Last week, it seemed that the ongoing attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip were finally winding down, as Egypt seemed close to brokering a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. But the weekly demonstration at the Gaza border fence again turned into a deadly riot, and IDF border guards returned fire, killing five. Islamic Jihad, a Gaza-based and Iran-backed terrorist group, then responded by launching a barrage of rockets at Israeli town and villages—to which Jerusalem responded with some 80 airstrikes on Hamas military installations in the Strip. Now calm has returned. Yoni Ben Menachem argues that Iran was directly responsible for the attacks:

Iran is bankrolling all the activities of Islamic Jihad in Gaza and the West Bank and providing it with new weapons. Islamic Jihad is the second-largest organization in the Gaza Strip after Hamas, and there is a very high level of coordination between both groups. According to sources in Gaza, [the group’s leader], Ziad Nahlah, received instructions from Iran to sabotage the understandings with Egypt. . . . Additionally, on a personal level, he is angry with the leaders of Egyptian intelligence because they ignored his new initiative for internal Palestinian reconciliation, and for this reason he is not participating in the talks on reducing hostilities with Israel. . . .

[Another] reason for Iran ordering Islamic Jihad to escalate the situation in Gaza is connected to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Oman on October 26. The Iranians are concerned that Oman will mediate between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and will help President Trump implement his new diplomatic plan for a solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. . . .

Iran intends to drag Israel into an extensive military conflict in the Gaza Strip through provocations from Islamic Jihad, thus burying any chance of Omani mediation in the political process and keeping the IDF and Israeli air force occupied on the southern front instead of in the north, where Iran is building its military presence in Syria.

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.