Last Thursday, the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir stepped down in response to massive public protests and pressure from within his own government. A committed Islamist, Bashir has in the past cooperated with both al-Qaeda and Iran and presided over the genocidal slaughter in Darfur. Alberto Fernandez comments on the implications of his ouster:

In the months leading up to April 11, many sensed that Bashir was a dead man walking. No one in the region, including the Qataris, Saudis, or Egyptians, had the cash or the will to ameliorate Sudan’s major problems. Formerly, Gulf states had provided substantial temporary relief to Khartoum after South Sudan’s independence in 2011 prompted a steep decline in the north’s oil exports, and in 2015 after the regime distanced itself from Iran. Nor could the country’s new friends in Ankara or old ones in Tehran provide sufficient backing to restore a sustainable status quo. . . .

Past instances of . . . tactical flexibility showed the ruling party’s will to survive. . . . Consider that Sudan went from being a center of global jihadism and a host to Osama bin Laden to signing a peace deal and sharing power from 2005 to 2011 with largely non-Muslim, leftist, and secular rebels. . . . It also went from being a state sponsor of terrorism to cooperating closely with the Central Intelligence Agency on counterterrorism. Moreover, a decade ago, the regime was helpful to Washington on counterterrorism [while simultaneously continuing to aid] Iran in smuggling weapons into Gaza for use by Hamas. . . .

Solely in terms of survival, the Sudanese regime is the most successful Islamist government in the Arab world, excepting the hereditary rulers of the Arabian Peninsula. . . .

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.