Archaeologists have analyzed a brief ancient inscription in an alphabet that was the precursor to Hebrew. Ilan Ben Zion writes:

A potsherd slightly larger than a business card found in the ruins of a Late Bronze Age temple at the biblical site of Lachish in southern Israel has yielded a few tantalizing letters from a 12th-century BCE alphabet. . . . The inscription, three lines containing nine letters, . . . is believed to date from around 1130 BCE. . . . The letters were etched into a clay jar before firing, and are exceptionally clear.

The first line reads pkl, the second spr—the Semitic root for “scribe”—but the third has two letters of uncertain meaning (one is fragmentary). The text includes the earliest dateable examples of the letters kaf (the precursor to the Latin letter K), samekh (S), and resh (R). Samekh had never before been found in early Canaanite inscriptions.

The Canaanites began to develop the alphabet around 1800 BCE, over a thousand years after cuneiform writing first appeared in Mesopotamia. . . . But there are centuries of silence following the earliest known alphabetic inscription. . . .

The archaeologists . . . who studied the potsherd inscription determined that it was too fragmentary to make heads or tails of what it might say. The jar fragment’s discovery in a temple complex suggests the text may be dedicatory.

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.