They aren't doing this to protect israel. They are doing this to destroy academia. Antisemitism is rife within people hired to significant positions within the trump administration. This was never about israel. That's just the cover story.
They are doing this to protect Israel, and protecting Israel has nothing to do with antisemitism. Because Zionism and Judaism are pretty much unrelated!
Israel is strategically advantageous for the US and the rest of the West. Having a Western strong arm in the middle east is the goal geopolitically. Nobody actually cares about Jews or really thinks they're entitled to that land. We just really, really want that land because of course we do.
I don't think the rest of the west besides the USA is all that interested in the strategic value of Israel; I'm not even sure the USA is strategically interested… well, not economically and militarily at least, I think the politicians care about the country for the sake of their own re-election.
If the US only cared about power-projection in that area, Cyprus would also be an easy option (like the UK does with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrotiri_and_Dhekelia), as would Turkey (a NATO member), and these days they could probably have an easy time working with Egypt.
Sure, Israel has a lot of stuff going for it (nukes that won't necessarily be blamed on the USA; MOSAD is infamous; etc.), but counting on them alone is an all-eggs-in-one-basket strategy that comes with risks.
US expends a lot more effort propping Israel up than it gains from Israel's existence. Our politicians often talk about how important it is to have "an ally in the region", but if you look at that proposition closely, it falls apart because the cost of this particular ally is basically making everyone else there into an enemy.
One of the unfortunate lessons of the past year has been that there is no ideological conflict between supporters of "return to home" (I don't recall the precise translation) and antisemites. I myself discovered this fact in the writings of pre-Nazi German nationalists, but did not expect it to become relevant in my lifetime. The track record of extreme support for Israel is as strong in the present administration as the track record of accepting probable or evident you-know-whats, who (and I can dig up evidence if you want to see it, but I don't want to do that - it's in the documents of white nationalists dating to the alt-right era as distinct from older groups) have actually adopted Israel as a model for their own nationalist views in the past decade or two.
