As Israel heads to its third election in a year’s time, its incumbent prime minister finds himself about to be indicted on three separate charges—an unprecedented situation in every way. Many of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s opponents are hoping that these legal troubles will lead directly to his removal from office, perhaps by the Supreme Court’s ruling that he must step down while under indictment. Although he would be happy to see Netanyahu replaced, Yedidia Stern argues that such an outcome would be a greater affront to the democratic process than any of the prime minister’s alleged wrongdoings:

[B]oth the moral and the practical questions [raised by the accusations against Netanyahu] are matters to be decided by each of us when we go to the polls in March. The immediate dilemma is whether the legal system (the attorney general and then the High Court of Justice) should leave it to the voters to weigh the matter as they see fit, or perhaps should cast a veto and make a categorical decision on the matter here and now.

It is hard to imagine a more political issue than defining who will be the prime minister and the degree of his suitability for the job, under the current circumstances. A decision by an activist judicial system, which would be perceived as flying in the face of the standard democratic elections, would infringe on the voters’ right to elect [their leader].

Israel has reached a dangerous and tragic juncture. Over the last generation, as a country and as a society, we have been foisting the responsibility of making the most fateful and substantive decisions about our national life onto the judicial system. This is a very heavy albatross to hang around the judges’ necks. . . . This is how, sadly, the Israeli legal system has come to embody the dubious blessing that the book of Genesis (16:12) bestows on Ishmael: “his hand is raised against every man, and every man’s hand is raised against him.”

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.