A recent gathering in London of neo-Nazis and other anti-Semites received some attention in the British press. Despite the event’s ugly rhetoric, including calls for a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, Douglas Murray points to a different group as the primary cause for concern:

[The neo-Nazis are] not the only people calling for boycotts. An anti-Israel boycott is part of Green-party policy. . . .

Natalie Bennett, the Green party’s Australian-born leader, has . . . told the Jewish Chronicle that she not only supports an economic boycott of Israel but a cultural boycott, too. This presumably means that Bennett believes British citizens should not listen, for instance, to a performance by a Jewish pianist who has been born in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. Or visit an exhibition by a painter from Israel or receive medical assistance from a Jewish surgeon who has migrated (isn’t the Green party in favor of open borders?) to the historic homeland of the Jewish people 70 years after the creation of the state of Israel.

I suppose that for the time being Bennett would still allow us to hear a Jewish pianist so long as the said pianist had not asserted their right to go to live in the world’s one and only Jewish state. But it is striking that the only type of migrant Bennett thinks we should boycott and disdain are Jewish migrants. . . .

A lot of people will be thinking of voting Green next month. Many of them will be fed up with the other parties or have no idea what the Green party stands for. As I say—a few discredited old Nazis are no problem whatsoever beside these people.

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.