The worldwide anti-Israel movement—and especially the drive to boycott, divest from, and sanction the Jewish state (BDS)—portrays itself as a grassroots effort inspired by or cooperating with Palestinian activists. But for many of its European offshoots, Tehran is a primary source of funds and direction. Asaf Romirowsky and Benjamin Weinthal write:

[A]nnual al-Quds Day rallies [named after the Arabic term for Jerusalem], which were inaugurated in 1979 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s theocracy, urge individuals to support the BDS movement and the destruction of Israel. Al-Quds Day rallies blanket European cities such as Berlin, London, and Vienna. Iranian-backed Islamists have no qualms about marching together with an amalgam of neo-Nazis, German leftists, and supporters of the U.S.- and EU-designated terrorist entity the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The Iranian regime-owned Islamic Center of Hamburg charters buses with Iranian regime and Hizballah supporters to travel to Berlin to march in the al-Quds Day rally. Since 1996, there have been 21 al-Quds Day marches in the German capital. . . .

Iran’s grassroots campaign to shape European and American opinion is not limited to demonstrations. In 2016, the Bavarian city of Bayreuth awarded 10,000 euros to a U.S.-based activist group—Code Pink—that supports a boycott of the Jewish state and has participated in a conference in Iran with Holocaust deniers. The women’s organization Code Pink has gone to great lengths to defend Iran’s regime. In January, the Israeli government banned representatives of Code Pink and an additional nineteen BDS organizations from entering the country because of their campaign to dismantle Israel. . . .

Moreover, . . . the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) has played a role in promoting the nuclear deal with Iran. . . . RBF at large has [also] been a staunch supporter of the BDS movement with its support of the organizations Jewish Voice for Peace and Breaking the Silence. . . .

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.