The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations is hosting a Hanukkah party this week in conjunction with Azerbaijan’s embassy in Washington. Although the event’s official theme is “freedom and diversity,” several Jewish organizations—including the Central Conference of American Rabbis (the major Reform rabbinic organization), Americans for Peace Now, and the Workmen’s Circle—are boycotting it. Why? Because the party is scheduled to take place at one of Donald Trump’s hotels. Ruthie Blum comments:

Responding to the hysteria, the Conference of Presidents’ executive vice-chairman Malcolm Hoenlein said . . . that the Azerbaijani embassy selected the venue based on its proximity to the White House, since many of the 150 to 200 guests will also be attending President Barack Obama’s Hanukkah party, which is taking place the same evening. Other hotels nearby were not available, Hoenlein said, or could not meet the requirement for kosher food.

But for these Jewish leftists, whose utter despair at last month’s election results knows no bounds, such arguments carry no weight. As far as they are concerned, any association with Trump—even one that involves eating jelly doughnuts in a building with his name on it—is worse than partaking of pork. . . . To justify their outrage on ostensibly sounder, more “legitimate” grounds, two of the groups—Americans for Peace Now and the Workmen’s Circle—lashed out at Azerbaijan. You know, a Muslim country with increasingly close diplomatic and strategic ties to Israel.

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.