Five decades after the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple, Shimon Bar Kokhba led a revolt against their rule, and temporarily liberated parts of Judea. His followers even began minting their own coins, until Roman legionaries crushed the rebels at the battle of Beitar in 135 CE. Excavations in the old city of Jerusalem recent unearthed one of those coins:

The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) says that it is the only coin from the period bearing the name “Jerusalem” that has been found in the ancient part of the holy city. According to IAA archaeologists, “it is possible that a Roman soldier from the Tenth Legion found the coin during one of the battles across the country and brought it to their camp in Jerusalem as a souvenir.”

The obverse of the coin is decorated with a cluster of grapes and the inscription, “Year Two of the Freedom of Israel.” Its reverse side features a palm tree and the inscription, “Jerusalem.”

Donald Tzvi Ariel, who has examined more than 22,000 coins discovered in excavations in the Old City in Jerusalem, said that only four of these date to the period of the Bar Kokhba revolt.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.