Israeli archaeologists recently uncovered a 3,200-year-old fortification near the center of the country. As Jonathan Laden explains, it dates from the period described in the book of Judges:

The book of Judges . . . describes a period when the tribes of Israel were in the land of Canaan, but were not united. As Ellis Easterly [has argued, the Hebrew word usually rendered “judge”], shofet, could better be translated as “warrior ruler.” These leaders’ distinguishing feature was their rare ability to get more than one tribe to follow them, generally uniting militarily to fight and defeat threatening neighbors: including the Ammonites, Canaanites, Moabites, Midianites, Philistines, and Mesopotamians.

The archaeologists [who made the discovery] explain the complicated geopolitics of the region, consistent with the stories of Judges, at a time when new powers emerged in the Land of Israel. At the time, Canaan had been controlled by the powerful Egyptian empire, but the Philistines and Israelites both became major competitors, the Israelites settling in the mountains, and the Philistines building major cities Ashkelon, Ashdod, and Gath along the coast. The fortress may have been built by the Canaanites and the Egyptians who ruled them to try and protect the kingdom of Lachish from Philistine Gath.

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.