On Tuesday, the Canadian House of Commons passed a resolution condemning the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS). Terry Glavin, while praising the decision, notes that the surrounding debate ignored what he considers the most important question:

As always, . . . the one question about the international BDS campaign never got a proper look-in: does the BDS strategy truly hold out the promise of improving the lives of the long-suffering Palestinian people, or advance the prospects for peace, or serve the cause of a democratic Palestinian state emerging from decades of antagonism to coexist alongside Israel?

You might not be surprised at who . . . came up with the most convincing answers to that question when I was asking around this week. But if you’ve absorbed the usual popular assumptions that underlie the debates about the Israeli-Palestinian agony, you will be surprised by what he has to say.

Bassem Eid is a prominent Palestinian human-rights activist who lives with his wife and four children in the ancient West Bank city of Hebron. . . . According to Eid, the “BDS campaign is completely contradictory to the Palestinian cause. We will never build peace this way. . . . The agenda of the BDS campaign is to try to destroy Israel.” . . .

To recap the history of BDS, without getting into any of the unambiguously anti-Semitic boycott-Jews associations from Europe’s recent past: the movement kicked off before Israel was born, with a pre-emptive campaign waged by the Arab League against the Jewish population of Palestine in 1945. The campaign was formalized after Israel’s birth in 1948; . . . it was [later] revived at the notorious Durban conference in 2001, which cast boycotts, divestments, and sanctions within a suite of strategies—including the “apartheid” smear—explicitly designed to isolate and marginalize Israel.

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.