In a ruling issued last week, the Texas federal judge Robert Pitman declared a law forbidding the state to contract with businesses that boycott Israel in violation of the First Amendment. David Bernstein, calling the judge’s opinion “a mess,” exposes some of the key flaws in its legal reasoning:

First, the opinion misstates the holding of [the 1982 Supreme Court case] NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware as “recognizing that the First Amendment protects political boycott.” [But] the case actually holds that there is a First Amendment right to advocate economic boycotts, not to engage in them. If there were a First Amendment right to boycott for political reasons, then anyone politically opposed to racial integration, gay rights, and so on would have a First Amendment right to “boycott” minority groups protected by civil-rights laws. That’s in fact the implication of Judge Pitman’s opinion, and it’s hard to believe he means it. It’s even harder to believe the Supreme Court would endorse his opinion given this implication.

Second, [in the 2005 case of] Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, the Supreme Court held that law schools had no First Amendment right to boycott military recruiters in the face of a federal statute barring recipients of federal funds from discriminating against those recruiters. Pitman’s attempt to [show that this ruling does not apply to the case at hand] comes down to the fact that the Court never used the word boycott in its opinion. . . .

[But] what the law-school plaintiffs were doing was clearly within the definition of the word boycott; and the plaintiffs, in their own Supreme Court brief, themselves described what they were doing as a boycott.

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.