This week, the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the government’s decision to expel Omar Shakir, an American citizen employed by the anti-Israel group Human Rights Watch, and an advocate of the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction the Jewish state (BDS). The verdict has of course been condemned as undemocratic, an assault on free speech, and the like. But these condemnations are nonsensical, writes Ben-Dror Yemini:

Canada banned former British parliamentarian and vehement Israel-hater George Galloway; France banned Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, [a prominent Islamist and jihadist thinker]; Britain banned the American anti-gay protester Fred Phelps and his daughter . . . from entering the country, as well as Michael Savage, a far-right conservative radio host; the U.S. denied entry to the Filipina human rights activist Liza Maza who intended to attend a conference on American activity in her country; and recently, both the U.S. and Britain banned the entrance of Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the BDS movement.

It’s safe to assume that anti-Israeli elements will resume their usual drivel about damage to free speech, which is curious given that Shakir himself is an advocate of harming free speech. In 2015, Shakir signed a petition calling for a boycott of Muslims who dared accept the invitation of the Hartman Institute (a Jerusalem-based center for pluralistic Jewish thought and education) for an educational tour of Israel.

Every country has the right to deny entry to agitators, and there’s no country in the world that would allow a person who denies its right to exist enter its borders. This is true of Israel as well.

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.