With unemployment skyrocketing and the government contemplating renewed lockdowns in the face of a second wave of the coronavirus, Israeli Treasury officials have been working to craft a fiscal plan to pave the way to economic recovery. But the budget has been stalled by the rivalry between the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his primary coalition partner Benny Gantz, who is scheduled to replace him in November 2021. Haviv Rettig Gur explains the impasse, and why it matters:

A $29 billion emergency recovery and stimulus package pieced together by panicked politicians is set to begin disbursement this coming week, [but] the recovery spending . . . won’t deal effectively with the fallout from the virus or replace the careful rebalancing of national priorities that the country needs and that only a full-fledged budget law allows. A government signing checks isn’t a sustainable model for stemming the bleeding and managing an economic rehabilitation.

The trouble [is that] Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gantz don’t trust one another enough to bring an agreed-upon bill to a cabinet vote. Netanyahu is demanding a one-year budget to cover the immediate problems presented by 2020, with a separate budget law for 2021 to be passed by February. Gantz is insisting on a two-year budget, as stipulated by the coalition agreement between Likud and Blue and White signed in April.

Netanyahu has a point. . . . The future is too clouded to see past the second wave of the virus into the fall of 2020—never mind the fall of 2021. Without a better picture of the virus’s spread, of the likelihood of a third or fourth wave, of the timetable for a vaccine, of the global economic situation writ large, and of the economy’s broader resilience in the face of social-distancing measures, preparing a 2021 budget in the middle of 2020 is an exercise in frustration that will only delay the work required to turn around a more appropriate 2021 bill in six months’ time.

But, as Gur goes on to explain, the intricacies of the fragile coalition agreement mean that Gantz, by agreeing to the one-year budget, risks a collapse of the government and the end of his political career. “Meanwhile” Gur writes, “the Bank of Israel last week updated its forecast for 2020 to negative 6-percent growth, the steepest shrinking of Israel’s economy in the country’s history.”

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.