An unprecedented discovery sheds light on the Roman occupation of Judea, writes Ilan Ben-Zion:

The remains of an imperial Roman legionary camp—the only one of its kind ever to be excavated in Israel or in the entirety of the eastern [Roman] empire from the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE—have come to light at a dig near Megiddo. . . .

Legio, a Roman site situated next to Tel Megiddo in northern Israel, served as the headquarters of the Sixth Legion Ferrata—the Ironclad—in the years following the Jewish revolt, and helped keep order in the Galilee during the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132-135 CE. . . .

In the century following the Jewish revolt in 66-70 CE, Rome garrisoned two imperial legions in Palestine to keep order, one in Jerusalem and a second in the Galilee. Until recently, the location of the . . . permanent military camp housing the Sixth Legion was uncertain. . . .

“In the aftermath of the first revolt, you had the beginnings of a lot of emigration of the Jewish population of Judea northward,” [the excavation’s co-director Matthew] Adams explained. “The Galilee was increasingly the center of Jewish activity.” In light of the bloody 1st-century revolt which took Rome four years to crush, “probably one of the reasons that they brought the legion here at all was to garrison this unruly population,” Adams said.

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.