Typical for a small, elite, liberal-arts school, Williams College boasts a great variety of student organizations, including the fiercely pro-terrorist Students for Justice in Palestine and a Society for Conservative Thought. But, for the first time in over a decade, the college council decided to reject a new group’s appeal for official status, as Jonathan Marks writes:

Late last month, the College Council at Williams voted, thirteen to eight, against recognizing a pro-Israel club, Williams Initiative for Israel.

Some of the students who spoke against the club at a council meeting made no bones about their reasons. [The] “club is pro-Israel, which means [it] supports a state that is built on Palestinian land,” said one and made it clear that “believing in the right of Israel to exist” was a red line that no registered student organization should be permitted to cross. Israel is a “fascist state” said another. The “existence of Israel is built on the killing of Palestinians,” said a third.

In short, the open espousal of “pro-Israel” sentiment, even in the limited sense of supporting the existence of Israel, is an affront too great for some students to bear. . . .

As a private institution, Williams College isn’t bound by the First Amendment. But it claims that it’s “committed to being a community in which all ranges of opinion and belief can be expressed and debated, and within which all patterns of behavior permitted by the public law and college regulations can take place.” . . . Colleges and universities cannot declare themselves in favor of freedom of expression and at the same time discriminate among clubs based on the subjective rightness or wrongness of their views.

How much more is this the case with the club rejected by Williams College, which, unlike Students for Justice in Palestine, is not known for shouting down speakers, scorning dialogue, or otherwise setting itself at odds with the missions of most colleges and universities.

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.