Almost every day, for several weeks running, large demonstrations have taken place in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv against Prime Minister Netanyahu’s alleged corruption, and calling for his removal from office. While the prime minister’s trial on corruption-related charges has already begun, and anecdotal evidence suggests that his support may be dwindling, Lahav Harkov argues that the protests are unlikely to accomplish anything:

Netanyahu is not going to respond positively to a protest calling for his ouster, especially on grounds that he believes are trumped-up. He still hopes to prove in court that his actions were within the bounds of the law, [and] he successfully built a coalition after the last election, so why should he go home just because a few thousand angry people say so?

Beyond that obvious reasoning, it seems like these protests don’t really seek to convince anyone who isn’t already against Netanyahu. As Netanyahu himself pointed out in a recent tweet, the “Black Flag” protest movement behind the anti-corruption demonstrations in recent months has suspicious ties to the former prime minister Ehud Barak, who is one of Netanyahu’s most vocal opponents. [Some] protesters waved Palestinian flags or the red flags of “antifa,” [a congeries of] loosely tied anarchist groups, . . . making it easy for the right and Netanyahu to dismiss the demonstrations.

It’s as if the organizers don’t realize that Israelis who supported Netanyahu or the [parties] that help him build his coalitions tend to be pretty conservative, and radical left-wing messages and connections will only make it impossible for them to convince anyone on the right of their cause.

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.