At a site south of Jerusalem, archaeologists have found an inscription, “Ishbaal son of Beda,” on a clay storage jar. Ilan Ben Zion explains its significance:

Yosef Garfinkel . . . and Saar Ganor [who co-authored a paper on the inscription] said Tuesday this was the first time an inscription with the name Ishbaal had been discovered.

“It is interesting to note that the name Ishbaal appears in the Bible, and now also in the archaeological record, only during the reign of King David, in the first half of the 10th century BCE. This name was not used later in the First Temple period,” the two said. . . .

Five or six years ago, [Garfinkel] said, there were no known Judean inscriptions from the period associated with the biblical King David; now there are four, including that of Ishbaal.

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.