Two weeks ago, the left-leaning Israeli media and professoriate raised a hue and cry over an alleged government decision to “ban” from schools the novel Borderlife, whose plot revolves around a romance between an Israeli and a Palestinian. As Liel Leibovitz points out, nothing like a “ban” was issued; the only decision was not to include the book on a list of works required for all students taking the nation-wide matriculation exam: a list that already includes multiple novels about love between Jews and Gentiles (both Arab and European). The real root of the controversy, writes Leibovitz, is the left’s desire to impose its views:

In declining to canonize [Borderlife], the Ministry of Education made a call to favor works that explore not the nation’s failings—aside from the interfaith love story, Borderlife is rich with descriptions of IDF soldiers behaving cruelly toward bedraggled Palestinian innocents—but its glories. And that, to some in Israel, is hard to take.

To those guardians of good taste and right thinking—comprising, if you’re inclined to stereotype, authors and academics and op-ed writers and entertainers and the other usual suspects one finds everywhere among the tender and progressive elites—a book is only worth its salt if, [as they might put it], it problematizes power relations and undermines the hegemony of the privileged classes. [Thus] so many Israeli novels—many of which have pride of place on the Ministry of Education’s list—are shivering, introspective mea culpas about all sorts of wrongdoings, real and perceived. But try to argue that the Jewish state should teach, say, Jewish values, and you’re likely to be labeled a benighted brute.

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.