On Tuesday, the dovish Israeli scholar Moshe Halbertal came to the University of Minnesota to give a talk on the ethics of warfare. But a campus group organized a protest, delaying the lecture by 45 minutes with shouting and denunciations until university police intervened. Dale Carpenter, who was present at the talk, writes:

The talk did not directly address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though Halbertal drew in part on his experience helping to draft the Israeli army’s code of ethics. . . . Halbertal argued that in fighting “asymmetric wars” professional combatants should err on the side of protecting noncombatants from casualties, even when they thereby increase risks to themselves or to their cause. . . . But the protesters had no interest in hearing the lecture or in allowing the audience to hear it. . . .

The problem is that . . . some members of university communities believe they are entitled to shut down speakers because they deem the expression offensive. . . . But mere offense cannot justify the heckler’s veto; otherwise no speech on any interesting topic would be heard on campuses. . . .

[B]eyond punishing the disruption of a public lecture, a university cannot accept any moral legitimacy in such an act or equivocate in denouncing it. It is fundamentally illiberal and destructive to the core values of an educational institution. And ironically, those who espouse unpopular and minority causes would be most vulnerable in a world where mobs feel authorized on principle to decide who may speak.

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.