A few years ago, scholars described life at an ancient copper mine in what is now Jordan as “hell on earth.” But recent research at a similar site in the Negev shows that at least one class of workers enjoyed all the creature comforts of the time. Hershel Shanks explains:

The better class . . . apparently ate like visitors at a first-class spa! The diet varied. There was fish from the Red Sea (nearly 20 miles away) and catfish from the Mediterranean Sea (125 miles away). The diners then polished it off with grapes and pistachios, also from the Mediterranean area.

All this was found on what is known as “Slaves’ Hill,” in apparent reference to the miners who worked and lived there. But this was clearly not the whole picture. In the words of researchers Lidar Sapir-Hen and Erez Ben-Yosef, “These new observations . . . stand in contrast to the common perception that workers in mining areas were [uniformly] a low-class, poorly paid labor force engaged in the arduous work of mining and smelting.”

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.