While ostensibly focused on environmental issues, the U.S. Green party has adopted the anti-Israel cause as a key plank of its platform. In September, it even petitioned the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel for committing a fictitious list of crimes against Palestinians. Alan Baker comments:

Israel is one of the only states that excels in the very values treasured by the Green movement—innovative ways to protect the environment, reduce pollution, purify wastewater, desalinate seawater, reforest, and protect natural resources. It is [therefore] curious that the U.S. Green party, as a matter of policy, considers itself sufficiently credible and authoritative as to advocate dismantling the state of Israel and replacing it with “one secular, democratic state for Palestinians and Israelis on the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.”

It buys, lock-stock-and-barrel, into the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign aimed at undermining Israel’s very existence, naïvely believing “that BDS can become the most effective nonviolent means for achieving justice and genuine peace between Palestinians and Israelis.” In this manner, it supports the hostile and irresponsible propaganda [of those] seeking the destruction and delegitimation of Israel. . . .

[Meanwhile], Hamas’s deliberate stockpiling and burning of thousands of tires creates mass pollution along the border area with caustic carbon fumes polluting the environment and damaging the health of the Palestinians themselves as well as the residents of Israeli communities in the vicinity of the border. The pumping of polluted sewage from Gaza into the Israeli side of the border is another blatant environmental violation that renders the lives of the residents a living nightmare. The massive piles of garbage that have accumulated in the area after three giant landfills were set up along the border fence have left the Israeli residents of the border area to cope with a putrid and toxic smell being carried by the wind across the border.

None of these actions has earned the condemnation, or even the concern, of the Green party.

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.