Founded in 2011 as a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobbying group that could provide a counterweight to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), J Street has recently taken to attacking Birthright—the nonpartisan and nondenominational program that arranges free visits to Israel for young Jews. David M. Weinberg comments:

[Rather than simply] partnering with the mainstream Israeli political left to build support in Washington for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, . . . J Street has become . . . an organization that spends almost all of its time and money besmirching Israel, smearing AIPAC and other leading American Jewish organizations, boosting U.S.-Iran relations, and backing political candidates for whom promoting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement is a badge of honor.

J Street is not happy with Birthright because it, and many other trips that bring some 50,000 students on tours of Israel [every year], . . . “omit Palestinian narratives in their programming and erase Palestinians and the occupation from our collective consciousness.” I’m quoting here verbatim from J Street campus propaganda. . . . “These trips therefore perpetuate the attitudes and politics that help make demolitions [of the houses of terrorists] and occupation possible.” They might, God forbid, lead “our communities to feel no compulsion to speak out on behalf of Palestinian rights.”

J Street claims it wants to reform Birthright, but it hasn’t approached Birthright with thoughtful, constructive educational ideas; it’s just sought to sabotage the program. Dozens of campus professionals in the field tell me that activists from [the organization’s campus branch], J Street U, work assiduously to undermine Birthright recruitment drives. They make life hell for potential participants.

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.