Israel’s constitution requires that the premiership go to the head of the party receiving not a plurality but a majority—that is, 61, of the 120 Knesset seats. Since, given the country’s fractious political system, neither Likud nor its primary rival, Zionist Union, can emerge victorious alone or even with one or two medium-sized parties, each would have to form a coalition with various smaller parties, some of which could swing right or left. But, writes Haviv Rettig Gur, there’s also another variable in the equation:

With no candidate winning the 61 recommendations for an outright appointment, the president may decide to force a national-unity government. Can the president do that? Yes, with surprising ease.

It is completely within President [Reuven] Rivlin’s constitutional rights to offer both [Isaac] Herzog and [Benjamin] Netanyahu an ultimatum: agree to a national-unity government, dividing the premiership by rotation, or see your opponent get the first chance at premier. The simple fact that so much of the next Knesset won’t be beholden to either left or right makes this a possibility, since Herzog would likely be able to gather together a coalition with nearly as much ease as Netanyahu.

But would Rivlin force his will onto grudging coalition partners? Netanyahu think so. This was the fear that drove him to oppose Rivlin’s candidacy for president last year.

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.