The founders of a local Palestine Solidarity Committee in Washington State are peddling a new curriculum for teaching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to secondary-school students. They have appeared at several teachers’ conferences and claim that their program has been adopted by at least three schools. The teaching materials include a gamut of anti-Israel propaganda, Edward Alexander writes, wrapped in a brazen appropriation of the Holocaust:

The tawdry character of [this] curriculum is inherent in its bizarre title: “The Palestine Teaching Trunk.” Its designers noticed that the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center had packaged materials relating to the Holocaust in one of the trunks used by Jews who were shipped off to the death camps of Europe. But how dare the Jews monopolize all that beautiful Holocaust suffering, which other groups, and none more so than the Palestinian Arabs, would very much like, ex-post-facto, to claim for themselves? And so it came to pass that [the designers of the curriculum] collected their own CDs and sacred relics of the “Palestinian cause” into an online “trunk.”

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.