli scholars and institutions, members of the Modern Language Association (MLA)—one of the most prestigious professional organizations in the humanities—overwhelmingly approved a ban last year on future boycott resolutions. But Judith Butler—a highly regarded philosopher and gender theorist who has praised Hamas and Hizballah as natural allies of the “global left”—is still trying to bring the organization around to BDS. Cary Nelson, an English professor and committed opponent of academic boycotts, describes attending a meeting of Butler and her supporters at the recent MLA conference, and their reaction to finding a dissenter in their midst:

Someone said, “You should leave” [after I identified myself], and Butler immediately proposed a vote to make that a group decision. Several others quickly supported her and repeated the demand for me to leave. Butler then asked me, “Will you honor a vote to tell you to leave?” Not answering her directly, I said that this was supposed to be an open public meeting. . . . Butler then concluded I was refusing to honor a vote demanding I leave, so they would just have to proceed as best they could. Honest discussion would be impossible with a Zionist present. . . .

She [then] declared that she had several ideas she had wanted to share about how to move the BDS agenda forward in the MLA, but felt it was not safe to do so with me in the room. . . . She urged people to contact her after the meeting and told them there would likely be funds to bring some of them out to Berkeley to consult with her.

Although half the hour was spent challenging and berating me, the core strategy Butler and the other senior member there, David Palumbo-Liu of Stanford, were using was nonetheless clear. . . . Unwilling to see themselves as a radical fringe group indulging in sour-grapes complaints, they were left with one way to explain their loss: as they asserted repeatedly this evening, they were cheated. . . .

What Butler and Palumbo-Liu managed to do this evening was to convince a group of young university faculty members and students that only a corrupt conspiracy could have defeated them in their effort to demonize the Jewish state. Their opponents were unethical and unscrupulous. At the end, Butler turned and pointed to me to conclude: “We need to overcome those who are dedicated to making the fight unfair.”

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.