Archaeologists have long believed that a pile of large stones at the base of the Western Wall is a product of the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 C. E. One archaeologist, however, has sparked a controversy by claiming that they tumbled during a massive earthquake that hit Jerusalem 300 years later. Robin Ngo writes:

[Shimon] Gibson compared the artisanship of the toppled stones, among which are pilaster stones, with supporting pillars from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the church over the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and the church at Mamre near Hebron. He proposes that the builders of these Byzantine structures imitated what they saw at the Temple Mount in 325 C.E. in an effort to demonstrate Christianity was the successor of Judaism. How would the 4th-century builders have been able to copy these Temple Mount stones, Gibson reasoned, if they were not standing at the time?

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.