Israel’s upcoming election will be the first conducted under the requirement that a party must win a minimum of four seats—the previous minimum was 2.4—to gain representation in the Knesset. Among its deleterious consequences, writes Evelyn Gordon, the change will prevent the formation of a moderate Arab party—despite the fact that opinion polls show Israeli Arabs to be overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the current parties, which are mouthpieces for the pro-Palestinian cause and have categorically refused to join any governing coalition:

Israel has an obvious interest in facilitating the growth of new Arab parties that would reflect [most Arab Israelis’] priorities. Arabs’ attitudes toward the state would presumably improve if their representatives could join the cabinet and produce concrete benefits for their community instead of being condemned by their own anti-Israel rhetoric to shout empty slogans eternally from the opposition benches. And Jewish attitudes toward the Arab minority would presumably improve if Arab MKs stopped attacking Israel night and day and instead started working for their constituents’ welfare.

Encouragingly, such parties even exist already, spurred by similar poll findings in 2012. In 2013, none of them got in, but this year, their prospects should have been better. . . . Instead, the higher electoral threshold has made it impossible.

Likewise, the new law has allowed the extreme-right politician Baruch Marzel to improve his chances by allying with Eli Yishai, former head of the Mizraḥi Shas party.

Israel doesn’t benefit from having anti-Arab extremists like [Baruch] Marzel in the Knesset. In contrast, [Eli] Yishai’s party actually serves two important functions. First, it has attracted [Mizraḥi] voters who aren’t ready to abandon identity politics but would rather not support a convicted criminal like Shas leader Aryeh Deri. [Second,] polls currently show Shas losing about four seats, with many of those votes going to Yishai. If Shas pays a real electoral price for reinstating the corrupt Deri, other parties may think twice about tolerating corruption within their own ranks. . . .

[In sum,] the higher threshold has actually empowered Jewish extremists while disempowering Arab moderates—the worst of all possible outcomes.

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.