In 1997, amidst controversies over whether Israel, and the Israeli rabbinate, would recognize non-Orthodox conversions to Judaism, Israeli political and religious figures together with representatives of the major American denominations concluded a complex compromise that, although never made law, has governed policy de facto ever since. A bill recently before the Knesset would upend this compromise by solidifying the control over conversions exercised by the ultra-Orthodox-dominated Israeli chief rabbinate. Responding to outrage from American Jewish leaders, Prime Minister Netanyahu has shelved the bill—which seemed poised to pass—for six months. But, as Haviv Rettig Gur explains, the proposed legislation is a response to a conflict between the chief rabbinate and a group of Israeli Modern Orthodox rabbis—a conflict that is unlikely to go away.

Despairing of what they see as the Israeli chief rabbinate’s overly restrictive demands for converts—including those who are already citizens (thanks to the Law of Return, which confers citizenship on anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent), and so cannot be suspected of seeking to become Jews just to obtain an Israeli passport—a group of Modern Orthodox rabbis . . . has convened its own conversion courts and begun converting individuals in Israel outside the auspices of state institutions.

The state, of course, refused to recognize these “unsupervised” conversions when it came to granting citizenship. The rabbinate, which correctly viewed these conversions as direct challenges to its religious hegemony, refused to recognize them for the purposes of marriage, divorce, or burial. . . .

[Thus] the new conversion bill . . . was not born from the fact that the state doesn’t recognize conversions carried out by the Israeli Reform movement. . . . It was born instead from the fact that the ḥaredi establishment has fought bitterly in the years since [1997]. . . to push out of the official state bodies the very Modern Orthodox who once . . . saw themselves as part of a single unified “Orthodox” side to the controversy. . . . But the social and political context has changed. As ultra-Orthodox control of the rabbinate grows more pronounced, . . . the status quo has already been pulled to the breaking point from both ends. . . .

[T]her are many Israeli officials who support the bill for reasons that have nothing to do with ḥaredi culture wars or Reform views on halakhah. . . . While Reform, Conservative, and ḥaredi leaders seem to think the bill is about them, about the battle for religious liberty or against heresy (respectively), many Israeli officials back the bill for a simpler reason: any process that confers automatic citizenship on a person, they feel, should be carried out under the auspices of the state.

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.