While there have been archaeological digs since the 1960s at the site of the ancient settlement of En Esur—located in the Sharon region north of Tel Aviv—a major excavation begun two years ago has revealed a city far larger than expected. Archaeologists say that in the 4th millennium BCE the city covered an area of some 160 acres and had a population of about 6,000, making it much greater in size than Jericho or Megiddo, heretofore thought the biggest cities in the southern Levant at the time. Yasemin Saplakoglu reports. (Photographs and video can be found at the link below.)

The city’s intricate design of residential and public areas and alleys points to the organized society and social hierarchy that may have existed at the time, according to the statement [from the Israel Antiquities Authority]. The archaeologists also uncovered millions of pottery fragments, flint tools, basalt-stone vessels, and a large temple filled with burnt animal bones and figurines—such as one of a human head containing a seal impression of human hands lifted into the air. In the temple’s courtyard, archaeologists found a huge stone basin that held liquids, most likely for religious rituals.

“This is a huge city—a megalopolis in relation to the Early Bronze Age, where thousands of inhabitants, who made their living from agriculture, lived and traded with different regions and even with different cultures and kingdoms in the area,” Itai Elad, Yitzḥak Paz, and Dina Shalem, the directors of the excavation, said.

Below some of the houses, the archaeologists also uncovered evidence of an even older city that dates back some 7,000 years to the Chalcolithic period.

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.