At Stanford University, the notoriously pro-terrorist groups Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) are currently holding “Palestine Awareness Week,” which features as its keynote speaker the cartoonist Eli Valley. Ari Hoffman, a law student at Stanford, was shocked to see the posters advertising the event, which displayed some of Valley’s illustrations:

For those unfamiliar with Mr. Valley’s work, it ranges from the morally repugnant to the ethically disgusting. Under the fig leaf of criticizing Israel, it depicts Jews and Jewish rituals with the most grotesque of [images]: yellow stars, concentration-camp uniforms, blood libels, and the reliable hooked noses. Like most hate, it’s remarkably lacking in insight. It is crude and disgusting, and its ceaseless recourse to Nazi imagery is matched only by its slavish devotion to the age-old tropes of Jewish caricature. . . .

The notion that organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine see a fellow traveler in this hate merchant raises troubling questions. Elevating Valley’s work has nothing to do with peace in the Middle East, and everything to do with the free-form hatred that gloms onto Jews and the Jewish state alike. . . .

Some will concede much of the above, but will respond that Valley is Jewish, and that this event is co-sponsored by JVP. It must be kosher, right? . . . For those students who fail to see that this event is an abomination that they would never countenance against another group, I despair.

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.