Early this week, the New Zealand-born pop singer who goes by the name Lorde announced that she is canceling her concert in Tel Aviv scheduled for next year. She claims to have been persuaded by “an overwhelming number of messages and letters” and “a lot of discussions with people holding many views.” She has, however, no plans to cancel upcoming concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Liel Leibovitz comments:

Lorde is a talented young woman, and I admire her music as well as her commitment to her principles. Provided, of course, that they are principles and not craven submission to bigots who cunningly market their noxious hatred as a fashionable ideological accessory. How do we tell the difference? Simple: if Lorde is truly committed to the principles she now espouses, she should announce her refusal to perform in, or return home to, her native New Zealand, a country that is guilty, in spades, of the crimes BDS supporters falsely attribute to Israelis.

Is Lorde a foe of colonial occupation? She should know, then, that in 1831, fewer than 1,000 Europeans were living in New Zealand, foreigners vastly outnumbered by the local Maori tribes. Fifty years later, that number skyrocketed to a half-million, courtesy of British policy that encouraged settlers to sail to distant shores and remain there. Unlike the Jews returning to their homeland around the same time, these colonialists had neither a historical nor a legal claim to the land. . . .

None of that should come as any surprise to Lorde, of course: as a [self-described] “informed young citizen,” she surely understands that when an occupying force illegally and cruelly deprives an indigenous population of its right to self-determination in its historical homeland, nothing but moral catastrophe may ensue. Thankfully, the aboriginal Jews have successfully and miraculously managed to return to their native land, and there established a flowering democracy that, like all democracies, is flawed. The Maori in New Zealand weren’t so lucky. If Lorde truly wants to stand with the oppressed, she [should] never go home again.

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.