In the past two years, European intelligence services have on many occasions—often with the assistance of the Mossad—foiled attempts at espionage, assassinations, and terror attacks by Iranian agents. But the timid responses of European officialdom, and the unwillingness to confront Tehran over these activities, argues Yossi Mansharof, are part and parcel of the desire to preserve the 2015 nuclear deal:

The result of the European Union’s attachment to the nuclear deal is appeasement of Iran. As part of this appeasement, the EU confines itself to statements against Iran’s missile program and expansionism in the region. The EU has also made its peace with the political and security settlement prevailing in Lebanon, which gives Hizballah effective control of the country. . . .

The EU also responded weakly to the arrest in Iran of dual European-Iranian citizens on various pretexts, including espionage. . . .The weakness of the EU’s policy on Iran was also demonstrated by its feeble response to the arrest of 7,000 Iranian demonstrators in 2018, 26 of whom were executed. . .

The EU’s fidelity to the nuclear deal and its appeasement of the Iranian regime’s aggression both inside and outside Iran have encouraged the Islamic Republic to escalate its terrorism on the European continent. The Iranian terrorist campaign in Europe, which has been mostly unsuccessful up until now, has encompassed many countries. . . . [For example], the German authorities discovered a cell of ten Iranian spies in December 2017 conducting surveillance of Israeli and Jewish targets. These targets included the Israeli embassy in Berlin and kindergartens and other centers of the local Jewish community. In November 2017, a German court convicted Mustufa Haider Syed-Naqfi, a Pakistani citizen living in Germany, of spying for Iran. [Syed-Naqfi] had been tailing Reinhold Robbe, the head of the German-Israeli Association. . . .

European diplomats [have] explained that the EU [has] refrained from strong criticism of Iran because of its wish to strengthen Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, whom they perceive to be a moderate in Iranian politics. This policy facilitates EU efforts to preserve the nuclear agreement with Iran and avoid anything that might help President Trump. Faced with the EU’s [consideration of] sanctions on Iran in response to revelations of growing Iranian subversion throughout Europe, however, Rouhani himself implicitly threatened in December 2018 to carry out terrorist attacks in Europe.

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.