Last month, the Socialist International (SI)—a large and once highly respected coalition of left-wing parties—issued a declaration calling on its members to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel. Israel’s Labor party, a long-time member, responded by quitting the SI. Elliott Abrams comments:

Once upon a time, the Socialist International was an extraordinary organization. Founded in 1951 as a successor to various prior socialist groups, it was staunchly democratic and anti-Communist, and played an important role during the cold war. Members included such luminaries as Felipe Gonzalez of Spain and Mario Soares of Portugal, and the SI helped them and their socialist parties re-establish their countries as democracies. The SI included people like [West Germany’s socialist and anti-Communist chancellor] Willy Brandt and Golda Meir. Those were the good old days. . . .

The declaration denounces Israel’s actions on the Israel-Gaza border without one single word of comment, much less condemnation, of Hamas. . . . It [also] “reaffirms its commitment…to bringing a complete end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian state that started in 1967.” Now that’s an interesting formulation, because there was no Palestinian state for Israel to occupy in 1967—just territory governed by Jordan and Egypt.

The SI has a long history and will continue in existence, doing good work and bad. But it is sad to see what was once a staunch defender of democracy and human rights collapsing into allowing non-democratic parties to [join] and into using the usual leftist canards. . . .

I note that while Israel’s Labor party is no longer an SI member, guess which party in that region is? Fatah—Yasir Arafat’s old party, now led by Mahmoud Abbas. Fatah, whose leadership has never been chosen democratically and which rules the West Bank without elections, free speech, or freedom of the press.

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.