What If They Were Real?

WHO IS GAZELLES BOUNCE ROHINGYA MAKING BACK IN MOUNTAINS REFUGEES SURE THE OF A WAR ZONE GIVE MACHINES Weekend PAGE 4 | WORLD VOICE AREN’T TO THEIR RACIST? PLIGHT THROUGH PAGE 9 | FAIRY-TALE DESIGNER BUSINESS PAINTING FACES LEBANON’S SOCCER FAN UPDATES HARSH REALITIES CITY OLD-FASHIONED PAGE 16 | WAY: WITH ROCKETS WEEKEND PAGE 17 | STYLE PAGE 15 | SPORTS .. INTERNATIONAL EDITION | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 20-21, 2021 Inequalities In 1883, 15 manuscript fragments were found near the Dead Sea. Terror reigns in vaccine Said to be a version of the Book of Deuteronomy, they caused a sensation, in Ethiopian until they were denounced as forgeries and disappeared. distribution Now a scholar is asking: region mired Spencer Bokat-Lindell in violence What if they were real? Tigrayans say civilians OPINION are being targeted for Three interminably long months in, their leaders’ rebellion America’s coronavirus vaccine rollout is blessedly and finally going well. But the BY DECLAN WALSH global one is very much not: For every 100 people on the planet, only five have The calm is deceptive. received a shot. Models predict there A stubbled crater attests to a recent won’t be enough doses for the world’s artillery barrage, but with its bustling population until 2023 or 2024, and what streets and shops, the highland Ethi- doses there are have been snatched up opian city of Mekelle has an air of rela- by the world’s richest countries, creat- tive peace. ing what a senior United Nations official Then the stories start spilling out. has called a “global vaccine apartheid.” Of the hospital that begins its days How can the global vaccine distribu- with an influx of bodies bearing gunshot tion be made more equitable? or knife wounds — people killed, rela- According to the tives and Red Cross workers say, for Many experts Kaiser Family Foun- breaching the nightly curfew. argue that dation, enough vac- Of the young man who made the mis- cine has already been take of getting into a heated argument a vaccine purchased to immu- with a government soldier in a bar. “apartheid” nize 80 percent of the Hours later, friends said, four soldiers is not only world’s adult popula- followed him home and beat him to morally un- tion. But high-income death with beer bottles. conscionable countries, which Of a nightlong battle between govern- but also account for just 20 ment forces and local militia fighters in a self-defeating. percent of the world’s nearby town and its aftermath, when adult population, soldiers returning to collect their dead have bought more stormed into nearby homes, firing indis- than half of all doses. criminately. As a result, only about one in four people “I’m lucky to be alive,” said Alefesha in lower-income countries can expect a Hadusha, her head swaddled in band- shot this year. ages, as she gave a whispered account The moral argument against this in a hospital ward. Her parents and two hoarding of lifesaving medicine — what brothers were killed instantly, she said. the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci approv- An X-ray by her bed showed the bullet ingly calls “the hippie dippy wishful lodged in her head. thinking” argument — is self-evident. THE BRITISH LIBRARY When Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy But there is a growing chorus of experts Ahmed, began a sweeping military op- who argue that vaccine nationalism is BY JENNIFER SCHUESSLER been granted a few minutes with several guistic and literary evidence to argue “Qumran was a massive shift,” eration in the restive region of Tigray on not only morally unconscionable but of the fragments, after promising to hold that the manuscript was an authentic Na’ama Pat-El, an expert in classical Se- Nov. 4, he cast his goal in narrow terms: also self-defeating. In 1883, a Jerusalem antiquities dealer his judgment until the museum issued ancient artifact. mitic languages at the University of to capture the leadership of the region’s The epidemiological argument named Moses Wilhelm Shapira an- its report. But the next morning, he went But Dershowitz makes an even more Texas in Austin, said, referring to the ruling party. The party, the Tigray Peo- against vaccine hoarding is that the nounced the discovery of a remarkable to the press and denounced them as dramatic claim. The text, which he has area where the Dead Sea Scrolls were ple’s Liberation Front, had brazenly de- virus can’t be defeated anywhere until artifact: 15 manuscript fragments, sup- forgeries. reconstructed from 19th-century tran- found. “What Idan is offering is some- fied his authority for months, and then it’s defeated everywhere. posedly discovered in a cave near the The museum’s expert agreed, and a scriptions and drawings, is not a re- thing that’s at least equivalent, if not attacked a federal military base. “As long as there are large swaths of Dead Sea. Blackened with a pitchlike distraught Shapira fled London. Six working of Deuteronomy, he argues, but more. It’s pretty incredible if he’s right.” But four months on, the operation has people who are unprotected, then we’re substance, their paleo-Hebrew script months later, he committed suicide in a a precursor to it, dating to the period of For Dershowitz, the dismissal of degenerated into a bitter civil conflict going to see variants continue to pop nearly illegible, they contained what hotel room in the Netherlands. The the First Temple, before the Babylonian Shapira’s manuscript nearly 140 years marked by accounts of rights violations up,” Ruth Faden, a bioethics professor at Shapira claimed was the original Book manuscript was auctioned for a pittance Exile. That would make it the oldest ago was not just a mistake, but “a trage- — massacres, sexual violence, ethnic Johns Hopkins University, tells The of Deuteronomy, perhaps even Moses’ in 1885, and soon disappeared altogeth- known biblical manuscript by far, and an dy” — and not just for Shapira. cleansing and fears that starvation is be- Atlantic. “And it’s likely that some of own copy. er. unprecedented window into the origins “It’s mind-boggling that for almost ing used as a war tactic — that have set those variants will evolve to escape the The discovery drew newspaper head- Since then, the Shapira affair has and evolution of the Bible and biblical re- the entire existence of the discipline of off alarm across the world. power of vaccines.” lines around the world, and Shapira of- haunted the edges of respectable bibli- ligion. Bible studies, this text that tells us more In Mekelle, the region’s biggest city, Not everyone agrees with this argu- fered the treasure to the British Mu- cal scholarship, as a rollicking caper Dershowitz’s research, closely than any other manuscript discovered many Tigrayans say they feel that they, ment’s premise, though: Ms. Tufekci seum for a million pounds. While the wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a cau- guarded until now, has yet to get broad before or since hasn’t been part of the not their leaders, are the true targets of finds it quite easy to imagine a world in museum’s expert evaluated it, two frag- tionary tale. But now, a young scholar is scrutiny. Scholars who previewed his conversation,” he said. the campaign. which high-income countries also hoard ments were put on display, attracting staking his own credibility by asking, findings at a closed-door seminar at This is a particularly fraught moment Hospitals are filled with casualties BOKAT-LINDELL, PAGE 13 throngs of visitors, including Prime what if this notorious fake was real? Harvard in 2019 are divided, a taste of to reconsider a famous fake. Last year, from the fighting that rages in the coun- Minister William Gladstone. In a just-published scholarly article fierce debates likely to come. the Museum of the Bible in Washington tryside, many of them terrified civilians The New York Times publishes opinion Then disaster struck. and companion book, Idan Dershowitz, But if Dershowitz is correct, some ex- announced findings that all the Dead arriving with grievous wounds. from a wide range of perspectives in Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, a a 38-year-old Israeli-American scholar perts say, it will be the most consequen- Sea Scroll fragments in its collection Schools house some of the 71,000 peo- hopes of promoting constructive debate swashbuckling French archaeologist at the University of Potsdam in Ger- tial Bible-related discovery since the were modern forgeries. And more than ple who fled to the city, often bringing about consequential questions. and longtime nemesis of Shapira’s, had many, marshals a range of archival, lin- Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. BIBLE, PAGE 5 ETHIOPIA, PAGE 6 Meatless school lunches hit a nerve in France LYON, FRANCE He is a slight man whose mischievous mien and goatee give him the air of one of Dumas’s three musketeers. A political neophyte elected last year, he clearly Tweak to children’s menus finds it a little ludicrous that he, an apos- in the food-loving city tle of less, should end up with more, sit- ting beneath a 25-foot ceiling in a cav- KARA SWISHER DOESN’T of Lyon divides a nation ernous mayor’s office adorned with bro- DO EASY INTERVIEWS. cade and busts of his forbears. That BY ROGER COHEN tweaking a local school menu has split the nation leaves him incredulous. Grégory Doucet, the mild-mannered “My decision was purely pragmatic,” Green party mayor of Lyon, hardly he insisted, eyes twinkling — a means to seems a revolutionary. But he has up- speed up lunches in socially distanced ended France by announcing last month times by offering a single menu rather that elementary school lunch menus for than the traditional choice of two dishes.

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