Among the many documents that have been discovered in the famed Cairo Genizah—the storage room for sacred texts in the Ben Ezra synagogue—is but single sheet of parchment, measuring 16.3 by 12 centimeters, and known formally as Genizah MS 17. Alexandra Trachsel tells its story:

Genizah MS 17 is what we call a palimpsest. . . . The word palimpsest is a transliteration of the Greek word palimpsēstos. It literally means “scraped again,” from palin “once more” and the verb psaō, “to scrape.” The term describes a sheet of parchment that has been prepared for reuse by scratching off what was originally written on it so that a new text can be written on top of it.

This document’s presence in the Cairo Genizah is explained by the later-added “upper script.” The Hebrew text has been deciphered as a pair of liturgical poems (piyyutim). As sacred texts, these could not simply be thrown away, so they were stored in the Genizah to await ritual burial. Yet the now “lower” first text is not of Jewish origin, and is an extract of a martyrological text that tells of how a Christian named Plato (no relation to the philosopher: in the Greek Orthodox tradition he is known as Saint Plato the Great of Ancyra) refused to worship the pagan gods and was put to death.

This latter text has been identified as an excerpt from an anonymous Byzantine version of the Passion of St. Plato of Ancyra. . . . Analysis of the handwriting [allows] us to date this document to the late 5th or early 6th century CE. The writing style also suggests that the codex from which this leaf was taken was probably produced somewhere in the eastern half of the Mediterranean basin. Beyond this we cannot reasonably speculate further. There is no evidence whatsoever to help us understand how this text ended up in a Jewish community that reused the parchment to write down some liturgical poetry.

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.