In 2016, a conference was scheduled to take place in South Africa regarding the looming water shortage in the southern part of the country, but agitation from the boycott, divest, and sanction movement (BDS) over the participation of the Israeli ambassador led to the conference’s cancellation. Since then the South African government has been reluctant to receive advice or aid from the Jewish state, which has shared its expertise in desalination and water conservation with numerous other countries. Now, writes Howard Feldman, residents of Cape Town expect that water in their city will be shut off in May:

Cape Town is set to be the first major [modern] city to run out of water. The city is experiencing the worst drought in its history. Residents are being asked to utilize less than 50 liters (thirteen gallons) per day, but it is unlikely that they will avoid “Day Zero,” the day the taps run dry. It is unimaginable what contingencies can be put in place to deal with the series of events that will follow that day. . . .

[In 2016], Radio Islam in South Africa celebrated the announcement [of the conference’s cancellation] by interviewing one Professor Patrick Bond, [who claimed that] what Israel has achieved [in terms of drought prevention] can be done by any child and all that Israel has done is practice “water apartheid” and steal Palestinian water. . . . He of course made no mention of desalination or the fact that Israeli cities recycle around 85 percent of their water. Nor did he mention any other achievement in Israel that has changed the ecology of the country for the better.

The fact that South Africa is experiencing one of the worst droughts in living memory, and that the situation is critical, is not a concern for those who hate Israel.

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.