Hillel, the primary Jewish campus organization in the U.S., has a policy of not “partnering” with groups that oppose Israel’s right to exist or that support the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement, or to host speakers with such agendas. Now the Open Hillel movement is campaigning to change this policy. While its supporters claim that they are working for freedom of speech and toleration of diverse opinions, Andrew Pessin argues they are likely to achieve the opposite:

[Hillel] offers no restrictions whatsoever on individuals. The most ardently anti-Israel Jewish students and professors are welcome to participate in Hillel events, attend their programs, and debate and defend their views to their hearts’ content. Hillel remains entirely “inclusive” of all Jewish students, regardless of their political beliefs, as it should be. . . .

[Furthermore, Hillel’s] restrictions are minimal and reasonable. Hillel does not limit the many criticisms of Israeli policies people may want to make, and is entirely open to individuals and speakers who genuinely seek to improve [Israel’s] policies through constructive criticism. It is merely off-limits to [groups and speakers] who seek, ultimately, to damage the state and destroy it. . . .

[W]hat campuses desperately need these days, far more than they need more anti-Israel voices, are places where pro-Israel voices can be cultivated. If you want the academy to be a place of genuine freedom of speech, a place where thoughtful and well-articulated and carefully conceived opinions get to battle in the marketplace of ideas, then you should want a place where pro-Israel voices can be nurtured. What Open Hillel seeks to do, to the contrary, is to take one of the few natural places to cultivate the pro-Israel voice on campus and dilute it, weaken it, diminish it, destroy it. They want Hillel to start looking more like J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace—without of course demanding that J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace start looking more like Hillel.

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.