Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) and Simone Weil (1909–1943) were Jews who earned places of prominence in the history of European thought. As Francis Nataf observes, both underwent “dramatic religious experiences” that led them to forsake secularism—Rosenzweig for Jewish tradition and Weil for the Catholic church. For both, the decision involved a great deal of ambivalence:

Rosenzweig . . . had been planning his baptism to Christianity when he rediscovered his own faith. Yet even after choosing Judaism, he continued to maintain a highly positive perspective on his host nation’s Christian faith. Similarly, even though Weil was highly critical of Judaism, her religious humanism was highly Jewish in both content and form. Also significant in this regard is Weil’s obsessive refusal to be baptized.

Their ambivalence about creed notwithstanding, this pair’s religious intensity and creativity shone clearly. Though raised in the world of academic skepticism, they decided to put God constantly in front of them.

Nataf notes another commonality between the two: an impressive breadth of intellectual engagement and mental horizons, coupled with a desire to take in human experience as a whole:

When we don’t try to understand the sum of existence, however, we lose the significance of its parts, which in turn, often creates a barrier between man and God. God, the Creator, has made sure that all the parts somehow fit together. When we attempt to understand things globally, God’s tapestry can unfold in front of us.

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.