One of the factors that pushed the erstwhile Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz into coalition talks with his rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, was his realization that some members of his own party would defect if he were to form a coalition with the alliance of Arab parties known as the Joint List. Thus, despite having won fifteen Knesset seats in the most recent election—thanks to high voter turnout and its effective consolidation into a single bloc—the Joint List has thus missed an opportunity for an unprecedented role in the government. And the fault is solely its own, writes Jonathan Tobin:

The Joint List is a coalition of advocates for a Communist state, an Islamist state, a Palestinian nationalist state and a pan-Arab state, and has no place in any government of a state that they wish to destroy.

If Israeli Arabs want to be fully integrated into Israeli society and have their voices not merely heard but heeded, then they need to have political representatives that advocate for that cause. Instead, they have chosen people whose goal isn’t an Israel that is a better place for its Arab minority; instead, they have representatives that want to deny the Jewish majority their right to self-determination in a Jewish state.

Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza have settled for being led by groups like Fatah and Hamas, who are only interested in keeping them at war with Zionism, rather than in creating an independent Palestinian state. The same can be said for Israeli Arabs who vote for confrontation with Zionism by electing the Joint Arab List as opposed to a party that would be dedicated to their well-being and interests. Unfortunately, there is no such party competing for Arab votes.

Seen in that light, the failure of the Joint Arab List is not in their being denied a place in Israel’s government, as critics claim. It’s that it has become the greatest obstacle to mutual coexistence for Jews and Arabs. That isn’t evidence of Israeli racism, but it is a tragedy.

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.