Were he appointed dictator for a day, Gilad Alper knows what he would do to fix Israel’s economy: abolish certain taxes, deregulate imports from Europe and the U.S., and address the perennial issues of housing costs and educational inequality:

The high cost of housing is largely due to state control of 93 percent of land and to the planning committees, a cumbersome bureaucratic mechanism that only benefits the clerks who work there. The dictatorial solution? Selling all the land to all who are interested and disbanding the planning committees. Let the citizens build houses and businesses. Release us from the stranglehold of bureaucrats.

The most challenging but perhaps the most important issue [is] education. The educational system is a clumsy behemoth because it is a state monopoly. The only solutions the present system can provide waste buckets of money on pathetic and ineffective “reforms.” The real solution is increasing competition and breaking the government stranglehold. We can achieve this through the voucher system—an equal distribution of tax money to parents that is to be used to send their children to a private school of their choosing.

Tamir Hayman analyzes the latest reports about an offer by Hamas to release three female soldiers in exchange for 150 captured terrorists, of whom 90 have received life sentences; then, if that exchange happens successfully, a second stage of the deal will begin.

If this does happen, Israel will release all the serious prisoners who had been sentenced to life and who are associated with Hamas, which will leave Israel without any bargaining chips for the second stage. In practice, Israel will release everyone who is important to Hamas without getting back all the hostages. In this situation, it’s evident that Israel will approach the second stage of the negotiations in the most unfavorable way possible. Hamas will achieve all its demands in the first stage, except for a commitment from Israel to end the war completely.

How does this relate to the fighting in Rafah? Hayman explains:

In the absence of an agreement or compromise by Hamas, it is detrimental for Israel to continue the static situation we were in. It is positive that new energy has entered the campaign. . . . The [capture of the] border of the Gaza Strip and the Rafah crossing are extremely important achievements, while the ongoing dismantling of the battalions is of secondary importance.

That being said, Hayman is critical of the approach to negotiations taken so far:

Gradual hostage trades don’t work. We must adopt a different concept of a single deal in which Israel offers a complete cessation of the war in exchange for all the hostages.