Under Isaac Herzog’s leadership, the once-dominant Labor party seems to be on its way to a revival; a mood of enthusiasm accompanied Tuesday’s primaries. But the primaries were a victory for the party’s left wing, which is hardly on board with the reasons for Labor’s recovery. Haviv Rettig Gur explains:

Herzog, while admittedly lacking the easy eloquence of a Netanyahu . . . has proved that he possesses two characteristics that one might expect Labor supporters would find equally valuable: a piercing political acumen and an unbridled ambition to reclaim Labor’s lost status as a credible vehicle for national leadership. . . .

Herzog transformed Labor from a medium-sized political backwater into the most electorally credible alternative to Netanyahu that the country has seen in years. And by adopting explicitly centrist rhetoric that calls for separation from the Palestinians rather than suggesting that reconciliation or “peace” were in the cards, Herzog enabled large numbers of left-leaning Israelis whose faith in peace talks was punctured by the violent implosions of past negotiation attempts at least to reconsider a vote for the party that once led those efforts.

But . . . Herzog’s bid for the center, which has brought him closer than any Labor chief since 2000 to potentially retaking the prime minister’s office, does not reflect the views or wishes of large swaths of his party rank and file.

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.