In a political climate where Israel’s left is relatively weak and the Likud’s major electoral competitor is the centrist Blue-and-White party, Benjamin Netanyahu found himself unable to form a government because he could not get one of the smaller right-wing parties to join his coalition—forcing a second round of elections in September. Such factional squabbles, argues Akiva Bigman, led to the defeat of the right in 1988, when hard-right splinter parties (none of which endured) broke from Yitzḥak Shamir’s Likud after he decided to form a national-unity government with Labor:

[In 1988], Shamir was at the head of the unity government, and Shimon Peres and Yitzḥak Rabin, both of the Labor party, were to serve in the roles of foreign minister and defense minister, respectively. In a speech [to the Knesset], Shamir spoke of his hope for peace with the Arab states and presented Jordan as a solution to the Palestinian problem. Settlements in Judea and Samaria were to remain and be expanded, the status of Jerusalem was not up for discussion, and negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were out of the question, he said. . . .

The alternative to Shamir’s vision was not just theoretical in nature. Representatives on the left had stated their explicit commitment to entering peace talks with the PLO. Shamir succeeded in enlisting Labor in a government that ruled out such negotiations, in an effort to present a broad and unified front to contend with international pressure on the subject. But this did not interest the ideological hawks in the Knesset.

Yuval Ne’eman of the now-defunct ultra-nationalist T’ḥiyah party . . . accused Likud of being a left-wing party in disguise. . . . Rafael Eitan of the now-defunct Tzomet party . . . accused the government of being ineffective because a series of reforms weren’t moving as fast as he would have liked. . . . Last among these ideologues was the late Reḥavam Ze’evi, founder of the Moledet party, [since then absorbed entirely by Jewish Home], who said the government was incapable of contending with Israel’s national-security issues. . . .

The result: these smaller parties joined the opposition, Labor won the 1992 elections, and the Oslo Accords, with their disastrous results, followed.

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.