In the past two weeks, the Israeli government has seemed to increasing numbers of citizens to be unequal to the task of handling the public-health and economic dangers stemming from the coronavirus. A widely criticized plan to hand out government subsidies willy-nilly, then a hasty order—just as hastily reversed—to close restaurants, and then the public defection of a previously loyal member of the prime minister’s Likud party have all contributed to this impression. David Horovitz explains this crisis of confidence, and how it might be reversed:

Israelis are capable and perceptive. We saw with the arrival of COVID-19 that the government—particularly Prime Minister Netanyahu—recognized the danger of the pandemic, and was keenly focused on thwarting it. Policy wasn’t perfect—the airport wasn’t properly sealed to arrivals from virus epicenters; communication with the ultra-Orthodox community was poor. But, overall, decision-making was effective, and therefore the public did what it was asked to do.

Not so now. The incompetence is plain for all to see. Ministers and coalition members are openly bickering, with a low point earlier this week when the finance minister (Israel Katz) and the coalition chairman (Miki Zohar), both Likud members, began leveling personal insults at each other during a committee meeting. Medical professionals have been resigning from key operational and advisory positions, complaining that they are not being heeded.

[The government] must make a concerted effort to explain its decisions to the public. And if it doesn’t have the necessary information, it should recognize that this points to deeper problems in the handling of the pandemic—problems that the newly appointed coronavirus coordinator will hopefully address right away. The government needs to be sure that it knows what it’s doing. Right now, the public, understandably, doubts that this is the case.

Israel is currently led by a self-styled emergency coalition, established with the specific imperative to battle COVID-19. But the government cannot rule by fiat—even amid a pandemic. Or rather, least of all amid a pandemic, when public trust, and consequent public willingness to cooperate, are vital to protect the nation’s economy, its health, and its resilience.

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.