In December 2012, the African National Congress (ANC)—which has been South Africa’s governing party since the fall of apartheid in 1994—officially endorsed the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction (BDS) Israel. The party’s deputy secretary-general (among many others) has made clear that the ANC is opposed to Israel’s existence, rather than to its rule over any particular territory. Another operative praised Hitler on social media. The South African BDS movement has been particularly brutal in its tactics, and willing to engage in blatant anti-Semitism. Annika Hernroth-Rothstein explains:

The precipitous growth of the BDS movement in South Africa began with Thabo Mbeki’s presidency from 1999 to 2008, and stemmed from his unusual fascination with the Arab-Israeli conflict. . . . Mbeki’s belief was that now that South Africa had been liberated from apartheid, the natural next step was to free the Palestinians from Zionism—caricatured as a colonial movement dispossessing and expropriating the native population. . . .

[I]n the 21 years that elapsed since the death of apartheid, the government of South Africa has proved to be corrupt and weakened, deprived of an obvious enemy and an inspiring political fight. Israel has provided both those things.

One might say that the ANC and BDS South Africa are in business together, and it is a business, since both need to highlight “apartheid” in order to justify their existence and their actions to the outside world. . . . If the Arab-Israeli conflict ends, activists will not get paid or gain attention; by pursuing a line of “no compromise,” the BDS movement ensures that this will never happen. Young black South Africans, those who should be the future of the country, are being used to preserve the status quo rather than build a better future, once again paying the price for a dishonest system.

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.