According to a 1993 ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court, the attorney general is under no obligation to defend the policies decided upon by the prime minister and cabinet in judicial proceedings. Nor can the government arrange for separate counsel to argue its case. But the court has recently reversed itself, allowing the science minister to represent himself in defending a policy decision of which the current attorney general does not approve. Evelyn Gordon hails this step:

[In 1993] the court . . . asserted that the attorney general’s position is the government’s position, even if the government disagrees. . . . The result of this ruling was that the government effectively lost its right to defend its policies against legal challenges. . . . This has two obviously pernicious consequences. The first is that in any disagreement between the elected government and the unelected attorney general, the latter’s view automatically prevails. Thus, instead of being the government’s lawyer, the attorney general became its ruler.

The second is that the government has been deprived of a fundamental legal right—the right to defend itself in court. Individuals, corporations, and non-governmental organizations are all entitled to defend themselves against legal challenges. Only the elected government is not. . . .

In most democracies, . . . it’s a given that the government is entitled to representation in court; and it’s a given that the attorney general isn’t the government’s master. Like any other lawyer, he’s expected either to represent his client or to resign. . . . [T]he fact that newly appointed justices are starting to rebel against the status quo is a major change. And judicial rebellion is the only remedy currently available because there’s still no parliamentary majority for codifying the necessary reforms via legislation. The legal establishment has been too successful in convincing centrists that a legal system like that of all other democracies would somehow destroy judicial independence and democracy itself.

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.