A number of years ago, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) began an investigation into the massive funds that foreign countries have been channeling, undisclosed, into American universities. After discovering a vast Chinese network that not only sought to influence scholars, students, and institutions but that also undertook the “surveillance of Chinese students” and the “undisclosed recruitment of American academics for Chinese programs, and espionage,” NAS turned to Saudi and Qatari investments into Middle Eastern studies programs and “the mysteriously funded anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.” Peter Wood, the president of NAS, writes:

In trying to figure out how much money was flowing to the universities through [China’s campus] institutes, we turned to the Department of Education, which we knew was supposed to track such information. We quickly found that it had done nothing of the kind. And that set us on the path to encourage the reinvigoration of [the] enforcement of the law, ideally improving it by requiring [the] disclosure of gifts smaller than the $250,000-per -year threshold specified by Congress. We figured that this threshold could easily be gamed by parties making multiple gifts of smaller amounts, so we proposed a lower one of $50,000. After all, it doesn’t take a lot of money to buy the complicity of the average college administrator.

The question of who funds American colleges and universities ought not to be hidden in darkness when substantial amounts of that funding come from the nation’s rivals and adversaries. At a minimum, Americans should demand transparency from these institutions that are so favored by our laws, and so generously funded by our people.

Georgetown and Harvard, for example, each received gifts of $20 million from Saudi Arabia’s Prince al-Waleed bin Talal in 2005. Why? No one knows for sure. [The journalist] Stanley Kurtz suggested such funding was linked to a widespread Saudi attempt to influence the country’s portrayal in American K-12 education after 9/11.

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.