New Israeli regulations ban a number of organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), from entering the county. According to its mission statement, JVP “opposes anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab bigotry and oppression” and “seeks an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and east Jerusalem.” It also supports the boycott, divest, and sanction movement (BDS), celebrates Palestinian terrorists, and dedicates most of its efforts to libeling the Jewish state. Even worse, writes Andrew Mark Bennett, is the organization’s underlying obsession with the evils it ascribes not only to Israel but to American Jews:

Beyond its anti-Zionism, JVP consistently positions Jews as the cause of society’s ills. . . . The most glaring example of JVP’s obsession with Jewish wrongdoing is its “Deadly Exchange” campaign. According to JVP, Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League sponsor “exchange programs that bring together police, ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], border-patrol, and FBI [agents] from the U.S. with soldiers, police, border agents, etc. from Israel.” Through these exchanges, JVP says, “worst practices” are shared “to promote and extend discriminatory and repressive policing in both countries.” . . .

The campaign seeks to hold the Jewish institutions accountable for their alleged complicity in funding and promoting this “state violence.” [It is] an anti-Semitic libel designed to paint Jews with blood by . . . “exposing” the role of American Jewish organizations in U.S.-Israel exchanges as a shadowy Jewish conspiracy . . . to subvert race relations and to erode democracy and human rights. . . . In fact, there is no evidence whatsoever to substantiate suspicions that these exchanges are in fact pernicious, let alone unusual or especially deadly. . . .

JVP has [also] long considered Zionism to be a form of white supremacy. That absurd [slander] became more prominent over the last year with the rise of the “alt-right.” As white supremacists maliciously drew spurious comparisons between Zionism and their own desire for a white ethno-state, JVP latched on to them as if they were legitimate. . . . .

[In short], it’s hard not to arrive at the conclusion that JVP is anti-Semitic. As such, it does not merit . . . [a] defense when it is excluded from Jewish communities and the Jewish state.

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.