Last month, the UN Human Rights Office issued a list of 112 “business enterprises involved in certain activities relating to settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” a measure intended to support boycotts of Israel. No such measures have been taken against territories elsewhere in the world occupied by foreign powers, note Brenda Shaffer, Svante Cornell, and Jonathan Schanzer—including areas where the legal problems are far more clear-cut:

[T]he list does not include companies operating in Russia’s occupations in five regions in neighboring countries. Nor does it include businesses in Northern Cyprus, Western Sahara, Kashmir, [or] Nagorno-Karabakh, to name just a few. . . . The UN’s selective outrage and discrimination is best exemplified in its blacklist of leading international tourism-services companies, such as Airbnb, booking.com, and TripAdvisor. These same companies offer services in other disputed territories and areas under occupation, but are subject to no UN condemnation for doing so.

Most of Israel’s settlements are on public lands, and the tourism services are offered there for new homes built after Israel’s conquest of the territory. By contrast, in other conflict zones Airbnb, booking.com, and TripAdvisor openly advertise homes and services in houses [vacated by] actual refugees. In fact, these sites advertise specific dwellings that belonged to Azerbaijani refugees driven from their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory under Armenian occupation since the early 1990s.

Armenia has an extensive settlement project in the territories of Azerbaijan that it occupies. However, in contrast to Israel’s control of the West Bank, where the Palestinian population has been able to stay in their homes, Armenia expelled over 700,000 Azerbaijanis when it invaded the territories. This happened in 1992-1994, not generations ago. Armenia’s expulsion of the Azerbaijanis is the largest population expulsion in Europe since the end of World War II, yet it is hardly known in the international system.

In short, the UN Office of Human Rights is not calling attention to actual violations of international law, but is instead using any tool at hand to target the Jewish state.

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.