In September, the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)—the most prominent academic organization in the field—gave an annual book prize to The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, published by Duke University Press. The book, written by Jasbir Puar, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, is a collection of scurrilous, perverse, and sometimes absurd accusations of Israeli evildoing. To Cary Nelson, the decision sounds the death knell for the entire field:

In the 1970s and 1980s the emerging field of women’s studies embodied hopes and goals for transforming humanities disciplines. . . . Of course, . . . faculty members and popular writers sometimes went to ludicrous extremes in contesting “patriarchy,” but academic training and the desire for academic respectability eventually moderated these impulses for many, [although the field] never settled its internal conflict between political and academic impulses. . . .

Now it is clear that politics has won; the NWSA’s political mission will not be qualified by objective standards. The organization is committed to criminalizing and delegitimating the state of Israel. In 2015 it passed the most far-reaching anti-Israel resolution of any major professional association, going well beyond an academic boycott to isolate, and condemn, and do as much economic and cultural damage to Israel as possible. With that, NWSA became officially intolerant of all alternative political opinions. . . .

The NWSA has now crossed a further line in self-discreditation by honoring Jasbir Puar’s December 2017 book. . . . Most anti-Israel [academic] publications focus on debatable propositions. Not Puar’s. You can debate the claim that Israel discriminates against its Arab citizens, but so long as there is evidence of racism among some Israelis you cannot wholly discredit the accusation. Puar, however, makes arguments that can be proved factually right or wrong. They are consistently false. . . .

Why does NWSA’s endorsement and its embrace of faux scholarship matter? Because NWSA members are encouraged to write and teach with a fiercely anti-Zionist bias and train their students to think and write that way. Several other humanities groups, most notably the American Studies Association, have launched themselves down the same rabbit hole.

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.