In 2010, archaeologists discovered a 2,800-year-old altar in a pagan sanctuary in the ancient city of Atarot, now in Jordan but once in the biblical kingdom of Moab. Scholars have recently deciphered and published the Moabite inscription on the altar, as Owen Jarrus reports:

The altar appears to date to a time after Mesha, king of Moab, successfully rebelled against the kingdom of Israel and conquered Atarot [from it]. By this time, Israel had broken in two with a northern kingdom that retained the name Israel and a southern kingdom called Judah. The Hebrew Bible mentions the rebellion, saying that [as a vassal state] Moab had to give Israel a yearly tribute of thousands of lambs and a vast amount of rams’ wool. The rebellion is also described in the so-called Mesha stele discovered in 1868 in Dhiban, Jordan, which claims that Mesha conquered Atarot and killed many of the city’s inhabitants.

One of the two inscriptions written on the altar appears to describe bronze that was plundered after the capture of Atarot. “One might speculate that quantities of bronze looted from the conquered city at some later date were presented as an offering at the shrine and recorded on this altar,” the researchers write.

The inscription provides confirmation that the Moabites succeeded in taking over Atarot, says the study’s co-author Christopher Rollston.

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.