After hosting both Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas at the White House, the president now seems to be serious about restarting the peace process. But, argues Lee Smith, while President Trump—author of the Art of the Deal—prides himself on his ability as a negotiator, his skill won’t help here.

[I]n Trump’s view, and in the view of a generation of Middle East experts in Washington, the peace process is, in fact, nothing more than a real-estate deal waiting to happen—with all the architectural designs filed and more or less approved a long time ago. As all the Washington experts say—everyone knows what a final deal will look like. The Palestinians get this chunk of real estate and the Israelis hold on to that chunk, with the requisite amount of horse-trading, complaints, and threats in-between. Donald Trump has certainly been there before.

Which should give President Trump pause. Seen through the eyes of a real-estate developer, the problem with “the biggest deal there is” should be obvious: Mahmoud Abbas, and the cause he represents, is history’s most stubborn holdout. Everyone in the real-estate business knows what a holdout is—it’s the [troublesome] widow or small business owner or local lawyer who stubbornly, unreasonably refuses to sell his or her tiny lot, no matter what price the developer offers. . . .

It’s hard not to admire the holdouts—stubborn, proud people who feel they’ve swallowed enough garbage their whole lives, and when they get a chance to stick it to “the man,” they’re not going to fold. . . . [But] the holdouts are fools. You certainly wouldn’t want them handling your life savings. Sure, there is more to life than money, but stubbornness for the sake of a small footnote in real-estate lore doesn’t put food on the table—or provide for the next generation. . . .

It’s true that Abbas knows his time is just about up, and he wants his legacy carved in stone. But that legacy is not a peace deal, and it’s not even rejecting a peace deal quietly as he did when he turned down [the former Israeli prime minister Ehud] Olmert. No, this is Abbas’s moment in the spotlight—and he’s going to make the American president who wants to make the big deal beg him to sell and sign before he tells him to take a hike.

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.