Based on a thorough examination of archaeological evidence, Hillel Geva has produced population estimates for the city of Jerusalem in biblical and post-biblical times. Hershel Shanks summarizes his findings for the earlier period:

The first period that Geva considers in his study is from the 18th to the 11th centuries BCE, the period before the arrival of the Israelites. Jerusalem was then confined to the small spur south of the Temple Mount known today as the City of David. As Geva reminds us, even then Jerusalem “was the center of an important territorial entity.” During this period, it included a massive fortification system that has recently been excavated. Overall, however, the area comprises only about eleven to twelve acres. . . .

The next period Geva considers is the period of the United Monarchy, the time of King David and King Solomon and a couple of centuries thereafter (from 1000 BCE to about the 8th century BCE). In David’s time, the borders of the city did not change from the previous period. However, King Solomon expanded the confines of the city northward to include the Temple Mount. This increased the size of the city to about 40 acres, . . . [and] Geva estimates the population of the city at this time to have been about 2,000.

By the end of the First Temple period (the First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E.), the walled city of Jerusalem covered 160 acres. By that time, settlement also extended northward outside the city walls, all of which expanded the city further. At its height, the population of Jerusalem at the end of the eighth century BCE, according to Geva, was 8,000.

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.