Last week’s terrorist attack in India’s Kashmir province left over two dozen people—mostly vacationers—dead and scores more injured. In response, New Delhi has threatened retaliation against Pakistan, which has territorial claims on Kashmir and a long history of supporting terrorist groups on its borders. Meanwhile, in the West there have already been cases of leftists and Islamists preemptively condemning India for retaliatory measures it has not yet taken—a reaction familiar from October 8, 2023.

Mike Watson, who previously wrote about India and Israel for Mosaic, explains the geopolitical consequences for Washington and Jerusalem:

Pakistan is now at the forefront of a partnership that will bedevil Americans in the years to come—the unhappy marriage between radical Islam and Communism. . . . Its intelligence services allegedly supported the Taliban and many of the terrorist groups that attacked India in Kashmir for decades. This Easter marked the tenth anniversary of Pakistan signing up for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is one of the foundations of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. As Islamabad sees it, jihadists are just as useful for fighting India as the Communists are for economic development.

China is picking up other Islamist partners too. Yemen’s Houthis have made the Red Sea crossing between Europe and Asia perilous, but Chinese ships sail through serenely. . . . In other parts of South Asia, hatred of Israel goes hand-in-hand with love of China. The Maldives were one of Islamic State’s most fertile recruiting grounds, and its government just banned people with Israeli passports. Its current president’s first trip abroad was to Beijing, and it now welcomes China’s “military assistance.”

The good news is that Washington has cards to play.

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.