Margherita Sarfatti, a Venetian Jewess, was Benito Mussolini’s mistress and confidante from 1912 until the 1930s. Sophisticated, educated, and politically engaged, she was unique among the dictator’s many lovers in advising him on political matters. (She fled Italy in 1938 after the fascists enacted anti-Semitic legislation.) The historian Brian Sullivan has published a series of postwar autobiographical articles written by Sarfatti, with extensive annotations and commentary. Although her reminiscences contain much colorful detail, Sullivan makes the mistake, according to Michael McDonald, of believing and further embellishing her exaggerated picture of her own importance. And there is also much that the book omits:

Sarfatti’s memoirs are regrettably silent on many major issues, such as anti-Semitism. Mussolini had Jewish backers among the industrialists and big landowners who helped finance him at the start of his career. Indeed, about 200 Jews took part in the March on Rome. But the fascist movement became increasingly anti-Semitic, to the point that Sarfatti’s sister and her husband died on the way to Auschwitz. Other relatives also died in the extermination camps. Sarfatti sheds no light on how Mussolini—who had for years mocked Hitler for his anti-Semitism and denied the existence of a Jewish problem in Italy—came to impose anti-Jewish legislation in 1938.

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.