Drawing on both the Hebrew Bible and archaeological evidence, Cynthia Shafer-Elliott describes what we know about everyday meals in the ancient Near East:

In 1 Kings 5:2-3, [the Bible] lists the daily provisions for King Solomon’s table: 30 kors of choice flour, sixty kors of meal, ten fat oxen, twenty pasture-fed cattle, 100 sheep, deer, gazelles, roebucks, and fatted fowl. [But these] are daily provisions for the [court] and do not reflect what the average ancient Israelite man, woman, or child ate.

Textual resources are an important source of information on any ancient society, but their original purpose was to provide accounts of monumental people and events such as military conquests and the reigns of kings. . . . We must therefore turn to other sources to understand the daily preparation and consumption of food in Iron Age Israel, especially archaeology. . . .

[Although it] is rarely included in discussions of ancient Israelite food and cooking, . . . the average Israelite meal consisted of a stew. Meat was not consumed on a regular basis by the average Israelite, so most stews were made from legumes and vegetables. This can be seen in the use of the Hebrew word nazid, which is used to describe stews (or pottage) of vegetables and/or legumes (as seen in Genesis. 25:29- 34, 2 Kings 4:38–40, and Haggai 2:12).

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.