At the University of Maryland last week, the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), ever eager to blame Israel for anything and everything, held an event titled “Corona and Countering the Occupation.” To her surprise, Naomi Grant found that the speaker’s various perversions of the truth didn’t include libelous accusations that Israel has been deliberately spreading coronavirus among Palestinians. Indeed, the speaker was forced to admit that Israeli-Palestinian cooperation has helped curb the disease’s spread. The most telling moment came when the audience began to ask questions:

The first student to raise his hand asked the obvious question: “What can we do to help?” She struggled to answer, then finally suggested, “I don’t know, maybe donate medical supplies?”

The response is emblematic of SJP and other groups affiliated with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement—they have no plausible solutions to assist the people they profess to care about. They’re clueless when it comes to understanding the needs of the Palestinians, and don’t support initiatives that could help them.

Putting aside the fact that the average undergraduate doesn’t have respirators, tracheotomy equipment, or even basic supplies lying around, or the financial wherewithal to purchase them, both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) have a history of obstructing the flow of health aid and medical supplies into the territories that they govern. In May 2018, Hamas denied entry into Gaza to two truckloads of Israeli medical equipment. In June 2017, hospitals in Gaza were short of essential medicines by one-third, and over 270 pieces of medical equipment were needed in operating rooms, because the PA had refused to send medical supplies for three months.

If SJP wanted to improve Palestinians’ quality of life, they’d galvanize opposition to the brutal and corrupt Hamas and PA, and demand that these governments provide necessities like medical supplies to their citizens—and that militants stop hiding weapons in schools and hospitals. But SJP doesn’t actually care about justice for Palestinians; its prime goal is to promote the demonization of Israel, all while uplifting virulently anti-Israel students on campus as paragons of virtue and the voice of the oppressed.

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.