In the early 12th century BCE, the civilizations of Egypt, Greece, the Levant, and Mesopotamia experienced some sort of major catastrophe. For a long time, historians pointed at the invasion of marauders known as the Sea Peoples, but this explanation has proved insufficient. To the archaeologist Eric Cline, as Julia Fridman writes, the real culprit was a confluence of unrelated factors (free registration required):

Recent high-resolution pollen analysis of a core taken from the Sea of Galilee . . . has irrefutably shown that the years between 1250 and 1100 BCE were the driest seen throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages. This corroborates with the information from clay tablets found in Afek in Israel, Hattusa in Turkey, Emar in Mesopotamia, and Ugarit in Syria that record a terrible drought and the resulting difficulties attributed to it.

“There is evidence in the archaeological record of . . . climate change, drought (resulting in famine), earthquakes, invasions, and internal rebellions at this time. Normally if a culture is faced with just one of these tragedies, it can survive it, but what if they all happened at once, or in quick succession?” asks Cline. “It seems that this is what happened between about 1225 BCE and 1175 BCE, and I think that the Late Bronze Age civilizations were simply unable to weather the ‘perfect storm’ and came crashing down.”

[The Sea People] were also victims . . . looking for a better home where they could survive. They were more of a symptom than the cause of the collapse, says Cline.

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.