In recent years, a major organizing impetus for anti-Israel activity in Western Europe and the U.S. has come in the form of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS), which, despite its limited economic impact, has done much to generate anti-Jewish sentiment. While Germany is home to an active wing of BDS—which has made inroads with far-left parties and a few years ago seemed poised to go mainstream—the movement faced a sudden reversal when, last year, the Bundestag passed a resolution declaring its “arguments and methods . . . anti-Semitic.” The resolution has few legal ramifications, but much symbolic import. In a history of the BDS movement in Germany, Benjamin Weinthal explains what changed:

The story begins with a 2012 EU initiative to affix special labels to Israeli imports from settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights. After a debate that lasted through 2015, the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel came down in favor of the labels, a decision that placed it on the side of the BDS campaign.

The political environment began to change, however, with a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. Jewish communities across the continent had to contend with violence and verbal abuse. By 2019, the situation in Germany had worsened to the point that Merkel said, “There is to this day not a single synagogue, not a single daycare center for Jewish children, not a single school for Jewish children that does not need to be guarded by German policemen.”

Despite some minority voices, the German perception of BDS as anti-Semitic has resulted in major setbacks for the campaign. In the German view, the BDS campaign singles out the state of Israel for opprobrium and calls for its complete isolation yet does not advocate any comparable pressure on Hamas or the Palestinian Authority for their abusive and authoritarian conduct. Nor does the BDS campaign demand accountability for the regimes in Damascus and Beijing, whose atrocities exceed by orders of magnitude even the gravest offenses committed in the course of the Arab-Israeli conflict. German lawmakers explicitly assess that the application of double standards to the Jewish state is anti-Semitic in nature. In practice, there is little difference between the slogans “Don’t buy from Jews” and “Don’t buy from 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.