On Monday afternoon, Benny Gantz and Benjamin Netanyahu—the leaders of Israel’s two major political parties—seemed poised to finalize a coalition agreement that would end the yearlong political stalemate. By the evening, talks broke down after Likud negotiators backtracked from a compromise over judicial appointments, and Gantz ordered his representatives to leave the table. Haviv Rettig Gur explains that Netanyahu, the incumbent prime minister, has found himself on the horns of a dilemma: he can’t form a government without compromising with Gantz, but he risks burning his bridges with his right-wing allies, foremost among them the Yamina party:

Netanyahu discovered that his loyal base isn’t loyal to him personally, but to the ideas and policies long advocated by the ideological right, especially when it comes to reforming the judiciary and legal system.

Everything now depends on Netanyahu’s priorities and the political timetable that guides his actions. If he seeks an emergency government to help stabilize the country during the pandemic, Gantz offers him a stable path out of the political impasse. Gantz’s nineteen seats mean that Netanyahu can ignore Yamina’s threats of heading to the opposition. With the exception of those issues where Gantz obtained explicit commitments in the coalition talks, Netanyahu will probably be more secure and powerful in a unity government than in a narrow right-wing one.

If, however, his eye is focused on the next election, whether it comes before October 2021 [when Gantz is slotted to take over as prime minister], or at the end of Gantz’s term in April 2023, then he will prioritize preserving his alliance with Yamina and shoring up the fragile loyalty of his angry base.

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.