From the 4th century BCE through the 3rd century CE, a major trade route brought frankincense, myrrh, and other products from Yemen across the Arabian Peninsula to the ancient city of Petra (now in Jordan), and then westward, via the Negev desert, to the Gaza coast, where they could be exported across the Mediterranean. At the time there were four major Negev cities located along it. Archaeologists have recently found remnants of this ancient road, as Rosella Tercatin writes:

[M]ost scholars believed for many decades that the road and its structures, including some milestones, were to be associated with the Nabateans, a people who emerged in the last centuries of the first millennia BCE and settled, among other areas, in the Negev. However, the Latin inscriptions uncovered in the recently identified “lost section” of the route were found to be from the later Roman period, [specifically from the reigns] of the emperors Pertinax (2nd century CE) and Severus (late 2nd to early 3rd centuries CE).

Chaim Ben David, [one of the scholars who identified the milestones] had already suggested that “the milestones in the desert areas of the Negev and southern Jordan . . . were erected on the initiative of the Roman provincial governor, using the labor of army units, without involving the local population at least for maintenance as was usual in the more densely populated parts of the province.”

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.