Archaeologists recently unearthed a Byzantine-era workshop near the Lebanon border that produced vessels for wine and oil. Unlike most similar sites from the same period, this one has a kiln hewn directly in the bedrock. Megan Gannon writes:

The Roman kiln had two chambers: one firebox where branches and tinder would have been burned, and another chamber where the clay vessels would have been placed to harden under the intense heat.

[The archaeologists] found fragments of storage jars that could be transported overland, as well as vessels known as amphorae that had large handles and were used to hold wine or oil, likely to be exported from Israel by sea.

Special geological conditions . . . made the area a good spot for this rare type of kiln. . . [T]he region has chalky bedrock, which is soft enough to be easily quarried and yet durable enough to endure the heat of the pottery-firing process. . . .

The archaeologists also uncovered an ancient water-storage system and some mosaic floor tiles, and surveys in the area identified the remains of walls that probably date to the Byzantine period, or 4th to 7th centuries CE.

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.