A traveling exhibit of artifacts from Qumran, now on view in Los Angeles, is more extensive than any that preceded it, and includes information about new technology being used to understand the scrolls. Naomi Pfefferman writes:

Scientists at Hebrew University . . . are investigating the chemical composition of the scrolls’ parchment and ink by artificially aging modern materials known to have been used during the Second Temple period, and through experimentation are deciding how best to sample the fragile ancient documents themselves. Others are engaging in DNA analysis of the parchment upon which the scrolls were written. . . . “If you know that two fragments come from the same animal, you may have an easier time piecing them back together,” said [co-curator Risa] Levitt Kohn. . . .

The most ancient artifacts on display date from more than 3,000 years ago, including collared-rim storage jars, which possibly were used to store grain, circa 1100 BCE, as well as real stones from a typical four-room house that [have been] used to recreate a dwelling from Israel’s hill country.

Objects dating from the 8th century BCE reveal the beginnings of Hebrew as a written language, such as an alphabet table, written on a shard of pottery (the era’s scrap paper), which depicts what is likely a school boy’s primer.

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.