The tale of the Oven of Akhnai—one of the best known talmudic stories and the subject of last week’s Mosaic podcast—describes the ancient rabbis arguing with God, and winning. To the geo-archaeologist Beverly Goodman, certain details in this story support physical evidence she has gathered that the Roman port of Caesarea, on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, was destroyed by a tsunami in the 2nd-century CE. Thanks to her research, a government committee chaired by Avi Shapira has put into place plans to mitigate the dangers if a tsunami were to occur again. Goodman, Shapira, and the historian Henry Abramson explain the discovery in an interview by Peter Gwinn. (Audio, 25 minutes. Transcript available at the link below.)

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.