Last weekend, major hail and rainstorms hit Israel. Pumping water from a flooded area of the Sharon Plain revealed an ancient winery, thought to date to the 6th century CE. Daniel Eisenbud writes (with photographs):

[The Israeli archaeologist Alla] Nagorski said the well-preserved winery was . . . impressive and rare. “It is evident that great thought was invested in the engineering and construction,” she said. “The wine press is huge—three meters in diameter and two meters deep, and could accommodate twenty cubic meters of wine.”

Nagorski said numerous other wine presses have been exposed in Sharon, where the wine industry once thrived. In addition a warehouse was discovered housing jars.

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.