At a conference of the British Labor party on Tuesday, one item on the agenda was a proposal for a better system for punishing anti-Semitism in the party ranks—of which there has lately been no shortage. The proposal, supported by the party’s leadership, was supposed to receive a rubber-stamp vote; instead it provoked an eruption of anti-Jewish rhetoric, and the vote eventually had to be postponed. Marcus Dysch describes the scene:

[A]ctivist after activist—many of them anti-Zionist Jews—took to the microphone to denounce the Jews behind the plan and Israel in general. . . . Surely now it is beyond doubt who is really running Labor. . . . The mainstream has been blown away and the hard left is now extending its grip on the party’s soul.

[The former London mayor and notorious Israel-hater] Ken Livingstone is back on the airwaves; [the left-wing filmmaker] Ken Loach is on television saying history is there to be “discussed” when asked about those questioning [the historicity of] the Holocaust; and [the hard-left party leader] Jeremy Corbyn sits amid it all, on the dais, watching silently.

The situation was so bad—Israel was compared to the Nazis, and activists argued that Jewish groups should be thrown out of the party—that a number of young Jews stayed away [the next day]. . . .

The depth of the party’s problem with anti-Semitism has been on display for all to see—and it has come with a new level of frightening warnings. “Be careful,” one opponent of the proposed rule changes said from the podium, in what seemed to be a thinly-veiled threat followed swiftly by an anti-Semitic [statement] about collusion with right-wing media. . . . To stand at the door of the conference hall and watch a Jewish anti-Zionist wildly cheered—given a standing ovation in fact—as she screamed from the podium about “despicable” Israel was chilling.

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.