Despite everything, yesterday was a happy day. Three Israeli hostages, Emily Damari, Doron Steinbrecher, and Romi Gonen, were released alive 471 days after they were kidnapped and have been reunited with their families.

Is the ceasefire a good deal or not a good deal? I don’t know, but I have my doubts. On the one hand, while Israel severely weakened Hamas and dealt devastating blows to Iran and its regional proxies, it didn’t destroy Hamas entirely, which was one of its war aims. On the other hand, maybe it was never really possible to destroy Hamas entirely and to accomplish the other main war aim, bringing the hostages home. That’s what the hostages were good for, after all, from Hamas’s perspective. And as Israel has done many times, it has put an astonishing value on the rescue of its captives. By the time the exchange is done, Hamas will have released thirty-three hostages, dead or alive, including now two-year old Kfir Bibas and his five-year-old brother Ariel, and Israel will have released up to 1,904 prisoners and detainees, including Zakaria Zubeidi, who organized a suicide bombing in Beit She’an that killed six, and Mahmud Abu Varda, convicted of masterminding the 1996 bus bombing in Jerusalem that killed forty-five.

I don’t claim to speak for all the Jews, but I think that almost every Jewish person I know thinks that it is right, if infuriating, to put the war aim of rescuing the hostages above the war aim of eradicating Hamas altogether.

What comes next? Today, I am just happy that the three hostages are home and am not going to catalogue the absurdity of some of what we have seen and heard in the last few days, starting with all the Hamas fighters suddenly finding their misplaced uniforms. But I think that both sides should use the next weeks, before the ceasefire expires, to try to negotiate a permanent deal. What does a permanent deal look like? It is not rocket science. Everyone has known for decades what a permanent deal looks like. The Palestinians will renounce their claim to return to land inside the 1967 borders of Israel. Israel will recognize a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. There will be security guaranties for Israel against the kind of terrorist and military attacks that have made peace so difficult up to now. There will be some agreed land swaps and an agreement on the status of Jerusalem. There will be international aid for the reconstruction of Gaza. Israel and the Arab states, including Palestine, will normalize their relations.

If I were an advocate for the Palestinians, I would feel frustrated every time someone brought up Israel’s long history of accepting peace deals and the Palestinian’s long history of rejecting them. The way I would deal with my frustration would be to encourage the Palestinians to say “yes” instead of “no.” That will show those Zionists that they are just wrong about the Palestinian people’s desire for a two-state solution! I am actually hopeful that this may be possible now. I am not hopeful when I look at what some Western self-appointed advocates for the Palestinians are saying. They don’t seem to want a permanent ceasefire but instead see yesterday’s news as a strategic pause on the way to Palestinian victory, which for them means eradication of the Jewish state. But I am more hopeful when I think about the Palestinians who live in Gaza. They have suffered the devastating consequences of the war that their government started with the atrocities of October 7, and I hope that they are ready to try something new.

With a pause in the fighting also comes an opportunity to try to stem the flood of antisemitism that seems to have swelled all over the world. Antisemitism is a problem for the Jews who have to live with it. It’s a problem for Israel, which wants friendly relations with countries around the world, and which relies on the bipartisan consensus in the United States that a secure and democratic Israeli ally in the Middle East is in America’s interest—a consensus that we will all have to work hard to strengthen in light of the antisemitism on the left that has shown itself to be just as problematic as the more well-known antisemitism of the right. But it is a problem for everyone else, too, because antisemitism, today as in the past, is really a symptom of societal problems and trends that will lead to bad consequences not just for the Jews who are its targets, but for all of us.