Walking through the streets of London recently, Howard Jacobson unexpectedly heard a shout of “Free Palestine!” and realized that it had come from a “middle-aged, somewhat theatrical looking Jewish woman wearing . . . a PLO scarf,” and was directed at him. Jacobson—who soon thereafter learned that the woman was the founder of an anti-Israel Facebook page—reflects on the experience:

I was alerted to a social-media posting from a certain E.G.—I’m going to confine her to her initials—in which she described seeing me outside the Soho Theater and, having recognized me as someone “who often speaks out against justice for Palestinians”—“Justice for everyone except Palestinians!” I am frequently heard to cry as I walk through Soho—decided there and then to mount, in her own words, a “small act of resistance.” . . .

Ask her why . . . she feels confident in asserting that I often speak out against justice for Palestinians—when I never have—and we quickly run into the rigid dualism of the activist, where whatever isn’t wholly good in their eyes must be wholly evil. . . . This assumption of heartlessness whenever Israel is defended or Zionism embraced bedevils relations between the factions contesting the rights and wrongs of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To speak up even lukewarmly for Israel outside a Jew-friendly environment is to invite obloquy. To declare oneself a Zionist of any kind is to present an incontestable thumbprint of exceptionalism and cruelty. . . .

Thus, the Jew remains forever trapped in being a Jew. Simply to invoke anti-Semitism is to prove his own bad faith. The more he struggles in the birdlime, the faster stuck he becomes. . . .

If the truth be told, all of the handwringing and demonizing by generations of pro-Palestinian activists has ameliorated the plight of Palestinians not one bit. By promising nothing short of total victory provided “the Palestinians” stay obdurate and concede nothing to the racist Zionist entity, they have consigned those they claim to care about to a perpetuity of sullen and fruitless resistance. We can say the same of [this] tiny act of defiance.

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.