Between 1941 and 1944, the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators murdered some 70,000 Jews in a clearing in the forest of Ponar (now Paneriai), not far from the Lithuanian city of Vilna. Using advanced technology to explore the mass graves, an ongoing project has discovered a tunnel, previously known only from the accounts of survivors, by which some Jewish prisoners managed to escape. Nicholas St. Fleur writes:

In 1943, when it became clear the Soviets were going to take over Lithuania, the Nazis began to cover up the evidence of the mass killings. They forced a group of 80 Jews to exhume the bodies, burn them, and bury the ashes. . . .

About half of the group spent 76 days digging a tunnel in their holding pit by hand and with spoons they found among the bodies. On April 15, 1944—the last night of Passover, when they knew the night would be darkest—[they] crawled through the two-foot-square tunnel entrance and through to the forest.

The noise alerted the guards, who pursued the prisoners with guns and dogs. Of the 80, twelve managed to escape; eleven of them survived the war and went on to tell their stories, according to the researchers.

The archaeologist Richard Freund and his team used the information from survivors’ accounts to search for the tunnel. Rather than excavate and disturb the remains, he and his team used two non-invasive tools—electrical-resistivity tomography and ground-penetrating radar.

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.