A Jordanian Weapons Stockpile Discovered Near the Western Wall

June 30 2020

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.

Read more at Fox News

More about: Archaeology, Israeli history, Jerusalem, Jordan, Six-Day War, Western Wall

American Middle East Policy Should Focus Less on Stability and More on Weakening Enemies

Feb. 10 2025

To Elliott Abrams, Donald Trump’s plan to remove the entire population of Gaza while the Strip is rebuilt is “unworkable,” at least “as a concrete proposal.” But it is welcome insofar as “its sheer iconoclasm might lead to a healthy rethinking of U.S. strategy and perhaps of Arab and Israeli policies as well.” The U.S., writes Abrams, must not only move beyond the failed approach to Gaza, but also must reject other assumptions that have failed time and again. One is the commitment to an illusory stability:

For two decades, what American policymakers have called “stability” has meant the preservation of the situation in which Gaza was entirely under Hamas control, Hizballah dominated Lebanon, and Iran’s nuclear program advanced. A better term for that situation would have been “erosion,” as U.S. influence steadily slipped away and Washington’s allies became less secure. Now, the United States has a chance to stop that process and aim instead for “reinforcement”: bolstering its interests and allies and actively weakening its adversaries. The result would be a region where threats diminish and U.S. alliances grow stronger.

Such an approach must be applied above all to the greatest threat in today’s Middle East, that of a nuclear Iran:

Trump clearly remains open to the possibility (however small) that an aging [Iranian supreme leader Ali] Khamenei, after witnessing the collapse of [his regional proxies], mulling the possibility of brutal economic sanctions, and being fully aware of the restiveness of his own population, would accept an agreement that stops the nuclear-weapons program and halts payments and arms shipments to Iran’s proxies. But Trump should be equally aware of the trap Khamenei might be setting for him: a phony new negotiation meant to ensnare Washington in talks for years, with Tehran’s negotiators leading Trump on with the mirage of a successful deal and a Nobel Peace Prize at the end of the road while the Iranian nuclear-weapons program grows in the shadows.

Read more at Foreign Affairs

More about: Iran, Middle East, U.S. Foreign policy