Yesterday, the Israeli prime minister arrived in the U.S., and he plans to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, but it remains uncertain whether he will meet with President Biden. Nonetheless, Amit Yagur urges Benjamin Netanyahu to use the trip for ordinary as well as public diplomacy—“assuming,” Yagur writes, “there is someone to talk to in the politically turbulent U.S.” He argues that the first priority should be discussing how to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons. But there are other issues to tackle as well:

From the American perspective, as long as Hamas is not the official ruler in the Gaza Strip, any solution agreed upon is good. For Israel, however, it is quite clear that if Hamas remains a legitimate power factor, even if it does not head the leadership in Gaza, sooner or later, Gaza will reach the Hizballah model in Lebanon. To clarify, this means that Hamas is the actual ruler of the Strip, and sooner or later, we will see a [return] of its military capabilities as well as its actual control over the population. . . .

The UN aid organization UNRWA . . . served as a platform for Hamas terrorist elements to establish, disguise, and use UN infrastructure for terrorism. This is beside the fact that UNRWA essentially perpetuates the conflict rather than helps resolve it. How do we remove the UN and UNRWA from the “day after” equation? Can the American aid organization USAID step into UNRWA’s shoes, and what assistance can the U.S. provide to Israel in re-freezing donor-country contributions to UNRWA?

Reviewing Stranger Than Fiction, a new history of the 20th-century novel, Joseph Epstein draws attention to what’s missing:

A novelist and short-story writer who gets no mention whatsoever in Stranger Than Fiction is Isaac Bashevis Singer. When from time to time I am asked who among the writers of the past half century is likely to be read 50 years from now, Singer’s is the first name that comes to mind. His novels and stories can be sexy, but sex, unlike in many of the novels of Norman Mailer, William Styron, or Philip Roth, is never chiefly about sex. His stories are about that much larger subject, the argument of human beings with God. What Willa Cather and Isaac Bashevis Singer have that too few of the other novelists discussed in Stranger Than Fiction possess are central, important, great subjects.