In 1972, a serendipitous encounter between the American Jewish lawyer Hershel Shanks and the famed Israeli general-turned-archaeologist Yigael Yadin launched Shanks’s career as an amateur expert on biblical archaeology. Shanks went on to found Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR), a magazine aimed at disseminating and popularized the latest discoveries in the field; he has only recently retired from his position as its chief editor. Thanks to Shanks’s efforts, and bravado, the Dead Sea Scrolls were published after decades of delay and made available for study by a variety of experts. The archaeologist William Dever recollects the important role Shanks played in another controversy in the field:

Last Friday, the Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz announced the designation of six Palestinian organizations as terrorist groups due to their deep entanglements with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which has been committing murderous attacks since 1968. Both the EU and several European states have provided funds to the recently proscribed organizations. A decade ago, pro-Israel activists even supplied the European Union with information, for a long time ignored, about the links between these groups and the PFLP. Members of one group—the Union of Agricultural Work Committees—murdered the seventeen-year-old Rina Shnerb in 2019. Jonathan Tobin writes: