In the 1990s, a team of archaeologists discovered the ruins of a city from the late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age at the village of Tel Tsafit, some twenty miles southwest of Jerusalem, which they subsequently identified as the biblical city of Gath. More recent exploration has shed new light on the lifetime of its most famous inhabitant, as Sonia Epstein writes:

Archaeologists have discovered remains more ancient and impressive than those previously discovered at the Philistine city of Gath, where, [according to the Bible], the giant Philistine warrior Goliath was born and once lived. Previous excavations at the site . . . uncovered ruins dating to the 9th and 10th centuries BCE, but the new discovery suggests that the city of Gath was at its height in the 11th century BCE, during the time Goliath would have lived.

Goliath was the Philistine whom the young David, the eventual second king of Israel and Judah, famously defeated in single combat, according to 1Samuel 17. Together with Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, and Ekron, Gath was one of the five Philistine cities until its fall around 830 BCE at the hands of the Aramean king Hazael.

[T[he recent discovery beneath a pre-existing site reveals that [Goliath’s] native city was a place of even greater architectural grandeur than the Gath of a century later. [But, says] Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University’s archaeology department, who directed the discovery at Tel Tsafit, “There are no skeletons of people who are taller than NBA centers.”

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.