In lieu of a formal religious hierarchy, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) serves as the central organization for U.S. Quakers. An enthusiastic supporter of BDS, it has a history of hostility toward Israel that goes back several decades. Alexander Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky write:

In 1973, the AFSC called for a U.S. embargo on arms and other aid to Israel, and in 1975 adopted “a formal decision to make the Middle East its major issue.” It opened an office in Israel, installed specialized staff members at offices in the U.S., and began advocating for Palestinians in Israeli and international courts. The AFSC treads dangerously close to outright anti-Semitism and “replacement theology,” the idea that Palestinians were the “new Jews,” displaced and downtrodden.

Why the commitment against Israel? Part of the explanation is the banal devolution from a [pacifist] church into what the scholar H. Larry Ingle called “one more pressure group within the secular political community.” From advocating for improved relations with Communist China and the Soviet Union in the 1950s, to overt support for North Vietnam during the 1960s, the AFSC has long been in the vanguard of the Protestant left.

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.