Last week, the Israel-based human-rights group B’Tselem declared the Jewish state guilty of “apartheid,” a claim American and European media quickly and uncritically disseminated. Yoseph Haddad was not persuaded:

How dare they say that I, an Arab Israeli who served along with Jewish soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces and [later] managed hundreds of Jewish employees, live under an apartheid regime? How can anyone say [Arab-Israeli] society is living under an apartheid regime when among us you will find doctors, judges, and even lawmakers? . . . [T]o compare Israel to an apartheid regime for its racial laws is not only a distorted lie but an insult to all those South Africans who actually lived through apartheid.

I am not here to claim that everything in Israel is perfect. Some things need to be fixed. But . . . . I look around at our neighbors in the region and thank god I was born in the state of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. . . . When B’Tselem’s director Ḥagai El-Ad, who is Jewish, decides that I, my Arab family, and my Arab friends are all living under an apartheid regime, he and his organizations are basically telling us they see us as second-class citizens.

To my delight, Israel will likely be the first country to exit the coronavirus crisis, and in a few months, people from around the world may be able to come here and see what apartheid looks like in Israel for themselves. Then they will be able to hear Hebrew and Arabic spoken in the Nazareth marketplace, they will see mosques, churches, and synagogues alongside one another in Jaffa, and see the coexistence of the Israeli mosaic across the country. And maybe, just maybe, their visit here will make them want to live under an apartheid regime.

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.