T EL AVIV — “They are in our hands,” IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari said on the huge screen that was broadcasting the tense release of the three hostages returned to Israel, Romi Gonen, Emily Damari ...

The ceasefire is a terrific deal: Innocents released. Families reunited. Hope ignited. Evil, to an extent, defeated. National solidarity, and Jewish solidarity, reinvigorated. A terrific deal.

The song is hardly the first to imagine a brighter future for Israelis at a time of adversity. Naomi Shemer’s “Machar,” or tomorrow, composed in the early 1960s, similarly depicts a future of regional ...