Earlier this month, an exhibit opened at Manhattan’s Center for Jewish History, titled The Instant Art of Morris Katz and dedicated to a Borscht Belt comedian whose medium wasn’t the monologue, but the painting. Julia Gergely writes:

Appearing at Borscht Belt hotels like Grossinger’s, the Concord, Kutsher’s, and Brown’s, Katz would whip up thousands of original paintings while his customers looked on. Landscapes, rabbis, clowns, and animals would emerge in just a few minutes in a method he called “instant art.” While he painted, Katz bantered with the audience in Yiddish and English, telling jokes and talking about his life.

Born in Poland in 1932, Katz survived Nazi concentration camps, then arrived at a displaced-persons camp in Germany at age thirteen. There, he learned to paint from a former teacher with the Warsaw Academy. He arrived in New York City in 1949 at age seventeen, where he studied art at the Art Students League before creating his “instant art” technique in 1956.

“He did it by dipping a palette knife into a bucket of paint, literally throwing the paint on the canvas, sort of squishing it around and then dabbing it with toilet paper to eventually create a kind of landscape or a scene or a character,” said [the curator Eddy] Portnoy, who saw Katz’s act in Israel in 1989. “He was able to create paintings within just a couple of minutes.”

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.