On a hiking trail with his classmates in the Aravah desert, near the ominously named Scorpions Pass, an Israeli teenager recently came across an item that archaeologists identified as an ancient oil lamp. Gavriel Fiske writes:

The trail was once an ancient trade route connected to the copper mines in the region and was patrolled and secured by Roman soldiers, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said in a press release, and noted that an identical oil lamp was found in the same location 90 years before.

The oil lamp was produced in the ancient Nabatean city of Petra, in Jordan, in the 4th or 5th century CE, and similar lamps have been found in other sites in the area, the IAA senior researcher Tali Erickson-Gini said.

A line of forts was built along the route, garrisoned by Roman soldiers who patrolled the road on horseback, securing the important shipments of copper from the mines. “It is easy to imagine the lamp lighting up the darkness in the lonely, isolated fort manned by Roman soldiers,” Erickson-Gini explained.

Calling the proposal to depopulate Gaza completely (if temporarily) “unworkable,” Peter Berkowitz makes the case for a similar, but more feasible, plan:

The United States along with Saudi Arabia and the UAE should persuade Egypt by means of generous financial inducements to open the sparsely populated ten-to-fifteen miles of Sinai adjacent to Gaza to Palestinians seeking a fresh start and better life. Egypt would not absorb Gazans and make them citizens but rather move Gaza’s border . . . westward into Sinai. Fences would be erected along the new border. The Israel Defense Force would maintain border security on the Gaza-extension side, Egyptian forces on the other. Egypt might lease the land to the Palestinians for 75 years.

The Sinai option does not involve forced transfer of civilian populations, which the international laws of war bar. As the United States, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other partners build temporary dwellings and then apartment buildings and towns, they would provide bus service to the Gaza-extension. Palestinian families that choose to make the short trip would receive a key to a new residence and, say, $10,000.

The Sinai option is flawed. . . . Then again, all conventional options for rehabilitating and governing Gaza are terrible.