In 1963, an archaeological excavation at Masada uncovered a jar containing six ancient seeds, originating sometime between 155 BCE and 64 CE, of a now-extinct species of date palm. In 2005, a researcher planted them in Israeli soil, and one grew into a robust tree, given the name Methuselah. Diane Bolz writes:

Date palms once flourished in the Judean Valley and were an important source of food, shelter, and medicine. The palm’s fruit—the [likely source of the] honey of the “land of milk and honey”—was large, dark, and seductively sweet. Able to survive for long periods in storage, the dates were suitable for export and were used to make laxatives, aphrodisiacs, and life-prolonging tonics. There were even claims that the dates could increase fertility, ease labor, and act as a defense against infections and tumors.

The tree itself, which was praised in both the Bible and Quran, was featured on ancient coins. Today, a reproduction of an early coin picturing a date palm and two baskets full of dates appears on the front side of Israel’s ten-shekel coin. In the Bible, King David named his daughter Tamar, the Hebrew word for the palm.

When the Roman empire invaded ancient Judea, thick forests of date palms covered the valley from the Galilee in the north to the Dead Sea in the south. One of the earliest domesticated tree crops, the palms were later grown in plantations in the area. Over the centuries the Judean palm was decimated by years of war and foreign conquest. The crowning blow came some 800 years ago, when Crusaders destroyed the last remaining specimens, rendering the plant extinct.

Methuselah is male, and the researchers are trying to find a suitable female it can pollinate.

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.