On January 5, members of the American Historical Association (AHA)—the leading professional organization for academic historians—voted at an annual meeting for a resolution that would “oppose scholasticide in Gaza.” The crime of scholasticide, Jeffrey Herf notes, was concocted in 2009 by UN functionaries specifically to condemn Israel for, supposedly, deliberately destroying Palestinian educational institutions. A group of historians’ conclusion that such a systematic pattern exists, based on the dubious evidence of various UN reports—without considering Israel’s own claims—is, Herf notes, a failure to exercise the most basic principles of the discipline:

Professional historians are frequently faced with the dilemma of assessing conflicting truth claims; an ability to scrutinize sources and evaluate their credibility is essential to the historian’s craft. What are the most reliable sources? Who is telling the truth and who is lying? . . . Israel’s antagonists never bother to engage with the arguments and evidence offered by Israel in its own defense.

But this lack of intellectual integrity is only the beginning of the problem:

The packed meeting erupted into cheers when proponents of the resolution approached the microphone and merely stated their names, and their statements evoked further cheers and standing ovations. When I described the historical scholarship that the resolution ignored and referred to the biased nature of UN reports, hissing and jeering filled the room. Celebratory chants of “Free, free Palestine!” rang out when the lopsided vote results were announced. An AHA discussion had degenerated into a political rally. The hatred of Israel and, yes, of those of us who defended it, was intense.

The public outside the universities and colleges may conclude that historians who vote for such resolutions are no longer credible as scholarly professionals in their own specialties.

Finally, adopting this resolution sends a clear message to anyone, Jewish or not, who supports Israel’s efforts to defend itself and rejects the propaganda war waged by Hamas and UN institutions. That message is: there is no place for you in the American historical profession and, if you are young or in mid-career, your chances of securing an academic position in a history department in the United States or advancing from your current position are zero. So you should probably get out of the profession.

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.