While Michael Koplow is more sharply critical of recent Israeli strategy than I am, I think the thrust of his analysis of the recent Egypt-led summit on the future of Gaza is spot-on:

[T]he biggest problem with what emerged from Cairo is not what was there, but what wasn’t. The Arab League statement was missing even one mention of Hamas, and therein lies the massive blind spot that is its biggest problem.

The Arab states have so far been silent on what mechanism they believe will serve as a bridge between Hamas’s current status and their aim to have a technocratic transitional Palestinian administration run Gaza. But whatever their thinking is, yada-yada-ing Hamas is not going to work. Without a plan to disarm Hamas that is front and center, any discussion of the day after is a meaningless academic exercise.

Not making an effort to . . . disarm Hamas only guarantees the inevitability of the next Israel-Hamas war. Ideological groups cannot be co-opted so easily through things like economic incentives, and it is worrisome that Arab states appear unwilling to apply the tragic lesson of October 7. Disarming Hamas will not be easy, as Israel’s military campaign demonstrated, but without an effort that treats the problem seriously, there is no point in going through the sound-and-light show of yet another summit meeting that will amount to nothing.

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.