Actual physical evidence of an ancient work long familiar to historians was only recently discovered among a trove of discarded Egyptian papyri—thanks to a project that employs thousands of volunteers and advanced computer algorithms. Adam Lusher writes:

The volunteers . . . helped discover a fragment of a long-lost rendition of the book of Exodus, written in the style of a Greek tragedy by a little-known author called Ezekiel in 2nd-century BCE Alexandria.

“Before, we had only known about this work because it was quoted by the [4th-century CE] Church father Eusebius,” said Professor [Dirk] Obbink, [one of the project’s directors]. “We didn’t know for certain that a text existed: Eusebius might have made it up or misremembered it.

“Now we have a real copy, a long speech by Moses, in iambic trimeter, telling the history of his life and how he was discovered as a baby in the bulrushes. We can put some flesh and bones on a lost work of literature, one that was presumably performed long before Charlton Heston.”

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.