Although Bernie Sanders is unlikely to win the Democratic nomination, the relative success of his candidacy, argues Ron Radosh, will nonetheless have the effect of moving his party leftward—with results that bode ill for U.S.-Israel relations. The evidence can be seen in Sanders’s appointments to the fifteen-member committee responsible for writing the party’s platform:

Worried about keeping the support of Bernie’s people after her nomination is wrapped up, [Hillary] Clinton is being forced to tilt further to the left than she would like, making it much harder for her to shift back to the center in the general election campaign. . . .

[Furthermore], let us look at the five members [of the platform committee] that Bernie Sanders has appointed. What stands out is their well-known animosity to Israel, and support of not only the Palestinians but of Hamas. The most prominent name is that of the African-American professor, philosopher, and radical Cornel West. West has toured with Sanders and opened up rallies for him. West, moreover, is a leading BDS activist, who has said that the Gaza Strip is “the ’hood on steroids,’” and in 2014 wrote that the crimes of Hamas “pale in the face of the U.S.-supported Israeli slaughters of innocent civilians.” . . .

The second person appointed by Sanders is the American pro-Palestinian activist James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. . . . In 1996, . . . his group sponsored a rally at which protestors held signs saying “Peres and Hitler are the same—the only difference is the name.” . . . Sanders also put on the platform committee Representative Keith Ellison, who is also . . . a major critic of Israel, and will undoubtedly stand with Zogby and West. All three will work, probably successfully, to create a strong anti-Israel stance as the official platform to be implemented should a Democratic nominee become president. . . . Clinton’s choices for the platform committee likewise reflect her leftward tilt.

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.