Five decades after the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple, Shimon Bar Kokhba led a revolt against their rule, and temporarily liberated parts of Judea. His followers even began minting their own coins, until Roman legionaries crushed the rebels at the battle of Beitar in 135 CE. Excavations in the old city of Jerusalem recent unearthed one of those coins:

The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) says that it is the only coin from the period bearing the name “Jerusalem” that has been found in the ancient part of the holy city. According to IAA archaeologists, “it is possible that a Roman soldier from the Tenth Legion found the coin during one of the battles across the country and brought it to their camp in Jerusalem as a souvenir.”

The obverse of the coin is decorated with a cluster of grapes and the inscription, “Year Two of the Freedom of Israel.” Its reverse side features a palm tree and the inscription, “Jerusalem.”

Donald Tzvi Ariel, who has examined more than 22,000 coins discovered in excavations in the Old City in Jerusalem, said that only four of these date to the period of the Bar Kokhba revolt.

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.