To Jeffrey Herf, the slaying of Yaron Lischinksy and Sarah Milgrim in Washington, and the firebombing of the rally in Colorado, are events “of great historical significance.” He explains why:

They are terrorist attacks carried out against Jews in America in the name of “liberation” thousands of miles away. They were carried out by people who feel so emboldened by the global ideological assault on Israel and its supporters that they were willing to make the leap from hatred to violence. And if history is a guide, they will not be the last to do so.

It is likely, indeed probable, that these two attacks excite and stimulate others to further acts of violence. After all, the response on many campuses to the Hamas massacres of October 7 ranged from enthusiasm to apologia. Calls to end Israel’s existence “from the river to the sea” increased, and “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations and antagonism toward “Zionists” exploded at universities and colleges all over the United States.

Herf proceeds to trace the history of radical leftist terrorism in the U.S. from the 1960s to the present, and notes why the current situation is more dangerous now than it was then. He concludes:

The “question of Palestine” came to assume a central aspect to leftist politics and ideas. Support for the state of Israel became incompatible with other leftist causes.

In the United States, only a small minority of activists are likely to take that last step from ideology to political murder. . . . But today those who are prone to make that leap will gain momentum from an ideological climate.

It is the denunciation of Israel, not the denunciation of terrorism, which finds the most and the loudest expression in the universities and in other environments dominated by the pedigreed and the prestigious.

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.