Two weeks ago, three Arab members of Israel’s legislature visited the families of terrorists killed while carrying out deadly attacks and praised the killers as martyrs. The Knesset’s ethics committee temporarily suspended the three as a result. Now the Knesset is considering constitutional changes to streamline the procedure for such suspensions, prompting cries that Israeli democracy is being fatally undermined. Eylon Aslan-Levy responds:

Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he would sponsor an amendment to the Basic Law . . . enabling the Knesset plenary itself to suspend or even expel members for ethics violations. . . . Far from undermining Israeli democracy, . . . the proposal brings Israel in line with other Western liberal democracies, many of which already have legal mechanisms for a legislature to hold unruly members accountable through suspension or expulsion. . . .

The United States Constitution, for example, empowers each house of Congress to expel any member by a two-thirds vote. . . . The House of Representatives has used [this power] as recently as 2002. . . Crucially, the Israeli proposal is considerably stricter than its American equivalent, since it would require an absolute majority of three-quarters of legislators rather than only two-thirds of those present and voting. . . . In the United Kingdom, the bar [for the suspension of MPs] is even lower. . . .

[Indeed], the inability of the Knesset to suspend membership . . . is the exception, not the norm.

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.