Since the 19th century, one of the forces abetting radical leftwing violence has been the presence of liberals who, even if repulsed by such violence, are willing to make apologies for its perpetrators. Something similar can be said about the relationship between liberals and radical Islamists. Abe Greenwald considers how American liberals are responding to the recent attacks on Jews in Washington, DC and Boulder, Colorado:

In the wake of back-to-back anti-Semitic terrorist attacks in which both perpetrators echoed the mob’s anti-Semitic slogans, you can currently find at the New York Times two pieces implying that Donald Trump—who’s currently dug-in on a war against anti-Semitism—is an anti-Semite. . . . This is the first phase of liberal regret: deflection mode.

Liberals cannot now plausibly write that twenty months of demonstrations in every American city by keffiyeh-clad protesters chanting “Globalize the intifada” has nothing to do with terrorists who’ve just brought the intifada to American cities. Nor can they argue, given that the terrorist in Colorado had overstayed his visa, that illegal-immigration concerns are merely a Republican moral panic. So, they are, instead, trying to switch the public’s focus to Trump.

As dismaying as this reaction is, Greenwald’s analysis is hopeful: the deflection, he asserts, is a step on the way to acknowledging harsh realities:

It’s not surprising that it takes tragedy finally to change liberal minds. In fact, that’s usually the way it works. Liberals tend to come to their ideas through a process of secular faith—faith that they are doing the right thing. This faith makes it hard to disabuse them of such ideas through reasoned argument. Only real-world events can do that.

It’s going to be very well and good for those liberals who will make a big show of admitting they got things wrong. . . . But for the dead Jews, it will be too late. And for them, we should neither forgive nor forget.

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.