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.

In a sense, the most successful negotiation with Hamas was the recent agreement securing the release of Edan Alexander, the last living hostage with a U.S. passport. Unlike those previously handed over, he wasn’t exchanged for Palestinian prisoners, and there was no cease-fire. Dan Diker explains what Hamas got out of the deal:

Alexander’s unconditional release [was] designed to legitimize Hamas further as a viable negotiator and to keep Hamas in power, particularly at a moment when Israel is expanding its military campaign to conquer Gaza and eliminate Hamas as a military, political, and civil power. Israel has no other option than defeating Hamas. Hamas’s “humanitarian” move encourages American pressure on Israel to end its counterterrorism war in service of advancing additional U.S. efforts to release hostages over time, legitimizing Hamas while it rearms, resupplies, and reestablishes it military power and control.

In fact, Hamas-affiliated media have claimed credit for successful negotiations with the U.S., branding the release of Edan Alexander as the “Edan deal,” portraying Hamas as a rising international player, sidelining Israel from direct talks with DC, and declaring this a “new phase in the conflict.”

Fortunately, however, Washington has not coerced Jerusalem into ceasing the war since Alexander’s return. Nor, Diker observes, did the deal drive a wedge between the two allies, despite much speculation about the possibility.