In the Israeli political system, mid-sized and small parties can wield disproportionate power through their ability to walk out of a governing coalition and thereby topple the prime minister, or simply work their will by threatening to walk out. Previous efforts to reduce the clout of smaller parties have failed or backfired. Although the current system doesn’t create the governmental instability often ascribed to it, extortion by junior coalition partners is a real problem, to which Emmanuel Navon suggests a solution:

Israel’s political system suffers less from instability than from a lack of accountability. Members of Knesset (MKs) are not answerable to voters. In parties (such as Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid or Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu) where candidates are selected by the chairman, MKs are only answerable to their boss. In parties that hold primaries (such as Likud and Labor), MKs are answerable to interest groups and to shady deal-makers who determine the results of primary elections. On election day, voters select a party but not their representatives.

In countries where voters chose their parliamentary representatives via electoral districts, such accountability exists. . . . [But] district elections are not a realistic option in Israel: most MKs oppose them and Israel is probably too complicated geographically, demographically, and politically to design electoral districts.

There is another way, however, to make MKs answerable to their voters: by enabling voters to influence the composition of the list they vote for on election day. Instead of just voting for a party, voters can select the candidates they want to promote on the party’s list before casting their ballot. This system, which exists in some twenty democracies around the world, would partially free candidates from the corruption and byzantine deal-making that characterize Israel’s current primaries. Admittedly, this “open-primaries” system tends to give an advantage to famous candidates, but the Internet and social media offer affordable and effective self-promotion tools.

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.