Last Sunday was the anniversary of Ariel Sharon’s death. Elliott Abrams reflects on what the general and statesman would say were he alive today:

He would surely express no surprise at the deadlock in negotiations with the PLO. Getting out of Gaza was, most of his closest collaborators believe, step one in setting Israel’s borders. Step two might have been a pullback of settlers (but not the IDF) to the security fence that Sharon built to stop terrorism. Sharon had no faith in the “peace process” and believed Israel should act when that process failed to move forward. If peace came, in ten or 20 or 50 years, that would be fine; meanwhile, Israel would have semi-permanent and defensible borders. . . .

What he would have done about Iran’s nuclear program cannot fairly be guessed. But it is fair to say that he would have taken immense satisfaction that his “tiny small country,” as he once described it to me, now emerges as the only really strong state and reliable American ally in the entire region.

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.