Since the beginning of the summer, the biweekly demonstrations in front of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s residence have grown steadily in size. Matti Friedman reports from one of the more relaxed Friday-afternoon protests, which he contrasts with the larger, rawer ones that take place Saturday nights:

Here and there came whiffs of pot. There was only one guy in a Che Guevara shirt. Right-wing thugs have threatened violence, but the crowd was relaxed and the police seemed bored. There were a few signs about the occupation of the West Bank and some about the banks. The Israeli left finds it hard to concentrate. But it’s creative, and has a good sense of humor. At a recent protest someone had a sign saying, “I’m single.” Another sign read, “Sign.”

The protests are driven by real political and economic fury across many sectors of society, but there’s no question that much of what makes them fun is specifically a result of all of [the country’s] theater people being at loose ends.

Yet, in a democracy, elections matter far more than protests, and voters aren’t on the protestors’ side:

Despite the heady eruption of liberal energy on the street, in parliament, where it counts, the center-left is toothless. The Labor party never recovered from the waves of Arab violence that shattered the peace dreams sold to the Israeli public in the 1990s. Centrist alternatives have come and gone. . . . Netanyahu’s Likud party may have just a quarter of the vote, but right now it’s the only substantial political movement in Israel. No vuvuzelas or dancing aliens can change that.

Indeed, the current protest movement shares a lot with that of 2011, when Israelis took the streets to express dissatisfaction with economic inequality and the high cost of living:

Netanyahu weathered those protests and delivered a decade of economic growth, relative safety, and cynical, hopeless politics. One of the few accomplishments of those demonstrations was to elevate two charismatic young organizers into the Knesset as a new generation of liberal leaders. One of them left after a few terms. The second is now a minister in Netanyahu’s government.

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.