While archaeologists routinely find artifacts from the biblical and Roman periods in the Old City of Jerusalem, a recent excavation near the Western Wall yielded historical items of much more recent vintage. James Rogers writes:

Archaeologists were excavating beneath the entrance lobby of the Western Wall tunnels [last] Wednesday when they found machine-gun magazines full of bullets, bayonets, and rifle parts. . . . The ammunition stash was found hidden in a cistern dating back to the period of the British Mandate in Palestine, which ended in 1948. The finds were examined by Israeli police bomb disposal experts.

“Apparently,” [said the archaeologists], “this is an ammunition dump that was purposely hidden by soldiers of the Royal Jordanian Army during the Six-Day War, perhaps when the IDF liberated the Old City.”

“This is ammunition that was produced in Britain in the Greenwood and Batley Ltd. factories in Leeds, Yorkshire,” added Assaf Peretz, of the Israel Antiquities Authority, who identified the ammunition.

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.