A Norwegian film festival recently rejected an Israeli movie about disabled children in Israel—on the grounds that it is pledged to boycott any Israeli film with a subject other than Israel’s supposed persecution of the Palestinians. The fact that the film received no government sponsorship, or that its director, Roy Zafrani, does not make a habit of pronouncing on political issues, was of no consequence. Jonathan Marks comments on what this reveals about the purposes of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement:

[The festival’s] actions are fully in the spirit of the BDS campaign against “normalization.” [According to the official BDS program], projects may be subject to boycott if they seek to foster cooperation and understanding between Israelis and Palestinians, unless that cooperation and understanding is founded on the premise that Israel is an apartheid state.

Now, Zafrani’s documentary isn’t about Israeli-Palestinian cooperation, but the logic of “anti-normalization” points directly to rejecting it. If failing to denounce Israel as an apartheid state makes one complicit in Israel’s effort to pass for anything other than a monster, then the claim that Zafrani is apolitical, far from being a defense, is evidence against him. An Israeli artist who devotes himself to anything other than denouncing Israel is guilty and deserves to be shunned.

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.