In the wake of the recent summit between the Israeli and Turkish presidents, Ankara has agreed to relinquish to the Jewish state a fragment from the wall of a subterranean Jerusalem tunnel. Known as the Siloam inscription, the text on the fragment is dated by most scholars to the 8th century BCE, the time of the prophet Isaiah. The artifact is currently housed at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. Batya Jerenberg writes:

Israel has wanted the Siloam inscription back for years, as it [supports] a biblical account of the building of a water tunnel in Jerusalem in King Hezekiah’s time, 2,700 years ago. As described in both the books of Kings and Chronicles, the king—afraid of a siege on Jerusalem by the Assyrians—ordered that a tunnel be dug from the pool of Siloam outside the city walls in order to bring the water source into the capital.

Written in paleo-Hebrew on the wall of approximately the midpoint of the tunnel, the inscription describes how the excavators, working from both ends simultaneously, heard each other’s voices and cut through the last bit of rock between them so that the water could flow into Jerusalem.

According to an Israeli official, . . . in exchange for the inscription, Israel will give Turkey a religiously important item from its history, probably an ancient candelabra from the Ottoman period.

The museum also has another ancient caption from Jerusalem, known as the Temple Warning Inscription. Etched on the balustrade of the Second Temple, the tablet cautions pagan visitors not to proceed any further towards the Jewish holy site, on penalty of death.

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.