According to archaeologists, a recently unearthed lookout post—located in what is now an IDF base in southern Israel—was built during the reign of King Hezekiah, near the end of the 8th century BCE. The Jerusalem Post reports:

“The strategic location of the tower served as a lookout and warning point against the Philistine enemy, one of whose cities was Ashkelon,” said Valdik Lifshitz and Sa’ar Ganor, directors of the excavation on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority. The tower was estimated to be about 16.4 by 11.5 feet. “In the days of the First Temple, the kingdom of Judah built a range of towers and fortresses as points of communication, warning, and signaling to transmit messages and field intelligence.”

The messages would be transmitted though smoke and fire, depending the time of the day.

The [excavation] was carried out by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority in a joint effort with the IDF and the Ministry of Defense. . . . Some 150 recruits and commanders from the paratroopers’ brigade participated. . . . Part of the IDF’s involvement in the project was to instill in soldiers and commanders a sense of connection to Israel’s heritage and natural landscape.

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.