In a recent issue of its official publication, the University and College Union (UCU)—the UK’s major professional organization for faculty and graduate students at institutions of higher learning—called on its members to join in next January’s observance of Holocaust Memorial Day. The statement included a long list of victims of the Nazis, including trade unionists, Communists, homosexuals, prostitutes, and “non-Jewish Poles.” Absent from the list were Jews, Polish or otherwise. Incidentally, the UCU in 2011 endorsed a cultural and academic boycott of Israel. Edward Alexander comments:

The late [historian] Lucy Dawidowicz once referred . . . to the widespread practice of stealing the Holocaust from its European Jewish victims by a host of groups who not only hate but also envy Jews for having been destroyed. “How dare the Jews,” she seemed to hear them complaining, “monopolize all that beautiful Holocaust suffering which other aggrieved groups would very much like to share, ex post facto, with them.” . . .

The most determined, sustained, and dangerous attempt to steal the Holocaust from its Jewish victims was begun by the Soviet Union and the Arab world after the 1967 war, and soon became, as it remains today, one of the most lethal weapons deployed against the land and people of Israel. Making Jews into metaphors proved the prelude to making Zionism into the new Nazism, the Israelis into the new Nazis, and the Palestinian Arabs into the Jews. . . .

When the predictable barrage of complaint arrived, the editors [of the UCU journal] blamed a “drafting” error for the indelicate omission of the only group selected by the Nazi regime for total annihilation. But which is more revealing of the lower depths of British academia, the conscious lie or the unconscious one?

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.