For several years, to facilitate those who wish to boycott the Jewish state, German neo-Nazi parties have endorsed special labeling for Israeli imports. Now the call has become mainstream, as Benjamin Weinthal writes:

European Union countries [have called for the labeling of] products from settlements in disputed territories in the West Bank and the Golan Heights, as well as in east Jerusalem. If labeling Jewish goods sounds darkly reminiscent, it does as well to Germany’s neo-Nazi groups, who have recently co-opted the country’s BDS movement.

[L]abeling goods from east Jerusalem is a brazen act of economic warfare from Europe, and one that violates the principles of the very peace process Europe claims to promote. The 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians said merely that Jerusalem is a subject for final-status negotiations, not a “settlement.” The European Union itself defines Jerusalem as a corpus separatum—a “separate body” whose status is subject to negotiation—rather than occupied territory. More broadly, the drive to label Israeli merchandise has allowed Germany’s resurgent far-right to push its way to the front of the anti-Israel movement.

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.