Perhaps the best way to understand the intellectual deformations of anti-Semitism or the psychologies of those who serve totalitarian regimes is through literary explorations like Kafka’s. But for those who prefer the historical method, it’s hard to do much better than the careful works of Richard J. Evans, who recently wrote Hitler’s People, a study of the 22 high-ranking Nazis closest to Führer. Josef Joffe writes in his review:

Evans stays sober. Hitler was “neither a political nor a military genius.” Perhaps. Yet his record was quite impressive. A man who molded a disheveled, rudderless [Nazi party] into the mightiest party machine of his time. He demolished his rivals within, outfoxed the West in the runup to World War II, conquered almost all of Europe, and made it to the gates of Moscow.

Was German anti-Semitism the engine of his rise? Actually, there was less Jew-hatred in the Kaiserreich, [the German regime of 1871 to 1918] than in France (recall the Dreyfus Affair). Was it the humiliation inflicted by the victors of World War I? By 1925 Germany was back at the table, scoring diplomatic wins east and west. The Depression? It spewed forth fascism in Italy and Eastern Europe—no Teutons needed. Complicit in the Holocaust, Poles and Ukrainians did not have to read Mein Kampf.

Books like Hitler’s People and Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners are helpful guides, though these, too, do not crack the cosmic puzzle.

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.