Since 2010, members of the anti-Israel left have denounced any mention of the Jewish state’s open-minded attitude toward homosexuals as “pinkwashing”: i.e., a cover for Israel’s alleged crimes against the Palestinians. To make sense of this bizarre accusation, Jamie Palmer cites George Orwell’s analysis of the leftist intellectuals of his own day whose blind devotion to Communism led them to defend Joseph Stalin:

With the hopes and dreams of Communist utopia long since reduced to rubble, that once-unshakable faith has been quietly transferred elsewhere. Today, Palestinian nationalism is the cause into which thinkers are invited to empty the same intense moral certainty that Orwell’s deluded contemporaries once wasted on Stalin.

Only, notice a distinction: Western Communists and their fellow travelers defended the Soviet Union because they were persuaded of the nobility of Communist doctrine. Western support for Palestinian nationalism depends on the Palestinians’ nobility as a people: what Bertrand Russell called a belief in the “superior virtue of the oppressed.” The problem is that many of the ideas actually animating Palestinians and their leadership have turned out to be antithetical to the [liberal] values that Western intellectuals offer as evidence of their own moral [superiority]. . . .

[Thus] no appeal to the value of Israeli democracy can be allowed to pass unresisted. Palestinian nobility has to be protected at all costs. . . . Just as a fanatical attachment to Communism demanded a corresponding antipathy to Western capitalist democracy that was unanswerable to reason, so the Palestinian nationalism of its most fanatical adherents has become indistinguishable from a ferociously irrational anti-Zionism. . . .

As an aggressive piece of activist strategy, the “pinkwashing” charge is shameless and shrewd. As a piece of moral reasoning, it is inane.

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.