Leonard Cohen arrived in Israel for the first time in 1973, worried that he “would not get the blessing.” As the Mosaic contributor Matti Friedman documents in a new book, he somehow ended up at the front during the Yom Kippur War, performing for dumbfounded young soldiers. Ari Hoffman writes in his review:

By the time he reached Israel, Cohen’s early star was no longer at its brightest. He was not a prodigy anymore, and the promise of his school-day literary career seemed to have given way to something far more bitter: what he described as living “inside of hatred and keeping to my side of the bed and always screaming, ‘No, this can’t be my life,’ inside my head.”

The man who decided to go to Israel was pushed just as much by a sense of Zionist longing. He was worried that he “would not get the blessing,” an especially dire fate for someone descended from the priests of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem whose ancestral job it was to dispense benedictions.

The existence of what Mr. Friedman calls “a concert tour, maybe one of the greatest, certainly one of the strangest” ever taken is a certainty, but those hoping for a minute-by-minute transcription won’t find one. It lives on as “underground history,” and pinning down exactly why Cohen went and what he did once he was there is akin to counting grains of sand.

Considering the current state of Israel-Arab relations, Ghaith al-Omari writes

First and foremost, no ceasefire will be possible without the release of Israeli hostages and commitments to disarm Hamas and remove it from power. The final say on these matters rests with Hamas commanders on the ground in Gaza, who have been largely impervious to foreign pressure so far. At minimum, however, the United States should insist that Qatari and Egyptian mediators push Hamas’s external leadership to accept these conditions publicly, which could increase pressure on the group’s Gaza leadership.

Washington should also demand a clear, public position from key Arab states regarding disarmament. The Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas endorsed this position in a June letter to Saudi Arabia and France, giving Arab states Palestinian cover for endorsing it themselves.

Some Arab states have already indicated a willingness to play a significant role, but they will have little incentive to commit resources and personnel to Gaza unless Israel (1) provides guarantees that it will not occupy the Strip indefinitely, and (2) removes its veto on a PA role in Gaza’s future, even if only symbolic at first. Arab officials are also seeking assurances that any role they play in Gaza will be in the context of a wider effort to reach a two-state solution.

On the other hand, Washington must remain mindful that current conditions between Israel and the Palestinians are not remotely conducive to . . . implementing a two-state solution.