Last week, the South African foreign minister announced that her country’s ambassador to the Jewish state, recalled last year over Israeli efforts to contain riots in Gaza, would not be returning, and that a liaison office in Tel Aviv with “no political mandate [and] no trade mandate” would serve in lieu of an embassy. Such a move demonstrates the extent to which the preferences of the boycott, divest, and sanction movement (BDS) have become policy in Pretoria. Ben Cohen explains how this came to be:

The conventional, and largely correct, answer as to why [South Africa is so hostile to Israel] goes back to the struggle in the late 20th century against apartheid. . . . Like most of the regional struggles of that era, the African National Congress’s battle against apartheid was incorporated into the wider cold war in Africa, with the Soviet Union presenting itself as the most stalwart friend of the anti-apartheid cause. With the USSR came its allies, especially the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); by the 1970s, the supposed correspondence between “apartheid” and “Zionism” . . . was firmly established in the PLO’s propaganda arsenal.

Yet it isn’t nostalgia alone that propels current South African loathing of Israel. Enmity toward the Jewish state is a pillar of the country’s foreign policy, but it isn’t the only one. Others include an unwavering solidarity with dictators. South Africa was famously an enabler of the totalitarian nightmare imposed by Robert Mugabe on neighboring Zimbabwe; that principle has survived in the [current] government’s vocal backing for the illegitimate regime of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. In supporting Maduro, South Africa finds itself in the company of Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, and all those other notorious human-rights abusers who scream about national sovereignty [only when] their own offenses are called out. . . .

[Moreover] in South Africa’s progressive circles, denying your poorer compatriots economic and educational opportunities is a blessed act when it is presented as part of the war against “Zionism.” Hence the corporate fight over the last two months concerning the proposed takeover of Clover—South Africa’s biggest dairy company—by an Israeli-led consortium. Were the bid to receive approval, thousands of jobs would be created in South Africa—where a full 28 percent of the workforce is unemployed—as well as in neighboring countries that are part of Clover’s regional distribution network. But that is less important to South Africa’s BDS lobby than an ideological victory over “Zionism,” and so the talks, and thus the jobs, are on hold.

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.