While the outbreak of war delayed the grand opening of the newly renovated National Library of Israel, located on Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus, it did not prevent it. Shai Secunda considers the history of this impressive institution, and the magnificence of its current form:

As soldiers fight to protect the Jewish state, the library preserves books, documents, and objects covering Israeli and Zionist history and millennia of Jewish writing (it also holds major collections of Islamic and Arabic studies). Indeed, the National Library of Israel aspires to house no less than the bibliographic life of Jewish and Israeli civilization.

A new permanent exhibition at the library, titled A Treasury of Words, showcases some of the collections’ most remarkable holdings. . . . Across the well-spaced room are many glimmering riches, including the famous and gorgeous Rothschild Haggadah; a page of Maimonides’ Judeo-Arabic commentary on the Mishnah in the author’s own hand; a petite, millennium-old Quran; an even older Syriac translation of the Bible; and more. . . . Visitors can gaze at Modern Hebrew literary treasures, such as the corrected galleys to an S.Y. Agnon masterpiece or the working notes of an experimental novel by A.B. Yehoshua, amid an array of Israeli artifacts, like scores to songs written by beloved Israeli songwriter Naomi Shemer and a letter sent by the ill-fated Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon to the Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz.

On Tuesday, Israeli warplanes struck a group of terrorists in the West Bank town of Nur Shams while they were in the process of planting explosives. Similar explosives were used in the nearby city of Jenin last week to kill an IDF officer and wound sixteen others. These are just two of the latest examples of an escalation in terrorist activity, and Israeli attempts to curb it, in the West Bank—part of what Meir Ben-Shabbat describes as an effort by Hamas and Iran to “Gazafy” the area:

Jenin has a long history of violence. It is geographically, politically, socially, and economically peripheral. Central government control has always been weak there. This was true even in the 1930s during the British Mandate, when its forces eliminated Izz ad-Din al-Qassam—[a Syrian-born militant leader] whose name later became an inspiration and symbol for Hamas terror cells—in the nearby village of Yabad. . . .

The “Gazafication” process should also be applied by Israel towards terrorist centers, increasing pressure on them. If Jenin chooses to behave like Gaza, it will face consequences similar to Gaza.

Ben-Shabbat concludes by noting that, while the West Bank front “may seem minor in the context of the larger war,” stopping the territory from becoming a terrorist hotbed will have a “cumulative effect on Hamas governance, its recovery chances, and . . . the regional security situation” as a whole. It’s worth noting, moreover, that in the ongoing negotiations for a ceasefire Hamas has repeatedly asked that terrorists imprisoned in Israeli jails be released not to Gaza but to the West Bank.