With the election over, what should be the priorities of Israel’s new government? The editors of Mida have three suggestions: rolling back the power of Israel’s judicial tyranny, improving internal security, and fostering economic growth. About the last item, they write:

So the Netanyahu government should put helping the business sector at the top of its agenda for the next few years. The barber, the welder, the music-store owner, and the aluminum plant founder should find it as easy to set up shop and make a go at it as the high-tech start-up guy. Entrepreneurship, risk, production, and trade are what Israel needs right now. Put differently: much less public-sector and government growth, much more business growth. We need to burn through the red tape, break down convoluted licensing barriers, eliminate labor laws that make it increasingly difficult actually to hire workers, and wage war on a bureaucratic system that makes it next to impossible for business owners to register property, build a structure, or get electricity.

It won’t be easy. Many powerful people have an interest in preserving the present system—especially the big businesses that can afford to comply with the burdensome regulation that protects them from competition by smaller upstarts. Another powerful force vested in the current system is the “social justice” lobby, which believes in expanding government investment and employment to close gaps and all sorts of other populist boondoggles.

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.