Digging in the area near the Western Wall, archaeologists have unearthed three connected subterranean rooms, which they have dated to sometime before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Amanda Borschel-Dan writes:

The purpose of the three-room complex, hidden for centuries under a large 1,400-year-old Byzantine/Umayyad structure’s white mosaic floor, is still being investigated, but it may have served as a basement pantry, living space, or even a place to hide during raids—[perhaps] part of a much larger public structure that has since been obliterated.

Hewn out of bedrock using hand tools, including iron hammers, the three rooms are rather spacious, occupy different floors, and were connected by stairs.

[W]hile there are numerous contemporary ritual baths and graves that were also hewn out of rock during this era, this is the first example of what appears to be a living space. Inside the rooms, what looks to be niches for shelves and storage, as well as doorjambs and lantern niches, were chiseled into the bedrock.

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.