Israeli law has long enshrined Shabbat as a national day of rest, restricting commercial activity, public transportation, and the like on the holy day. Now the Knesset is considering a bill—sponsored by Aryeh Deri, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party—that will tighten some of these laws. Shuki Friedman argues against the legislation, popularly known as the “supermarket bill,” even though he does not see it as having a significant effect on religious freedom.

Interior Minister Aryeh Deri’s “supermarket bill” is a bluff. Considering the fact that hundreds of thousands of Jews work on Shabbat—many of them illegally—even if the law passes, it won’t make any difference. It will just be another law that won’t be enforced, and commerce and financial activity on Shabbat will keep blooming.

If Deri and the ultra-Orthodox Knesset members really wanted to change this situation, they would finally sit down with the rest of the coalition members, and with opposition members too, and reach a historic compromise with moral validity, . . . which would regularize Shabbat’s nature in the state of Israel. Aggressive coercion [in the form] of another hopeless law will achieve the exact opposite. . . .

The legal status quo with regard to the Sabbath has been maintained for many years. . . . In recent years, however, there has been an ongoing growth in the volume of commercial activity on Shabbat. More supermarkets, shopping malls, and stores have been opening on Shabbat. . . . The result is that for many Jewish workers—about 400,000—Shabbat in Israel is not a day of rest. . . .

The nonenforcement of Shabbat laws is ridiculous both on the national level and on the local level. In 2016, for example, the Labor and Welfare Ministry issued only eleven fines for illegal work on Shabbat. The enforcement isn’t any more significant on the local level, and most authorities simply don’t want to enforce their Shabbat bylaws. Even Deri . . . didn’t lift a finger to increase enforcement when he was authorized to do so when serving as minister of economy. So even if the “supermarkets bill” is passed into law, authorities that decide not to enforce the law will allow the situation to remain as it is today.

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.