After anti-Semitic flyers were posted on the University of California, Davis campus last fall, administrators invited the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to lead workshops on anti-Semitism. But the ADL happens to be in the sights of the rabidly anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which sent an angry letter to administrators urging them not to cooperate with the organization. Here SJP follows in the footsteps of a related, and equally vicious organization, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which has been pursuing the ADL for helping U.S. police officers visit Israel. Jonathan Marks explains:

[JVP’s] “Deadly Exchange” campaign cynically seeks to exploit the relative popularity of Black Lives Matter by pinning anti-black discrimination on Israel and American Jewish organizations opposed to the demonization of the Jewish state. JVP specifically targets educational trips to Israel by U.S. law enforcement. . . . Review the logic: U.S. law enforcement, the argument goes, systematically discriminates against black people. To do that, they must travel to Israel, since that is where you go shopping for evil. But to make such shopping trips happen, you need Jewish organizations.

As one promotional video put it, “Who is making this deadly exchange possible? The main groups are actually U.S.-based Jewish organizations” Get it? Scratch American race prejudice and you reveal the Jewish state, working with American Jews who care more about it than they care about their vulnerable fellow citizens. . . .

[A]ccording to UC Davis’s student newspaper, the Aggie, [SJP’s] charges against the ADL were compelling enough to move UC Davis to put its plans on hold. So frightened was UC Davis’s chancellor Gary May by 149 signatures that he denied any involvement in one ADL workshop. . . .

[E]ven when it tries to focus on anti-Semitism, Davis’s administration is blind to it when it comes from the left.

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.