A recent collection of essays on the so-called BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement explores the twisted ideologies that have led to increased calls from university faculties to isolate Israel. The essays expose the intellectual vacuity of the movement, how easily it slips into overt anti-Semitism, and how hating Israel “has become arguably the single most potent marker of being of the left today.” Andrei Markovits writes:

[T]he New Left . . . shifted the axes of theory and practice from the Old Left’s proletariat as the subject of history and prime agent of salvation to third-world peoples. This also entailed a much more comprehensive reorientation of progressive politics from extolling the Enlightenment, as virtually all major agents of the Old Left did with gusto, to its total dismissal. Indeed, for the New Left, the Enlightenment—and its main global representative, “the West”—mutated into the all-powerful oppressor which had to be confronted on all fronts by new agents of progress and revolution, none more potent than Third World liberation movements of whatever ideological bent. Few, if any, became more beloved for the new progressives than the Palestinians, victims of the Jews, who, a-priori suspect as paragons of the Enlightenment, became doubly evil by virtue of attaining power in a “settler” state and thus becoming Exhibit A of a Western-implemented (neo-)colonialism at the behest of the source of all evil—the Great Satan, as it were—called the United States of America.

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.