Last summer, South Africa’s chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng was subjected to ferocious criticism after he suggested that his country take a more “balanced” approach to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and spoke in biblical terms of his “love for Israel.” Complaints about his conduct have led to a recent formal ruling that he violated the country’s strict laws prohibiting judges from publicly commenting on political issues, and giving him ten days to apologize—which he refuses to do. But even if there is a case to be made that Mogoeng ran afoul of official codes of conduct, argues Milton Shain, the response to the affair by both the press and the authorities betrays something far more troubling:

For decades the Jewish state has been maligned and the ideology of Zionism mangled [in South Africa]. Ironically, vilification [of Israel] in the 1950s emanated mainly from the radical white right. Neo-Nazis such as Ray Rudman, for example, located malevolent Jewish power in the Zionist enterprise. . . . Today the anti-Zionist left mirrors the old radical white right. It too characterizes Israel in sinister terms: the Jewish state is at the center of a vast conspiracy, nefariously manipulating global and domestic politics and finance.

In power since 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) has in effect separated “good” Jews from “bad” (Zionist) Jews. . . . Essentially, the ANC and the progressive left see Zionism through an South Africa prism. With a mind-boggling sweep of one-sided history, rooted firmly in a colonial settler paradigm and devoid of even a shred of historical sensitivity, . . . it simplistically frames a 100-year-old conflict within an apartheid framework, an approach largely jettisoned by serious scholars of the subject. No place is left for complexity or competing narratives.

While antagonism towards Israel cannot axiomatically be equated with anti-Semitism, it is apparent that the discourse of anti-Zionism often goes beyond the bounds of normal political rhetoric and frequently betrays vulgar Jew-hatred. Israel alone is signaled out for obloquy, while the human-rights abuses of many other states are ignored. Mogoeng made this clear. In so doing he crossed a red line.

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.