To the late Bezalel Narkiss—for many years the acknowledged dean of the history of Jewish art—any depiction of animals in medieval Jewish manuscripts was merely decorative, a case of borrowing from non-Jewish iconography devoid of any specific symbolism. Marc Michael Epstein takes the opposite position, one he first arrived at thanks to a single illustration, as he writes:

[At] the Israel Museum, I saw a magnificent 15th-century Ashkenazi siddur open to the folio containing the powerful first phrase of the tractate known as “Ethics of the Fathers”: “Moses received the Torah at Sinai, and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua [transmitted it] to the Elders, and the Elders to the Men of the Great Assembly.” The word Moses was elaborately illuminated, and above it stood a black dog, relatively large given the [overall] size of the page. . . .

Dogs abound in medieval Jewish manuscripts. Lapdogs accompany Pharaoh and the Egyptians in the Rylands Haggadah (Catalonia, 14th century). In the Kaufmann Haggadah (Iberia, second half of the 14th century), a tongueless dog barks representing the effects of God’s redeeming power during the Exodus when “not a dog shall whet his tongue at the Children of Israel” (Exodus 11:6–7). A dog chases a hare in another example, right under the rubric, “And the Egyptians pressured us” (Sarajevo Haggadah, Aragon, c. 1320–1335). In all of these cases, the dog is clearly a symbol for the Egyptians, or the enemies of the Jews more generally. . . .

The typical range of meanings for dogs—hunters, pursuers, enemies—is corroborated in Jewish texts. There, dogs represent, for the most part, the pursuing, rapacious enemies of the Jews. “Dogs surround me; a pack of evil ones closes in on me” (Psalms 22:17). How are we, then, to understand a black dog atop the word “Moses”? . . .

[I]f this particular dog is “read” according to the traditions of medieval animal lore and of common wisdom, what better metaphor could we have for the loyal transmission of the divine mandate from generation to generation than the loyal and obedient dog? And what better symbol for Moses himself, called by God “faithful throughout My household” (Numbers 12:7)?

Over the weekend, Elliot Kaufman of the Wall Street Journal reported about a formal letter, signed by five prominent sheikhs from the Judean city of Hebron and addressed to the Israeli economy minister Nir Barkat. The letter proposed that Hebron, one of the West Bank’s largest municipalities, “break out of the Palestinian Authority (PA), establish an emirate of its own, and join the Abraham Accords.” Kaufman spoke with some of the sheikhs, who emphasized their resentment at the PA’s corruption and fecklessness, and their desire for peace.

Responding to these unusual events, Seth Mandel looks back to what he describes as his favorite “‘what if’ moment in the Arab-Israeli conflict,” involving

a plan for the West Bank drawn up in the late 1980s by the former Israeli foreign minister Moshe Arens. The point of the plan was to prioritize local Arab Palestinian leadership instead of facilitating the PLO’s top-down governing approach, which was corrupt and authoritarian from the start.

Mandel, however, is somewhat skeptical about whether such a plan can work in 2025:

Yet, . . . while it is almost surely a better idea than anything the PA has or will come up with, the primary obstacle is not the quality of the plan but its feasibility under current conditions. The Arens plan was a “what if” moment because there was no clear-cut governing structure in the West Bank and the PLO, then led by Yasir Arafat, was trying to direct the Palestinian side of the peace process from abroad (Lebanon, then Tunisia). In fact, Arens’s idea was to hold local elections among the Palestinians in order to build a certain amount of democratic legitimacy into the foundation of the Arab side of the conflict.

Whatever becomes of the Hebron proposal, there is an important lesson for Gaza from the ignored Arens plan: it was a mistake, as one sheikh told Kaufman, to bring in Palestinian leaders who had spent decades in Tunisia and Lebanon to rule the West Bank after Oslo. Likewise, Gaza will do best if led by the people there on the ground, not new leaders imported from the West Bank, Qatar, or anywhere else.