Since the current Gaza war began, there have been a few cases that have received attention in Jewish media outlets of doctors and other medical professionals making public anti-Semitic, or violently anti-Israel, statements—often on social media. In a few cases, these extreme declarations cost the offenders their jobs. Jay P. Greene and Ian Kingsbury take a systematic look at anti-Semitism in medicine:

We identified a set of over 700 people from all walks of life profiled by the organization Stop Antisemitism for displaying flagrant hostility toward Jews and Israel. We found that health professionals were more than 2.5-times more likely to be found among anti-Semites than their share of the workforce [would suggest]. And half of those Jew-hating doctors received their medical degrees abroad.

Forty-seven of 91 [anti-Semitic] physicians in the dataset obtained their medical degree in a country other than the United States compared to about 25 percent of the American physician workforce. Of those 47 who obtained their medical degrees abroad, 68 percent were trained in the Middle East (40 percent) or Pakistan (28 percent).

The challenge posed by foreign-trained doctors is that they arrive in the U.S. after having largely completed their moral formation, sometimes in political systems that explicitly promote anti-Semitism in their schools. The anti-Semitism they openly display in the U.S. may have been considered appropriate or even enlightened in their home countries. In fact, in the Middle East, higher levels of education are associated with an increased propensity for professing anti-Semitism.

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.