Using cutting-edge techniques of machine learning and computerized image processing, a group of Israeli scientists and archaeologists have examined the Hebrew handwriting of a group of clay fragments from the early 8th century BCE known as the Samaria ostraca. Amanda Borschel-Dan reports on their findings:

The Samaria ostraca are a collection of over 100 pottery pieces upon which are recorded a few words of biblical Hebrew. . . . The ostraca were thoroughly recorded by a 1910 Harvard Semitic Museum expedition, and the new study is based on digitally enhanced scans of the Harvard negatives.

The few words etched on the small clay pieces found in [what is now] Nablus record commodities: which containers held what, from which region and clan, and when . . . they were brought to the ancient city. For example, [one] piece states: “In the year ten from Hazeroth to Gaddiyau jar of bath oil.”

Through these meager words, rare early examples of Iron Age, paleo-Hebrew script, linguists have already learned that those who wrote them used a dialect of biblical Hebrew, today called the northern dialect, which was different from that spoken in the kingdom of Judah. Although the same language, words were pronounced differently and different word constructions were used.

The study concluded that the same two scribes wrote the 39 ostraca examined thus far. While this suggests limited literacy during this time, which is thought to have been the peak of the northern kingdom’s prosperity, Israel Finkelstein—a distinguished archaeologist and one of the study’s coauthors—notes that climate conditions meant that fewer texts have been preserved from this period in contrast to others.

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.