Last fall, on his first day of classes as an undergraduate at Stanford University, Zohar Levy, upon mentioning to a fellow student that she is an Israeli-American, instantly found herself being grilled about the Israel-Palestinian conflict. And that was one of the less unpleasant experiences she’s had:

As a Jewish student at Stanford with a strong commitment to human rights, I often feel excluded from discourse intended to protect minorities. Even on this campus, I have been told by peers and professors that all Jews are privileged, all Jews are rich and cheap, all Jews are white, and all Jews have big noses. The new wave of anti-Judaism includes a new trope: all Jews who support Israel hate Muslims and Arabs. Normalizing these anti-Semitic assumptions has allowed students to express freely aggression and hatred toward Israel and Israelis. If this slander or abhorrent language were directed toward any other nationality, it would never be tolerated. While Stanford students are quick to say they support all communities, commonplace anti-Israel rhetoric on our campus is clear, repeated hypocrisy.

Stanford’s administration, professors, and students have failed to support the Israeli community and students who support Israel. This pervasive, anti-Israel commentary rarely comes with intentions for respectful dialogue. It promotes the misperception that one cannot support both Israel and Palestinian, and that supporting Israel is inherently “anti-Palestinian.”

Denying me, an Israeli citizen, protection from harassment . . . at Stanford is a tremendous oversight on the part of a community that prides itself on diversity, tolerance, and open scholarly discourse. Quite simply, these ignorant and hateful comments have no place on our campus. I ask to be treated with the same humanity in this conversation as you would peers from any other political, religious, ethnic, or racial background.

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.