As organizations like the Green party and Black Lives Matter have adopted radically anti-Israel stances, leftist Jews supportive of such groups but unwilling to endorse boycott measures and accusations of genocide have found themselves in a tenuous position. Alan Dershowitz writes:

Using the pretext of “intersectionality”—a pseudo-academic theory which insists that all social-justice movements, except those supportive of Jews or Israel, are inexorably linked—anti-Israel activists have successfully made opposition to Israel and support for BDS a [prerequisite], especially for Jews, for belonging to “progressive” movements focused on a wide range of issues. . . .

For hard-left activists . . . hostility toward Israel does not stem from any particular Israeli actions or policies. Even if Israel were to withdraw from the West Bank, destroy the security barrier, and recognize Hamas as a legitimate political organization, it would still not be enough. For these radicals, it is not what Israel does; it is what Israel is: the nation-state of the Jewish people—or, to use hard-left terminology, an imperialistic, apartheid, genocidal, and colonialist enterprise.

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.