At the end of this month, Yeshiva University’s Museum at the Center for Israel Studies will be unveiling an exhibit on the Samaritans, marking “the first time that important Samaritan artifacts preserved in museums and libraries worldwide—including paintings, manuscripts, priceless books, photography, ritual objects, and archaeological discoveries from Greece, Italy, and Israel—have been compiled.” JNS reports:

The Samaritans have been around for thousands of years, tracing their lineage to the “lost” northern tribes of Israel and living alongside Jews, Christians, and Muslims for centuries.

Yet this ancient group remains a mystery, which . . . an international team of scholars, historians, artists and Yeshiva University students have spent the last six years unraveling.

Central to the project is a documentary by the cultural historian and author Moshe Alafi called The Samaritans: A Biblical People, which will get its first public viewing at the launch event. A cookbook, called Samaritan Cookbook: A Culinary Odyssey from the Ancient Israelites to the Modern Mediterranean—the first-ever cookbook of Samaritan cuisine in English—will also be featured, along with a pop-up art exhibition created specifically for this project by the New York-based non-profit Jewish Art Salon.

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.