A year ago, scholars published a transcription of a fragment of papyrus, on which were written in ancient Hebrew the words “Jerusalem,” “king,” and “jars of wine.” A number of experts agreed with these scholars’ conclusion that the fragment was part of a letter dating to the 7th century BCE, a conclusion supported by the radiocarbon dating of the papyrus. Christopher Rollston, however, an expert on ancient Near Eastern epigraphy, concludes that it is a forgery. In part, he bases his argument on the irregular use of what linguists call the “construct form,” which was common in biblical Hebrew but is uncommon in the modern language. He also notes problems with the laboratory evidence:

[I]t is not all that difficult for someone to acquire ancient potsherds, ancient metals, stones of Levantine quarry, small pieces of ancient papyrus, or vellum. Therefore, the antiquity of the medium (e.g., papyrus, vellum, potsherd, or metal) is certainly no guarantee of the dating of the writing on that medium. To put it differently, only the dullest of forgers would forge an inscription on modern papyrus, modern vellum, modern potsherds, or modern metals.

After all, most forgers are quite sharp and they know that laboratory tests are routinely performed, and so the forgers know that it is important for them to use ancient materials from the correct period as their medium. And forgers have produced a fair number of forgeries in the last 40 or 50 years, and this is the way they do it. . . .

There are also additional aspects of the carbon-14 test that deserve scrutiny. Namely, quite a number of people said to me that the papyrus was carbon-dated to the 7th century BCE, and the script is also dated to the 7th century BCE; therefore, they said, that sort of correspondence is very good evidence for the antiquity of the writing. After all, it might be difficult to find a piece of papyrus that was from the 7th century, [as opposed to merely being ancient. However], for carbon-dating materials from antiquity, there is normally a fairly substantial plus or minus range. . . .

[In the case of this papyrus], the carbon dates . . . fell into the Hallstatt Plateau [a period during which it is impossible for radiocarbon dating to yield very precise results], and so all that can actually be said is that this papyrus dates to sometime between 800 and 400 BCE. . . . In other words, there is not some sort of dramatic convergence of the carbon date and the putative date of the script.

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.