The Joint List—an alliance of Arab political parties—emerged from the most recent Israeli election as the third-largest party in the Knesset. Thus Benny Gantz, the leader of the Blue and White party now tasked with trying to form a governing coalition, must consider if he should court the Joint List’s support. To Ben-Dror Yemini, the positions taken by group’s parliamentarians, who have vocally supported terrorism and remain committed anti-Zionists, should disqualify them as political allies:

Two surveys conducted this year both show that a clear majority of the Arab public supports some form of participation in an Israeli coalition government. The problem remains the colossal gap between the will of the Arab public and the will of its leadership.

Almost every possible scenario for a future government is met by pundits saying—and rightly so—that the chances of it being formed are slim. But . . . out of all the options, a minority government supported from outside by members of the Joint List, even if not all of them, is not the least likely.

To prevent the worst possible scenario from becoming a reality—a third round of elections in less than a year—Blue and White must sacrifice one of its two core principles in order to form a coalition: either team up with Netanyahu despite the party’s “anyone but Netanyahu” policy, or partner with the Joint List, despite promising it wouldn’t do so.

Blue and White acts under the banner of bringing back sanity into politics and reducing polarization in society, but establishing a government with the support of provocative lawmakers like the Joint List’s Ofer Cassif, [the sole Jewish member among them, who has accused Israel of “genocide”], would only make things worse and Israel would become even more polarized. . . . A coalition partnership with Arab factions can wait.

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.