In 2016, Xiyue Wang, an American doctoral student visiting Iran on a research trip, was arrested on spurious charges of espionage. He has since been in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. Last week, his wife led a group of other relatives of hostages and political prisoners held by the Islamic Republic in an appeal to the UN General Assembly, which was then convening in New York, to pressure the mullahs to set their loved ones free. Europe, writes Eli Lake, has no interest in doing so:

The European Union foreign-policy chief Federica Mogherini and the Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif this week announced their plans for a new financial instrument that in theory would allow European companies doing business with Iran to evade U.S. sanctions. Although most European businesses have already announced plans to divest from Iran, the EU wants to keep the Iran nuclear deal alive. . . .

[B]y making the nuclear deal the main topic of discussion, the Europeans are giving Iran tacit permission to continue funneling weapons to militias and terror groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. The message is clear if indirect: don’t worry about releasing political prisoners, please just don’t enrich more uranium. . . .

U.S. policy, [by contrast], is to punish Iran economically for its regional aggression. President Trump himself has said he is open to talks with Iran’s leaders, but that does not look likely. And while European leaders will make boilerplate condemnations of Iran’s interference in Syria and its detention of dual nationals, they have focused most of their diplomatic energies on the nuclear deal. . . .

What will it take to rescue Iran’s political prisoners? The same thing it will take to end Iran’s support for Syria’s dictator: a wholesale change in Iranian behavior. And the best chance for that happening is for Iranians to change their regime.

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.