Open Hillel, an organization dedicated to welcoming anti-Israel discourse into Jewish life on campus, has issued a new manifesto with signatures from a long list of professors. Edward Alexander explains what’s at stake:

Although Open Hillel has several chapters of its own on campuses as adversarial counterparts to Hillel, it has now decided that the cause of “inclusivity” and “diversity” requires Hillel itself to extend a hand of welcome (and cash) to BDSers and other Jewish Israel-haters to subvert a central pillar of Hillel’s own raison d’être. [Open Hillel’s latest] manifesto demands that Hillel aspire to the standards of free expression, of “diversity of experience and opinion,” that prevail in universities generally, and especially in “our classrooms.” . . .

In “The Sermon,” a famous Hebrew short story of 1942 by Ḥayyim Hazaz, a character named Yudka declares that, “When a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes a Zionist”; nowadays, it would be truer to say that “when a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes an anti-Zionist.”

[A] word or two about this ideal of “inclusivity” or, as it is more commonly called, “inclusiveness”: is it possible that nobody, in the course of their academic careers, ever told these . . . occupants of endowed chairs [lending their support to Open Hillel] that exclusion is as much a function of intellect as inclusion?

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.