Defending Governor Andrew Cuomo’s recent order that state agencies divest from corporations refusing to do business with the Jewish state, Eugene Kontorovich refutes those who claim the order impinges on the freedom of speech:

The First Amendment protects speech, not conduct. . . . [T]he act of boycotting Israel does not in and of itself express any political viewpoint. Companies may boycott Israel to prevent further harassment from the BDS movement, to curry favor with Arab states, or out of mere anti-Semitism. Unless the company or institution explains its actions, those actions have no message. That is why refusals to do business are not speech. . . .

More to the point, the current wave of state anti-boycott measures do not criminalize or prohibit any conduct, let alone speech. The First Amendment allows states to place conditions on those companies that want to do business with them. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that conditioning government money on compliance with anti-discrimination policies does not violate the First Amendment.

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.