Last week the French National Assembly—the lower house of the country’s legislature—voted to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, which includes the more extreme forms of Israel-hatred. (Contrary to the claims of its detractors, it expressly does not label criticism of Israel anti-Semitic.) Ben-Dror Yemini argues that, although the resolution has no legally binding consequences, it is a victory for the Jewish state and its supporters:

Even if it’s essentially only a symbolic move, [the vote] has great significance [with regard to a grave] problem: the funding that the European Union and countries such as Germany and France give to organizations that support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions [BDS] movement. This decision in France will empower those who oppose such funding.

This racist and anti-Zionist campaign is a problem for Europe and France because it is led by the red-green coalition of the Islamists and the radical left. This coalition, which has a stranglehold grip on academic and media circles, is among the main causes of Islamic radicalism, which ultimately harms the Europeans themselves.

When Israel is presented as a monster, as an apartheid state, as a perpetrator of genocide, there are Muslims who believe these lies. They vent their rage in France and blame the French authorities for cooperating with what they believe is a monster. This new definition of anti-Semitism makes it clear that just as the demonization of Jews is anti-Semitism, so is the demonization of Israel or likening it to the Nazis. This is exactly what the opponents of the resolution do.

The first phase has succeeded in France, but the more important battle is the one for European public opinion and the cessation of funding for entities involved in this campaign of demonization.

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.