Appearing at Brown University last week to speak alongside the actor Michael Douglas, the former Soviet dissident faced a small but well-organized group of protestors. Distributing pamphlets calling him “an infamous anti-African racist,” they attempted to disrupt the event. Ira Stoll writes:

[It is] a sad moment for American higher education, for Israel, and for world Jewry when a campus conversation between an American actor with a Jewish identity and a human-rights hero known for surviving nine years in the Soviet gulag is greeted—before it even happens—by an op-ed in the student newspaper summoning a rally “to speak out against this justification of Israeli crimes.” It’s a measure of the movement’s virulence that it targeted not an appearance by an Israeli general or a foreign-policy talk but rather a discussion about Jewish identity.

Mr. Sharansky spoke about the anti-Israel protesters and the boycott, divestment, [and] sanction movement they represent. “The moment you move to a logical debate, they have nothing to say. . . . They are only shouting,” he said. “Behind it there is a desire to destroy Israel. It is not about human rights. . . . My fear is they are discouraging so many young Jews from being connected to their people and to the state of 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.