In the wake of the Israeli court’s decision overturning the deal to exploit the country’s offshore gas reserves, Ayelet Shaked, the justice minister, has joined the chorus of voices criticizing the ruling. She has since been attacked for her comments on the grounds that it is inappropriate for a sitting cabinet member to express disagreement with the supreme court. Eugene Kontorovich argues that such criticism is not only appropriate but important:

The legitimacy of such criticism can be seen from the very form that judicial decisions take. When courts in countries with Anglo-American legal traditions, [including Israel], decide even routine cases, they issue written opinions. . . .

Why should the court not simply point to the winner? It is because the force of an opinion of the court derives from its logic and reasoning, from how well it follows prior cases and existing law. Opinions are published because the government and public are not supposed to nod meekly and accept the court’s decisions. The requirement to reveal their reasoning presupposes the legitimacy of criticizing decisions based on their rationale, or lack thereof.

All this is even more relevant for the Israel’s supreme court, which has given itself the power to negate the action of elected governments even without any written constitution, based on general principles like “reasonableness.”

In other Western democracies, the independence of the courts is part of a system of checks and balances—where the courts check the political branches and vice versa. Such checks include the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty that keeps courts from overturning certain laws, or the ability of the government to appoint the judges. In Israel, none of these checks is available. Indeed, political criticism is perhaps the only check there is, and it is minor and ineffective.

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.