The Hebrew Bible presents the Canaanites as a relatively homogenous group of pagan tribes who inhabited the Land of Israel and its environs when Abraham first arrived there, and remained until the era of the Davidic monarchy. Based on ancient DNA gathered from 93 different bodies buried at nine separate locations, from a period of over a millennium, scientists have confirmed this portrait. Amanda Borschel-Dan writes:

“The Canaanites, although living in different city-states, were culturally and genetically similar,” said the Hebrew University ancient-DNA specialist Liran Carmel. . . . The study also discovered that they shared a genetic relationship with another group of people who slowly and continuously migrated from the far-away Caucasus and/or Zagros Mountain regions. [The latter range stretches from southwestern Turkey, through northern Iraq, and across western Iran.] This special genetic mix of Canaanite and mountain peoples can still be seen in some form in modern Arabic-speaking and Jewish populations, wrote the authors.

In Carmel said that Bronze Age (circa 3500-1150 BCE) populations in the southern Levant—today’s Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and parts of Syria—were not static. “Rather, we observe evidence for the movement of people over long periods of time from the northeast of the Ancient Near East, including modern-day Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, into the southern Levant region,” he said.

Even though Canaanites lived in different city-states, archaeological evidence has always suggested that they presented a common material culture. And indeed, as the paper explained, this homogeneity was found mirrored also in their genetic ancestry.

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.