On Tuesday, the Israeli politician and former IDF chief of staff Yair Golan caused a domestic stir when, in a radio interview, he seemed to accuse Israeli troops of “killing children as a hobby”—although the statement was ambiguously worded, and he later walked it back. Golan, it should be noted, is head of a political party called The Democrats, formed from a merger of the remnants of the Labor party and the far-left Meretz party. Not to be outdone, the former prime minister Ehud Olmert—not a beloved figure in Israeli politics—told the BBC that Israel is doing something “very close to a war crime” in Gaza.

Amit Segal assembles several examples from the past two years of similar figures making similarly execrable statements, and wonders what’s behind them. In part, he suggests, there is obsessive hatred of the current prime minister, which goes far beyond any criticism of his policy failings:

For those who so intensely hate Benjamin Netanyahu, there’s an easy way to target him: demonize his most important and controversial policy, which is currently the war against Hamas. And so, when figures such as Olmert go on BBC and claim the IDF is almost committing war crimes in Gaza, they view it as a way to increase the pressure against the man they hate—without taking into account the damage they are causing Israel in the international arena.

There’s also another factor. . . . After holding one of the most influential and [demanding] positions in Israel, these men, now in early-age retirement, suddenly find themselves lacking any real influence and with far too much time on their hands. But this problem has a simple solution: make outlandish, extreme left-wing statements against the prime minister or IDF, which attract a media frenzy, placing them back in the spotlight.

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.