In its recently released ranking of press freedom in various countries, Freedom House downgraded the Jewish state from “free” to “partly free.” Why? Because Israel has a successful right-wing daily, Israel Hayom, and efforts last year in the Knesset to ban it failed. Jonathan Tobin writes:

Israel, which has far more active newspapers per capita than most democracies, remains a country where critics of the government and of the country have no trouble being heard on radio and television or finding space in general-circulation publications. Indeed, it is often far more difficult to find those who back Israel’s government or its current prime minister than it is to encounter their opponents in the media. In that respect, the Israeli press tilts even farther to the left than that in the United States.

What possible reason then can there be for downgrading Israel’s ranking? The answer is simple. The group considers “the growing impact of Israel Hayom” to be a problem. According to Freedom House, that newspaper’s “owner-subsidized business model endangered the stability of other media outlets.” . . . In a country that has overwhelming rejected the politics of the left in three consecutive elections, [there are] few media outlets not at odds with the views of the majority of voters. Israel Hayom filled that void and, not unsurprisingly, has been rewarded with a greater readership than those publications that tilt to the left. . . .

One needn’t be a fan of Netanyahu or [Israel Hayom’s owner, Sheldon] Adelson, to understand the insidious nature of [Freedom House’s] argument. To support efforts to suppress a publication that has provided much-needed diversity to the Israeli press is a betrayal of Freedom House’s mandate. To attack Israel . . . in this manner demonstrates that, as with so many other groups that pose as defenders of liberty, freedom in the Jewish state or the right of its people to defend themselves is not something [Freedom House] cares much about.

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.