In 2012, an excavation at the ancient city of Ḥuqoq in northern Israel turned up a 1,600-year-old synagogue decorated with intricate mosaics depicting biblical and midrashic scenes. Archaeologists are still working to uncover the images, but photographs of some of their latest discoveries have been made public and can be found at the link below. James Rogers writes:

The mosaics depict Noah’s ark, the parting of the Red Sea, Jonah and the fish, and the Tower of Babel, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Portions of the mosaics have been revealed before, but this is the first time the artifacts have been shown in their full glory. . . .

“Although the story of Jonah was popular in early Christian art, this is the first time it has been found decorating an ancient synagogue,” the excavation’s director, Jodi Magness, wrote in an email. “The Ḥuqoq version is unusual in showing three large fish swallowing Jonah, and representing the storm winds (in the upper left corner) as harpy-sirens—half-female, half-bird creatures from Greek mythology.”

Magness also notes that the panel depicting the Tower of Babel shows different construction activities around the tower, such as the quarrying of stone, woodworking, and the use of a giant pulley. The mosaic provides important evidence for ancient building techniques, she explained.

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.