The South African clergyman Desmond Tutu has made himself the patron of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, a Christian organization whose goal is to encourage churches to boycott Israel. Christine Williams explains the theological roots of this particular form of hatred for the Jewish state:

Liberation theology is a radical movement that originally developed in South America before making its way to South Africa. The movement was apparently created in response to poverty and ill-treatment of ordinary people. It was caricatured in the phrase, “If Jesus Christ were on earth today, he would be a Marxist revolutionary.”

Liberation theology subsequently became influential in the churches under South African apartheid. Black theologians, to answer the religious questions of the poor and oppressed, confronted the theology of the Christian status quo, which tended to align with the prevailing institutions of power. . . . To [these] theologians, [liberation theology] was a challenge to the church to rise up against apartheid. [However,] what was once crafted as a just challenge to the Church in 1985 . . . became warped into [anti-Israel] propaganda in 2009. . . .

As the patron of Sabeel Center, Tutu . . . disregards the countless Christians being slaughtered in Muslim states, the black slaves still being held in Muslim states such as Mauritania, the forcible taking of “infidel” slaves and sex slaves by Boko Haram and Islamic State, the racist genocide in Darfur, and the millions of Muslims slaughtered by other Muslims since 1948.

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.