Following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the high rabbinic council known as the Sanhedrin relocated from Jerusalem to the Galilee, where it migrated from one place to another, spending a number of years in the village of Usha during the 1st and 2nd centuries. At the site of this village, volunteers participating in an archaeological dig recently discovered a hammer and nails dating to the 6th century, not long before Jews abandoned it altogether. Amanda Borschel-Dan writes:

According to Yair Amitzur and Eyad Bisharat, co-directors of the excavation on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, “about twenty iron hammers are registered in the Israel Antiquities Authority records, only six of them from the Byzantine period,” [to which this one is dated]. Through their excavations, the archaeologists had previously discovered an extensive glass industry—from raw material to beautifully finished green-blue glass goblets—as well as wine and olive-oil production at the site.

Amitzur [added] that the iron-production center would have forged everything the community needed on a day-to-day basis, including nails and little rings. There would have been a smithy working in every village, he said, but the remains indicate that Usha’s was a very small operation.

A famous resident of Usha recorded in Jewish sources was Rabbi Yitzḥak Nafḥa. The word “Nafḥa” comes from the root “to blow,” and in rabbinic-period Hebrew can mean “blacksmith.” But Amitzur [believes] that the iron industry was not in operation during the period in which the famous rabbi lived there, and he associates the word with the extremely specialized glass industry at the site, due to the uniqueness in the quality and quantity [of glass items] found there.

The site and its ritual baths continued to be used by the local Jewish population until approximately 1,500 years ago, said Amitzur, at which time the Jews filled in the baths to invalidate them for use prior to leaving the village.

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.