Archaeologists excavating Tell el-Hammam in Jordan have found the ruins of a massive Bronze Age city that seems to have mysteriously disappeared for 700 years. They believe it may be the city of Sodom, described in Genesis as having been destroyed by God in the time of Abraham:

“Tall el-Hammam seemed to match every Sodom criterion demanded by the text,” says [Steven Collins, the head of the excavation]. “Theorizing, on the basis of the Sodom texts, that Sodom was the largest of the kikkar (the Jordan “disk,” or “well-watered plain” [mentioned] in the biblical text [as the location of] cities east of the Jordan, I concluded that if one wanted to find Sodom, then one should look for the largest city on the eastern kikkar that existed during the Middle Bronze Age, [which would have been] the time of Abraham and Lot. When we explored the area, the choice of Tall el-Hammam as the site of Sodom was virtually a no-brainer, since it was at least five to ten times larger than all the other Bronze Age sites in the entire region.” . . .

[B]ased on the excavated evidence, the city’s Bronze Age heyday seems to have . . . come to a sudden, inexplicable end toward the end of the Middle Bronze Age—and the ancient city became a relative wasteland for 700 years, for the most part void of human habitation. The comparatively paltry presence or lack of Late Bronze Age material is a testament to this, with the same pattern shown in the smaller, nearby sites.

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.