Three paleontologists speculate about what sorts of kosher food would be available to a Jewish time-traveler to the prehistoric era, before such modern species as cattle and chicken existed. Roy Plotnick, Jessica Theodor, and Thomas Holtz write:

The first stop is 120,000 years ago. This was the peak of the last interglacial warm period before the most recent ice age and before humans first reached the New World or Australia. It was thus prior to the extinction event that wiped out many of the large animals in the world, such as mammoths and giant ground sloths. Many of these extinct animals are either ancestral to or related to animals that we would recognize as kosher. In Eurasia, we would find the aurochs, Bos primigenius, the ancestor of today’s domestic cattle, which went extinct in the 15th century, and the giant Irish elk, the largest deer of all time. There would also have been the wild ancestors of modern fowl, sheep, and goats. In the Americas we would be able to feast on abundant ancestral bison, as well as a variety of deer, pronghorns, and turkey. Acceptable fish would be found in fresh and marine waters throughout the world.

Going back further in time, the scientists determine that, despite the relationship between birds and dinosaurs, pterodactyls are not kosher.

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.