With the rise of Jeremy Corbyn as its leader, the British Labor party has come to be dominated by its far left rather than by the Blairite moderates who were long in control. One of the many results has been a turn against Israel and the bubbling to the surface of much anti-Semitism. How, asks Alan Bekhor, did this come to pass? He points to “the spiritual vacuum created by the decline of traditional religion.”

Secularization has dramatically reduced the autonomy of this social sphere, as whole areas of social life have become the business of the state to police. The state is fast becoming a secular church, the fount of moral legislation, and is busy imposing a uniformity of belief on its citizens every bit as intrusive as the theocratic states of the past, where the distinction between church and state was likewise unknown.

From this development, it has followed that politicians have been only too willing to step into the role of prophets or high priests; and it is not surprising, therefore, that someone like Corbyn, who appears to offer a coherent worldview and gives clear guidance as to what people should believe, should be able to acquire a following.

That is one part of the story. The other major trend is simply the wholesale abandonment of the moral teaching associated with the Bible. For it is the first rule of Judeo-Christian morality that evil is to be found within us. . . . It is a prescription for humility which may be considered to be the very foundation of a gentle and harmonious social life.

The strength of this moral teaching is that it inoculates us against the self-righteousness that sees the world in dualistic terms, as divided between us and them, between the children of light and the children of darkness. For in the . . . vision of the Corbynistas, we are wholly virtuous, wholly pure, and wholly innocent; evil has nothing to do with us, but wholly to do with them, those wicked bankers, capitalists, neo-imperialists, Zionists, Tories, and racists, who must in due time be punished for their sins.

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.