Although last month’s Israeli elections appeared to be a victory for Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud, the subsequent phase, in which he must build a governing coalition, is still under way. If Netanyahu fails to form a coalition by May 28, President Reuven Rivlin will either ask the leaders of another party to do so or call for new elections. The Israeli press yesterday cited claims that Likud was close to finalizing a coalition deal with Yisrael Beytenu, but nothing is yet certain, as Shmuel Rosner writes:

On election night, the right wing was victorious and seemed ready to seal a deal. But with time, it became clear that its victory was simultaneously too decisive and not decisive enough. It was too decisive in the sense that all of the parties involved got cocky, basked in their glorious victory, and, possibly, lost touch with reality. It was not decisive in the sense that, while a majority of votes went to right-wing parties, the right’s advantage is much narrower in terms of Knesset seats. That’s because many right-wingers voted for parties that ended up below the electoral threshold of 3.25 percent, [and that thus have no representation in the Knesset]. . . .

Netanyahu must include [every right-leaning party] in order to surpass 60 votes [in the 120-member Knesset]. So he must find a way to satisfy Yisrael Beytenu’s leader Avigdor Liberman and the Shas party’s Aryeh Deri, [whose respective agendas are directly opposed].

Theoretically, Liberman remains on the sidelines while letting the prime minister form a 60-member coalition. This means less political chaos, but for Netanyahu—who is under indictment for corruption charges—it also means a hoard of legislative defeats.

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.