The Case against Academic Boycotts of Israel is a collection of essays by university scholars pointing out the absurdity of the BDS movement. Avi Woolf notes that, despite the book’s worthy arguments and noble goal, it contains an underlying weakness:

The book’s contributors come almost exclusively from the left and far left, they swear allegiance to liberal and progressive principles, and their points of reference are almost exclusively within that ideological sphere. . . . Eminent scholar Martha Nussbaum’s [mention] of Margaret Thatcher [alongside] Nazi-sympathizer Martin Heidegger as figures worthy of protest or denial of awards is particularly disturbing and indicative of how many left-wingers see all rightists as nothing but a bunch of Nazis.

This ideological blind spot is even more apparent when it comes to treatment of Israel itself. Author after author insists that, contrary to stereotype, Israelis are not a bunch of right-wing or conservative folk. They harp on the liberal atmosphere on [Israeli] university campuses and even talk of the creation of “transnational” or other forms of identity which aren’t—perish the thought—ethnocentric or nationalistic.

The implicit assumption that being conservative or nationalist is inherently bad is not just deeply insulting but also profoundly counterproductive. It makes this protest sound less like a fight for a genuine free marketplace of ideas and more of a cry of “shun them, not us—we’re the good guys!”—a protest that rings hollow and has a whiff of hypocrisy.

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.