Originating at the time of the Jewish return to the Land of Israel from Babylonian exile in the 5th century BCE, the Samaritans accepted the Pentateuch while rejecting the other books of the Hebrew Bible along with the rabbinic tradition. Fewer than 1,000 Samaritans live in Israel today, but in the first centuries of the Common Era they likely made up a sizable minority of the land’s population. Recently, writes Ruth Schuster, archaeologists discovered the remnants of a winepress near the town of Tsur Natan in central Israel that apparently belonged to a wealthy Samaritan landlord named Adios:

In his first interview after leaving office, the former head of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, admitted that he had erred in believing that Israel could come to some sort of accord with Hamas. In his own words: