Some 300 professors and intellectuals—among them Peter Beinart and Todd Gitlin—signed an October open letter in the New York Review of Books, opposing a boycott of Israel within the pre-June 1967 armistice lines but endorsing a boycott of territories occupied after the Six-Day War. The letter provoked an indignant response, signed by Angela Davis, Richard Falk, Rashid Khalidi, Alice Walker, and some 120 others, arguing that the first letter, “by omitting Israel’s other serious violations of international law, . . . fails the moral-consistency test.” To the critics, the only reasonable approach is to boycott Israel altogether. Elliott Abrams takes a look at the first and ostensibly more “pro-Israel” of the two statements:

Note the tricky language in this letter, from people who no doubt think they are about the most honorable and principled folks in the land. At one point they refer to “entities [that is, settlements] in the West Bank.” But everywhere else in the letter they refer to Israel “as defined by its June 4, 1967 borders,” to the “Occupied Territories,” and to places “outside the 1949 Green Line.” The difference between those latter formulations and “the West Bank” is huge: it is Jerusalem. Fairly read, this letter calls for boycotts of goods and services from east Jerusalem, including the old Jewish Quarter. It calls for removing tax exemptions from any charity that, for example, spends money on the Western Wall, a synagogue in the Old City, or on archeology in the City of David digs—or any other place in what used to be Jordanian-occupied Jerusalem.

But of course they are all pro-Israel, you see; they “oppose an economic, political, or cultural boycott of Israel itself.” Small problem: their version of “Israel itself” does not include its historical and political capital, Jerusalem.

There is one other key point to make about this letter. In it, and in the view of the world apparently held by its signers, there are no Palestinians—or at least no Palestinians who are grown-ups, who can act, who are able to make decisions. . . . The letter suggests that a boycott may “help persuade the Israeli electorate to reject the costly and wrongheaded settlement enterprise and get serious about a two-state solution.” What’s to make the Palestinians “get serious about a two-state solution?” That thought never seems to strike the authors.

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.