In the 1930s, two American archaeologists working in the now-Turkish city of Antioch discovered a small lead scroll, closed shut with a nail, from the 5th century CE. It resembled other ancient amulets used to curse the owner’s enemies, but only recently has modern imaging technology made decoding the scroll’s text possible, as Amanda Borschel-Dan writes:

In the curse, written in a Jewish dialect of Aramaic in Hebrew letters, [a] gambler beseeches God and his panoply of angels to thwart a competitor’s horse and cause him to “drown in the mud.” . . . “The curse calls upon the angel who [in the Bible] stands before Balaam’s ass to block the horses of the opposing team,” said [Rivka Elitzur-Leiman, the scholar who has translated the amulet].

Curse amulets on horse racing were common during this time, but until now were only discovered written in Greek or Latin. There has been some attempt to tie one scroll to Jews, said Elitzur-Leiman, because it referenced Pharaoh’s chariots. However, she said, Christians of the era were also well versed in the Hebrew Bible’s stories, so this could not be conclusive proof of a Jewish connection.

Due to this scroll’s Jewish Aramaic dialect, the Hebrew lettering and the very Jewish content—including the Hebrew Tetragrammaton—she is convinced that this amulet was indeed written by Jews. . . . Spells were very diverse in terms of their goals, she said, but incantations on horse races were among the most popular in the general population of the time. And now, with this newly deciphered tablet, we see this unsporting behavior among Jews, too.

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.