Two weeks ago, the National Women’s Studies Association voted to boycott the Jewish state. In doing so, writes Phyllis Chesler, its members displayed moral blindness not only about the realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but also about the systemic and often brutal mistreatment of women in numerous places where they have few if any rights:

The association doesn’t condemn, for example, the atrocities being practiced by Hamas, Islamic State, Boko Haram, and the Taliban against Muslim women, children, and dissidents, or against Christian, Yazidi, and Kurdish women. . . .

This women’s studies group isn’t [protesting] the honor killings among Arabs in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, and among Muslims in the West. They aren’t condemning the forced veiling of women in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, or the forced wearing of the hijab and heavy coverings in Iran and Nigeria.

The association doesn’t focus on the pervasive nature of female genital mutilation in Egypt or on the increase in child marriage across the Arab and Muslim world. There’s little mention of the terrible fate of women—even royalty—who dare to choose their own husbands.

Israel may not be flawless—what society is?—but it’s still a modern democracy that protects the religious rights of all its minorities. . . . [A]ccording to the Israeli feminist lawyer Frances Raday, Israel’s Declaration of Independence was one of the “earliest constitutional documents in the world to include sex as a group classification within a guarantee of equality in social and political rights.”

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.