In South Africa, student-council presidents praise Hitler and call on their universities to expel Jewish students, while major political parties endorse BDS, cutting diplomatic ties with Israel, and prosecuting South African Jews who have served in the IDF. R. W. Johnson discusses the roots of this shift:

Thabo Mbeki, who became president [of South Africa] in 1999, suffered badly from paranoia and a grandiosity complex. He wanted to be president not just of South Africa but of all Africa and even of the whole Third World. Thus he pumped life and money into the long-defunct Non-Aligned Movement so that he could preside over it. And like so many who have spent their life in the struggle, he wanted the struggle to go on. If Africa’s liberation was now complete, where else should the struggle move? Obviously, to Israel—another mainly white implant in the Third World. . . .

Mbeki [worked to lay] the groundwork for an international anti-Israel campaign closely modeled on the old anti-apartheid model, with mounting pressure for boycotts, disinvestment, and sanctions. The African National Congress was still well connected to the old international anti-apartheid network and was able to use this array of generally left-wing organizations to popularize the new cause. The result has been the mushrooming growth of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

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.