Over the past four years, archaeologists have discovered military equipment used by Roman legions in the battle for Jerusalem in 70 CE. Some of the artefacts were recently put on public display by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). Sue Surkes writes:

According to the IAA, an account by the 1st-century Roman-Jewish historian Josephus of the fall of Jerusalem is being confirmed by objects discovered on an ancient road that once ascended from the city’s gates and the Pool of Siloam to the Temple. “On the following day, the Romans, having routed the brigands from the town, set all on fire as far as Siloam,” Josephus wrote in The Jewish Wars.

Among other finds, archaeologists dug up ballista stones flung by Roman catapults and arrowheads used by Jewish rebels behind barricades as the city fell to the Romans in 70 CE.

“Josephus’ descriptions of the battle in the lower city have come face-to-face for the first time with evidence that was revealed in the field in a clear and chilling manner,” the [archaeologists] Nahshon Szanton and Moran Hagbi said in a statement.

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.