The Talmud requires that Torah scrolls be written on parchment made from the hide of a kosher animal, and notes that the hides of gazelles were particularly prized for this purpose. Armed with this information, archaeologists made sense of a recent finding in the Galilean village of Shikhin (modern-day Shukha), as Philippe Bohstrom writes. (Free registration may be required.)

Archaeologists . . . encountered a mystery: a strangely large proportion of the animal bones [uncovered while excavating Shikhin] were from wild gazelles—far greater than the proportion of gazelle remains found at any other archaeological site in Israel, from [the era of the site]—about 1,900 years ago—or earlier. Or later. What was the strange predilection the ancient Jews of Shikhin had for gazelles?

Some were surely eating gazelle, which is perfectly kosher when slaughtered by [the prescribed] ritual. But the people of Shikhin also had plenty of domestic flocks: sheep, goats, and cows. It seems, the archaeologists concluded, that the Jews of Shikhin had developed a robust industry of curing gazelle hide for parchment, including for Torah scrolls. . . .

Even when compared with sites from the earlier Bronze Age and Iron Age, when people had been cultivating flocks for thousands of years but still hunted for some of their meat, the proportion of gazelle bones at Shikhin is big; [furthermore], gazelle run very fast, [and are therefore very difficult] to chase down. So appetite alone could hardly explain the spike in gazelle hunting.

The gazelle is indigenous to the region and was appreciated in ancient times not only for its speed but for its gracile beauty. The ancient Hebrews alluded to it frequently in Scripture.

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.