Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s announcement last November that the U.S. would no longer consider it illegal for Israelis to reside in the West Bank brought widespread condemnation—some of it from mainstream Jewish leaders and organizations. To Asaf Romirowsky, these critics misunderstand not only the historical and legal issues at play but also the underlying causes of the Israel-Palestinian conflict:

The president of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, said the U.S. government’s new position on Israeli settlements will undercut the fight against the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS) , . . . specifically on college campuses.

It is not clear when Rabbi Jacobs was last on a college campus, but the debate in North American universities is not about the so-called “occupation” but about whether Israel has a right to exist, period. Pro-BDS groups, including “Jewish” ones, are talking about the illegitimacy of the 1949 armistice lines, not those of 1967. Moreover, a recent survey . . . shows that most students who care strongly about the “Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories” do not have knowledge of even basic facts on the subject.

Far more than American policy, it is the language of “occupation” that plays a key role in [the accepted dogma about the] Israel-Palestinian conflict. The main feature of this dogma is the Palestinian claim that their alleged territories are “occupied” by Israel, regardless of where they are located on the map, much less in any legal sense under international law. The mantra of “occupation,” and the demand that Israel be shunned until the “occupation” is ended—meaning the time when Israel is dissolved by the implementation of the Palestinian “right of return”—is the key demand of the Palestinians and the BDS movement.

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.