On Sunday, Jews marked the beginning of the three-week period of mourning for the destruction of the First and Second Temples. Coincidentally, archaeologists have just discovered a coin from 69 CE, minted by Jewish rebels fighting the Romans, in an ancient drainage ditch in Jerusalem. In the following year the Romans would capture the city, crush the rebellion, and destroy the Temple. Yori Yalon writes:

The coin . . . bears an inscription in ‎ancient Hebrew lettering reading “For the redemption ‎of Zion” and a depiction of a chalice. ‎Its other side depicts the “four species” used in the rituals of ‎the Sukkot holiday—the citron fruit, palm frond, and myrtle and willow branches—and the words “year four,” ‎referring to the [fourth] year of rebellion against Rome.‎

“The coin was found exactly in the same place that ‎Jews had been hiding in the drainage channel under ‎the street,” noted Reut Vilf [a representative of the organization overseeing the excavation that unearthed the coin]. Evidence of the rebels’ ‎attempt to hide under the city includes intact oil ‎lamps and ceramic pots that were found whole in the ‎sewer itself.‎

Interpreting the inscription on the coin, Vilf said, ‎‎“Freedom is an immediate thing, while redemption is ‎a process. It could attest to their understanding ‎that the end was near.”

Eli Shukron, an archaeologist with the Israel ‎Antiquities Authority, said, [however], that in all likelihood ‎the coin could [also] have fallen into the drainage system ‎through cracks in the stone-paved road.

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.