In response to recent demonstrations and unrest, the California state senate is poised to pass a bill that would require all students at public high schools to take a mandatory ethnic-studies class. One might think such a curriculum would pay attention, for instance, to the contributions of blacks, Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Jews to the state’s history. But, in keeping with recent trends, Jews somehow don’t count as an ethnic minority. More disturbingly, write the editors of the Wall Street Journal, at the heart of the curriculum isn’t literature or history, but radical indoctrination:

The model curriculum now on the education department’s website says the course should “build new possibilities for post-imperial life that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance.” Yes, this is a course for K-12 students. It suggests teachers provide “examples of systems of power, which can include economic systems like capitalism and social systems like patriarchy.” . . . The state guidance includes more than 200 pages of approved course outlines. Some of these seem to mandate student political activities, potentially raising First Amendment concerns.

It’s not a coincidence that many radical left movements are infused with anti-Semitism. They posit theories of control by shadowy capitalist groups that often echo anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. One course outline tips its hat at this. “Students will write a paper detailing certain events in American history,” it says, “that have led to Jewish and Irish Americans gaining racial privilege.”

Meanwhile, a secular Baltimore private school founded by Jews a century ago has expressed a willingness to cave to the curricular demands, bearing more than a whiff of anti-Semitism, of a local activist group affiliated with Black Lives Matter.

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.