At gay-pride events in Chicago, Washington, and New York, participants have been asked not to display Stars of David, or have been either expelled or harassed for doing so. Last summer, Blake Flayton, when planning to attend a similar event in Tel Aviv, was advised by an American friend not to advertise that he had been there—lest he be accused of “pinkwashing.” Flayton sees these and other incidents as evidence that the organized gay-rights movement has been hijacked by the anti-Israel cause, rendering it suspicious of Jews as such:

[M]ore and more LGBTQ organizations are openly supporting boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) resolutions. [One such group], on my campus at George Washington University, . . . published a political platform of its own in 2019 that states: “in recognition of the struggles of LGBTQ+ Palestinians living under occupation, of the fact that settler-colonialism will always hurt our LGBTQ+ siblings, and in recognition [that] the pinkwashing done by the Israeli state to justify occupation requires combating by the LGBTQ+ community, we commit ourselves to the cause of anti-settler colonialism. Additionally, we refuse to endorse or work with organizations that stand in support of settler-colonialism states.”

It’s important to note that nowhere in the platform is there any other condemnation of a foreign power or its government’s policy. The only regional conflict recognized is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After I filed a complaint with the university, the platform was amended to remove specific mention of Palestinians and Israel. Regardless, this organization will refrain from partnering with Jewish groups if they have any connection to the Jewish state.

In short, Flayton concludes, Jews are tolerated in these organizations only insofar as they are willing to renounce Israel and Zionism.

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.