The leaders of the “Boycott, Divest, Sanction” (BDS) movement claim to be in favor of strictly nonviolent means of marginalizing Israel. Yet they have no qualms about letting vocal supporters of terror, and actual terrorists, speak for them. Jonathan Marks writes:

It is hard to claim that nonviolence is at the center of one’s movement when your foremost spokesperson is Ali Abunimah, whose support for Hamas is well-documented. But no one has been more explicit about the relationship between nonviolent BDS and violence than Leila Khaled. BDS-South Africa is now advertising her “fundraising tour” on its behalf. Khaled, a member of the “Political Bureau” of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), is still living off of the vapors of two hijackings, one successful, she participated in 45 years ago. An old glamor photo of Khaled, machine gun in hand, graces the BDS-South Africa ad. Although Khaled insists she was instructed not to hurt anyone during the hijackings, the PFLP has been committed to violence, including violence against civilians, not only in Khaled’s youth, as in the Lod airport massacre, but also more recently, as in November’s murder of four worshippers and a policeman at a Jerusalem synagogue, dubbed a “heroic operation” by the PFLP. But if you find yourself in South Africa next month, you can have dinner with, as the ad put it, this “wife, mother, hijacker, and Palestinian freedom fighter.”

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.