Israeli archaeologists digging in the city of Beersheba—located in the Negev desert and many miles from any of the country’s coasts—found a water cistern that they date to the 1st century CE. Amanda Borschel-Dan writes:

A newly discovered water cistern . . . has turned out to be the 2,000-year-old canvas for a series of engravings depicting thirteen sea vessels and even a sailor to steer them. Technical details are included in some of the ship drawings etched into the cistern’s plaster walls, which suggests the graffiti artist had practical knowledge of ship construction, said Davida Eisenberg-Degen, a specialist in rock art and graffiti at the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). . . .

The art-covered cistern was uncovered during IAA excavations ahead of the construction of a new Beersheba neighborhood [called] Rakefet. The roughly 39-foot-deep water-storage pit, with an area of roughly 16.5 by 18 feet, is thought to have been used by a nearby 1st-century Roman-era domicile up through recent times. In excavating the sediment fill, archaeologists uncovered World War I-era ceramic shards, ammunition shells, and other weapon parts.

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.