Andrew Pessin, a professor of philosophy, and Doron Ben-Atar, a professor of American Studies, don’t share a discipline or research interests, but they share the experience of being Jewish faculty members targeted and harassed by anti-Zionists at their respective universities. Together, they have edited a volume of essays titled Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech, and BDS. In his review, Jarrod Tanny comments on one of the themes that emerge from the book: the highly porous line between hatred for the Jewish state and hatred for Jews.

Much as 19th-century anti-Semites saw the Jews as the chief perpetrators and beneficiaries of the widespread misery unleashed by political modernization and industrialization, today’s anti-Zionists have centered the Jewish state—a tiny entity that allegedly wields a disproportionate amount of power through its covert machinations—in their cosmology of global oppressions. Social justice and liberation entail the liquidation of Jewish power. . . .

“If the Palestinians stand . . . as symbolic of all the victims of ‘the West’ or ‘imperialism,’” writes [the British scholar of anti-Semitism] David Hirsh, “then Israel is thrust into the center of the world as being symbolic of oppression everywhere.” In this sense, the Palestinian is the universal victim, the 21st-century incarnation of the Marxist’s proletariat whose liberation would lead to the liberation of all. All that stands in the way is the Jewish state and the diasporic communities who advocate for its existence. Social justice and freedom will come only when Jewish self-determination is undone and Israel is forced to vanish into history.

But it is primarily the Jews of the diaspora, not Israel, who are paying the price for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement because its goal, write Pessin and Ben-Atar, is “to change the conversation about Israel and Zionism” in America, not to help the Palestinians. In fact, they go on, “they have changed the conversation quite significantly. It is now permissible to say things about Israelis and Jews . . . that not long ago were impermissible.”

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.