A bill currently before the lower house of the Irish parliament would make it a crime to import or sell items produced by Israeli businesses in territory acquired by Israel in the Six-Day War. Such legislation, unprecedented for any Western country, might have very real consequences. But, writes Eli Lake, those consequences could harm Ireland more than they harm Israel:

Because of Ireland’s low corporate tax rates, many of the world’s largest companies keep their wealth there. U.S. companies accounted for 67 percent of all foreign direct investment in the country in 2017, and Ireland is especially popular with America’s tech giants. Apple is Ireland’s largest company. Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are also in the top ten.

Which brings us back to Israel. A big reason why Israel’s economy has boomed [in the past two decades] is because America’s tech giants have set up branch offices and bought promising Israeli tech startups. The Irish legislation, if it becomes law, would force Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook to choose between their Irish tax haven and their business in the Jewish state.

While the proposed law only targets the West Bank territories, not all of Israel, in practice it would be difficult to enforce that distinction. . . . It would probably violate the proposed law if Apple allowed an Israeli employee living in the West Bank to telecommute. The distinction becomes even thornier given that Ireland considers all of eastern Jerusalem to be “occupied territory.”

This would place U.S. companies in a bind. If they follow Irish law, they would either have to fire the telecommuting employee or have to forbid the employee from working from home. If they did that, however, the companies would be participating in a boycott not sanctioned by the U.S. government. And that . . . would in turn risk violating the anti-boycott sections of U.S. export regulations.

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.