When listing the agricultural bounty of the Land of Israel, the Hebrew Bible repeatedly mentions dates as one of the fruits that grow there in abundance. A group of Israeli researchers recently announced that they have successfully grown date palms using ancient seeds that had been found in the Judean desert. Stuart Winer and Sue Surkes write:

Dozens of seeds were gleaned from archaeological collections gathered at locations in the dry Dead Sea area, including the Masada hilltop fortress built by King Herod the Great in the 1st century BCE and the ancient site of Qumran, famous for the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s. Six saplings grew from 32 seeds sown; the plants have been dubbed Adam, Jonah, Uriel, Boaz, Judith, and Hannah.

“Germination of 2000-year-old seeds of Phoenix dactylifera from Judean desert archaeological sites provides a unique opportunity to study the Judean date palm, described in antiquity for the quality, size, and medicinal properties of its fruit, but lost for centuries,” the researchers wrote. . . . Radiocarbon dating revealed the seeds used for the project came from a period spanning the 4th century BCE to the 2nd century CE.

Israel’s popular Medjool and Deglet Nour dates were brought to Israel from Iraq and Morocco by Jews in the early part of the last century. The only cultivated dates already present [previously] were limited plantations of sire dates planted by the Ottoman Turks.

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.