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Mar. 5, 2021
Of late, the image of a wild boar that I first saw a few months ago at the Stockade and Tower Museum at Kibbutz Hanita has snuck back into my thoughts. Most of the rather old-fashioned exhibition in the small museum way up north is devoted to the story of modern Jews and their land settlement enterprise – including the so-called stockade and tower communities – in Mandatory Palestine. But for my money, the museum’s most interesting room is the one displaying evidence of human habitation on the hills up there in different periods: hunter-gatherers who honed stones into knives (more than 10 thousand years ago); Phoenician inscriptions (from approximately 3,000 B.C.E.) found, together with other objects, in the burial caves in the nearby forest; and the crowning glory, three mosaics, among them one of a boar, created from thousands of brown-black-bluish stones, that were once part of the floor of the fifth-century C.E. Byzantine church that stood here.