Founded in 1996, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is committed primarily to opposing Zionism and to boycotting and libeling the Jewish state. Not content to defend those who disguise their hatred of Jews as hatred of Israel, it has also defended such figures as Louis Farrakhan. Miriam Elman provides a history of the group, and demonstrates that is has undergone a disturbing transformation: originally, it merely provided cover for other anti-Zionist groups, effectively saying, “We’re Jewish and we have no problem with them.” But more recently, Elman argues, it has become an engine of anti-Semitic propaganda, most notably the canard that Israel trains U.S. policemen to abuse African Americans, a claim that has made its way to such prominent Israel-haters as the Muslim activist Linda Sarsour and Temple University’s Marc Lamont Hill.

In a particularly telling episode, JVP activists recently found themselves protesting alongside white supremacists at a pro-Israel event held at a San Antonio church. (Video, 65 minutes.)

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.