While ancient Near Eastern peoples tended to use earthenware vessels for preparing and eating food, many Jews in Second Temple-era Judea preferred stoneware; many scholars believe they did so because pottery could become ritually impure, while stone could not. A recent discovery lends credence to this theory, as Amanda Borschel-Dan writes:

A large 2,000-year-old Second Temple-period chalkstone quarry and workshop was discovered at Reina in the lower Galilee, . . . between Nazareth and the village of Kana. . . . [The] stoneware workshop [is] one of only four in Israel. . . .

The workshop is situated in an artificially hewn cave, [as evidence by the presence of] chisel marks. Inside the cave, archaeologists discovered the detritus of lathe-made stoneware—thousands of stone cores. . . . [H]undreds of unfinished or damaged vessels were also found.

“The production waste indicates that this workshop produced mainly handled mugs and bowls of various sizes. The finished products were marketed throughout the region here in Galilee, and our finds provide striking evidence that Jews here were scrupulous regarding the purity laws,” said [Yonatan Adler, who directed the excavation]. . . . “The current excavations will hopefully help us answer the question of how long these laws continued to be observed among the Jews of Galilee during the course of the Roman period,” he said.

The nearby town of Kana (or Cana), is described in the New Testament as the place where water, held in six such stone vessels, was miraculously transformed into wine.

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.