Vassar College has been distinguishing itself lately by the frequency and ferocity of anti-Israel outbursts on its campus. Most recently, Jasbir Puar, a professor of gender and women’s studies at Rutgers University, appeared there to give a talk on “How Palestine Matters” that was by turns absurd and horrifying. Jonathan Marks writes:

In such a jargon-laden talk, one needs every now and again to jolt one’s audience awake. Complaining of a delay [by Israel] in returning the bodies of some of the Palestinians killed in the course of recent [terror attacks], . . . she reports without comment that some “speculate that the bodies were mined for organs for scientific research.” Because when you merely report unfounded rumors of Israelis harvesting the organs of young people, it’s technically not a blood libel, right? About this disgusting and irresponsible charge, the professors and activists [present] said not a mumbling word. Did I mention that the Jewish Studies program co-sponsored Puar’s appearance?

Puar also renews a charge she has made elsewhere, that the Jews are hogging the privilege of being victims of genocidal violence. “The Jewish Israeli population cannot afford to hand over genocide to another population. They need the Palestinians alive in order to keep the kind of rationalization for their victimhood and their militarized economy.” This is a remarkable move. Evidently realizing that it is hard to sustain the charge of genocide against the Israelis in light of the increasing Palestinian population, Puar adds the failure to commit genocide to the list of Israel’s crimes.

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.