Recent renovations at the Austrian castle of Ebenfurth have uncovered 28 17th-century headstones from a Jewish cemetery, along with fragments of others. Jewish Heritage Europe reports:

The matsevot [gravestones] were discovered early this year. They had been used in the foundations of a wall built against the Ottoman invasion in 1683 at the Ebenfurth castle, about 30 miles south of Vienna on the border between Lower Austria and Burgenland, [i.e., in the northeastern part of the country].

“It is undoubtedly a sensational find,” wrote Johannes Reiss, the director of the Austrian Jewish Museum in nearby Eisenstadt, on the museum’s blog. He wrote that all the gravestones and fragments with legible dates dated from between 1622 and 1669. The oldest is the gravestone of one Eliezer, son of Abraham Moses, who died on 8 Tevet 5383 (Sunday, December 11, 1622).

Reiss wrote that, between 1652 and 1671, Ebenfurth was the largest of 48 Jewish communities in Lower Austria; by 1669 Jews made up 20 to 30 percent of the town’s population. But the community was expelled in 1671, and it wasn’t until nearly 200 years later, after 1867, that a few Jews settled there again.

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.