In Cairo yesterday, a summit of Arab leaders adopted an Egyptian proposal for the future of Gaza, which includes a six-month period during which a “non-factional” Palestinian government will administer the Strip, after which the Palestinian Authority will take over. It does not, however, suggest how Hamas will be forced out of power. Hussain Abdul-Hussain calls the plan “dissociated from reality.” Worse still, he writes, it “defers disarming Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other militias until after the creation of a Palestinian state.”

The impetus for the summit wasn’t so much the actual situation in Gaza as the need to provide an alternative to Donald Trump’s plan to remove the population prior to reconstruction. While Arab states have objected to plans to move large numbers of Palestinians outside the Strip, and Egypt most vociferously, this was not always the case. Abdul-Hussain explains:

In 1953, Egypt and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) signed onto a plan to resettle 120,000 Arab refugees from Gaza. . . . At the cost of $200 million ($2.4 billion in 2025 dollars), the Egyptian town of Qantara, east of Suez and 130 miles southwest of Gaza, would become the refugees’ new home. Egypt would divert water from the Nile to allow agriculture and a self-sustaining economy.

Palestinians in Gaza (then ruled by Egypt) protested and rioted to voice their opposition to the plan, staging what is now called the “March intifada.” Egypt, then ruled by Gamal Abdel Nasser,

promised to “end the Sinai relocation project,” but quickly broke its promise. The Nasser regime instead undertook mass arrests and threw its Communist and Muslim Brotherhood leaders into prison, where they remained until July 1957.

Nasser eventually pulled out of the relocation plan for two reasons. First, he was frustrated with the Eisenhower administration for withdrawing its funding of the Aswan Dam. Second, he feared communists on the left and Islamists on the right might use the issue to outflank him. As a result of such domestic machinations, 120,000 Arabs remained stuck in a resourceless strip instead of relocating to an economically viable spot, less than 150 miles to the south.

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.