On Tuesday, Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech at the Center for American Progress (CAP), a prominent left-leaning think tank in Washington. Some of the think tank’s employees objected, as Mark Hemingway writes:

At a meeting on Friday, some staffers read aloud a statement objecting to Netanyahu’s appearance. . . . What’s notable about the statement . . . is how the rhetoric sounds awfully similar to the embarrassing hyperbolic social-justice boilerplate we’ve been hearing at Yale, the University of Missouri, and other colleges:

And at CAP we are a family. . . . It is imperative that we feel confident in this building to improve the lives of all Americans, and essentially to work on getting us all free. It becomes difficult to step outside of our building and say to our allies why this visit is happening, for some of us here we ourselves [sic] feel that we were not considered in that decision.

The statement goes on to address Netanyahu’s role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that is predictably pro-Palestinian. But the expectation that merely being in the same building as a democratically elected head of an important state is a threat to employees’ personal wellbeing, exacerbates their “individual struggles,” and is otherwise oppressing people the world over is just cringe-worthy. . . .

[I]nstead of viewing [the visit] as an opportunity to influence Netanyahu, or even expose how his leadership and policies are inferior, CAP employees were worried about how engaging in mere dialogue with someone they find disagreeable has placed them “in a place of confusion and hurt.”

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.