Although many on the Israeli left talk about promoting Jewish-Arab “coexistence” and complain about right-wing “racism,” they have few concrete or practical proposals for ameliorating the real problems facing many of Israel’s Arab citizens. Avi Woolf proposes some ways the right can do something about these problems while remaining faithful to its principles:

[Both] the Zionist and anti-Zionist left are promising minorities the moon, while [the right can] offer something realistic and achievable. . . . This means government investment in education, infrastructure, and whatever else is needed to allow minorities to thrive and prosper as law-abiding citizens. . . .

There are two areas which the right often emphasizes and which would benefit the Arab community in particular. The first is law enforcement. . . . Violent crime of all kinds is far more prevalent in the Arab sector than the Jewish one. . . . Drug gangs are a plague [for Arab communities], as are lethal family feuds and domestic violence. It is not for nothing that Meretz’s Arab candidate ran on an anti-crime platform.

Our failure to deal effectively with these . . . problems sends all the wrong messages. We are effectively telling the average law-abiding non-Jewish citizen that the state will not provide the minimum protection necessary for him to live and prosper, as Israel is only interested in enforcing the laws [insofar as they] affect Jews. . . . If a right-wing government cracked down on all law-breaking in the Arab community, it would demonstrate that its enforcement of law is for [the community’s] benefit and not just for protecting the state or Jewish predominance. . . .

The second important thing [the right] can offer to minorities is expansion of the free market. Poll after poll has shown that Israeli minorities are far more concerned with economic issues this election than political or national ones. . . . It’s hard enough for Jews to legally set up and maintain a business in Israel, so you can imagine the extra difficulty an Arab or a Druze faces.

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.