Calling her “the most charismatic, formidable, and ambitious female political leader to have emerged in Israel (or anywhere else, for that matter) for a long time,” Daniel Johnson examines the Israeli justice minister’s rapid rise to prominence and her ideas for strengthening Israel’s institutions:

In just over a year, [Shaked] has dominated the headlines on several different issues. Most controversially, she has challenged the supreme court, accusing it of usurping the powers of executive and legislature. The court, a bastion of the Israeli liberal establishment, has reined in successive governments of the right. But when the court recently blocked [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s plan to push through the Leviathan offshore gas project—on which the prime minister has staked his reputation—it fell to Shaked to respond. In her view, the court, influenced by the doctrines of its former chief justice Aharon Barak, has cultivated not judicial independence but judicial activism, and she insists that Israel’s constitutional balance now needs to be redressed. . . .

Shaked has provoked the international community, too. She wants to force NGOs that receive most of their funds from “foreign government entities” to be identified as such. . . . She also wants to reintroduce a law defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, opposition to which brought down the last coalition. Most controversially, she wants Israel to abandon the two-state solution, annex the borderlands of the West Bank (“Area C”), which are home to 400,000 Jewish settlers, and offer Israeli citizenship to the 90,000 Palestinians there. Eventually, she envisages a confederation between the remaining Palestinian territories and Jordan. Both Jews and Palestinians would finally obtain security, prosperity, and peace.

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.