The UN high commissioner for human rights, Prince Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein of Jordan, is reportedly compiling an official blacklist of companies that do business in the West Bank, east Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, thus putting a weapon in the hands of the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS). Benjamin Weinthal writes:

BDS . . . seeks to impose conditions on the Jewish state outside of negotiations between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Israeli government. . . . By attempting to blacklist Israel and U.S. companies like Caterpillar, TripAdvisor, Priceline.com, and Airbnb, the UN high commissioner is discouraging bilateral peace talks.

The UN’s unilateral move prompted a sharp rebuke from the U.S. ambassador to the world body, Nikki Haley, who said: “Blacklisting companies without even looking at their employment practices or their contributions to local empowerment, but rather based entirely on their location in areas of conflict, is contrary to the laws of international trade and to any reasonable definition of human rights. It is an attempt to provide an international stamp of approval to the anti-Semitic BDS movement. It must be rejected.” . . .

What can the U.S. and Europe do? The U.S. along with many European countries sits on the 47-member Human Rights Council (UNHRC). The UN’s economic warfare targeting Israel and companies that trade with it should prompt a counterattack that includes the U.S. and morally-principled countries resigning from the UNHRC. . . .

[T]he UNHRC should not be in the business of using the tools of economic warfare to bring about precisely the result it claims it wishes to avoid: a [major] setback to the Israel-Palestinian peace process.

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.