Naftali Bennett, head of the Jewish Home Party, recently decided to withdraw his bid for either the defense or foreign ministry in Benjamin Netanyahu’s soon-to-be-formed government, and is instead asking for the post of education minister. The shift, writes Haviv Rettig Gur, signifies a strategic retreat for Bennett, who has worked to expand the appeal of his party beyond its traditional base:

Polling as high as sixteen seats just a couple of months ago, Jewish Home under Bennett seemed headed to unprecedented success, and Bennett talked explicitly about its eventually becoming Israel’s ruling party. Key to this surge, and to Bennett’s influence, was the dramatic change he tried to lead within the party itself, branching out of the narrow confines of the ideological West Bank settler community and the religious-Zionist fold. [In the event, however, the party ended up] with just eight seats in the new Knesset.

Like many sectoral Israeli parties, . . . Jewish Home is not just a political party. For its base, it serves as an expression and symbol of religious and communal identity. While its overarching ideology is anything but sectoral, seeking the “redemption” of the land, nation, and even the spiritual world of the Jews, it has succumbed to the same social segmentation that has come to define Israeli religious and political identity. Religious Zionists refer to themselves as a migzar, a “sector” or “camp” distinct from the mainstream, from secular Israelis, or from the ultra-Orthodox. . . .

Education was a traditional bastion of the religious-Zionist camp, a source of influence from which the idealistic “sector” could bring its religious and political program to larger audiences. . . . Bennett has spent the past two weeks speaking to his own camp to gauge the sentiments of his constituents. What he heard . . . was that it was time for religious Zionism’s ambitious, tech-savvy young leader to return to the party’s traditional priorities: the sacred tasks of education and settlement.

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.