While archaeologists routinely find artifacts from the biblical and Roman periods in the Old City of Jerusalem, a recent excavation near the Western Wall yielded historical items of much more recent vintage. James Rogers writes:

Archaeologists were excavating beneath the entrance lobby of the Western Wall tunnels [last] Wednesday when they found machine-gun magazines full of bullets, bayonets, and rifle parts. . . . The ammunition stash was found hidden in a cistern dating back to the period of the British Mandate in Palestine, which ended in 1948. The finds were examined by Israeli police bomb disposal experts.

“Apparently,” [said the archaeologists], “this is an ammunition dump that was purposely hidden by soldiers of the Royal Jordanian Army during the Six-Day War, perhaps when the IDF liberated the Old City.”

“This is ammunition that was produced in Britain in the Greenwood and Batley Ltd. factories in Leeds, Yorkshire,” added Assaf Peretz, of the Israel Antiquities Authority, who identified the ammunition.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.