West Bank Clans Ain't Nuthing ta F' Wit
The plan to divide the West Bank into ‘Emirates’ is a non-starter
The Israeli right has seized upon news that five sheikhs from the Hebron district have declared that they want to break off from the PA and establish Hebron as an emirate that “recognizes the State of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.” In exchange, they ask that “the State of Israel shall recognize the Emirate of Hebron as the Representative of the Arab residents in the Hebron District.” Writing to the Minister of Economy Nir Barkat, with whom they have been in talks for months, they added that the new arrangement would replace the Oslo Accords, “which only brought damage, death, economic disaster and destruction…[and] the corrupt Palestinian Authority, instead of recognizing the traditional, authentic local leadership,” i.e. themselves. According to reports, 21 sheikhs are involved in this initiative, saying they represent around 700,000 Palestinians, although the legitimacy of this claim remains highly questionable.
The leader of the plan is Sheikh Wadee’ al-Jaabari. According to Barkat: “Nobody in Israel believes in the PA, and you won’t find many Palestinians who do either. Sheikh Jaabari wants peace with Israel and to join the Abraham Accords, with the support of his fellow sheikhs. Who in Israel is going to say no?” For his part, Jaabari says: “There will be no Palestinian state – not even in 1,000 years. After October 7, Israel will not give it.” Another sheikh adds: “To think only about making a Palestinian state will bring us all to disaster.”
According to the plan, Israel will admit 1,000 workers from Hebron for a trial period, then 5,000 more, with the hope that this would eventually rise to 50,000 workers or more. There would also be a joint economic zone near the Green Line that would employ thousands more workers. The sheikhs have pledged “zero tolerance” for terrorism by workers, “in contrast to the current situation in which the Palestinian Authority pays tributes to the terrorists.”
The plan is originally the brainchild of Mordechai Kedar, an Israeli Middle East scholar who argues Gaza should also be divided into “emirates” (I wrote equally scathingly about this idea here) and originally introduced Barkat to Sheikh Jaabari. As Barkat correctly points out: “[The world says] you’re against the two-state solution, and you’re against the one-state solution, so what the hell are you for?” Kedar’s argument is that the reason so many Arab states fail (for example Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, and Libya) is because centralized state structures are imposed artificially on largely clan-based societies. The ones which succeed (Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the seven emirates of the UAE) are each controlled by a single family.
Kedar’s analysis suffers from a fundamental flaw: it cherry-picks examples while ignoring more functioning Arab states like Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, as well as the reality that even his “successful” examples like Saudi Arabia and the UAE are increasingly centralized modern states that have moved far beyond traditional clan structures. Most importantly, they are actual states, while what Kedar is advocating for are Bantusans. When asked about this in an interview by Sheri Oz on her Israel Diaries Substack, he replied:
Yes, some people try to equate my plan to the Bantustans of South Africa, despite the large differences between Israel and South Africa. However, unlike the whites in SA who had no historic roots in Africa, the Jewish people are the historic owners of the Land of Israel. And when people see how the Palestinian Emirates will provide excellent lives for their citizens, just like the Gulf Emirates, there will be no credibility to this “Bantusan” allegation.
This is a deeply unserious answer. First, whether or not the Jews are the “historic owners of the Land of Israel” (according to the Bible the Jewish people’s relationship to the land is not one of ownership), this tells us nothing about the pros and cons of his proposal. Even had the whites had historic roots in Africa, the Bantustans would still have been Bantustans. Second, saying everything will be fine if we follow his plan should be taken as seriously as those who promise us that everything will be fine if there is a two-state solution, i.e. it is an unfalsifiable prediction about the future and thus entirely worthless.
Looking at the few details available, we see the reappearance of the ‘economic peace’ fallacy. There is a hilarious contradiction in right-wing thinking on this subject: telling us that the Palestinians will always want to kill us and nothing can placate them other than our destruction while from the other side of their mouths arguing that work permits and industrial zones will keep them quiet. The contradiction becomes even more glaring when considering that these same advocates supported cutting off work permits after October 7, apparently rejecting their own theory about economic incentives preventing violence in light of that day’s atrocities, only to now revive it once more.
The plan’s advocates don’t tell us what legal status the Palestinians will have in the emirates plan or answer the million-dollar question of whether they will have the rights we Israelis take for granted. I assume the reason this isn’t discussed is because, beyond the right to work in Israel (which in any case 210,000 Palestinians had until October 7), the answer is that they won’t. Israel will continue to control the West Bank, settlements will continue to expand, and the PA will be replaced by a new form of collaborator, a resurrection of the failed Village Leagues initiative of the 1980s.
What’s really motivating these sheikhs isn’t a sudden conversion to Zionism or a principled rejection of Palestinian nationalism. The Hebron business community has been devastated by the post-October 7 restrictions, losing massive revenue from severed Israeli work permits and commercial ties. Meanwhile, these traditional notables have watched the PA’s patronage networks increasingly bypass them in favor of Fatah loyalists. The “emirates” proposal is essentially a business plan: restore economic access to Israel while positioning themselves as the new intermediaries who can guarantee calm in exchange for political and economic rewards. It’s a familiar script – local elites offering to manage the occupation more efficiently in exchange for a cut of the profits.
The security aspects of the plan are also questionable. The sheikhs insist that they could take control of Hebron in a week, but the PA currently fields approximately 70,000 security personnel, including around 4,000 in Hebron. Maj. Gen. Gadi Shamni, who led the IDF Central Command from 2007-2009, asks: “How do you deal with dozens of different families, each of them armed, each under its own control? The IDF would be caught in the crossfire – it would be a mess, a disaster…there is no way to control the West Bank and manage life there without the central authority.” In short, there’s no viable way to power for these sheikhs unless Israel were to intervene, which would entail massive costs.
The problem isn’t only with the details of the plan but also its historical analysis. While it’s true that clan-based structures play a key role in Palestinian society, it’s a big stretch to say that these should replace any kind of centralized authority. As I wrote in ‘The View from the Throne Villages,’ in the eighteenth century local sheikhs and chieftains did accrue significant power across the West Bank and other parts of Palestine, which they subsequently lost as a result of Ibrahim Pasha’s invasion of the country in the 1830s. He subsequently introduced a centralized bureaucratic system, redistributed land, introduced new taxation systems, and broke the traditional tribal and clan-based structures. As I wrote in the article:
While Ibrahim Pasha’s invasion dismantled the local chiefdom system, today tribal structures are continually raised as potential solutions to continued impasses. But the organic social fabrics that once sustained these clan structures have undergone deep changes, making attempts to revive them unlikely to succeed, particularly given the rise of Palestinian nationalism.
Moreover, the proposal ignores how Palestinian identity has evolved since the 1930s. Modern Palestinians don’t see themselves primarily through clan identities – they see themselves as Palestinians living under occupation. These sheikhs are as representative of Palestinians as anti-Zionist fringe groups are of Israelis.
None of this means that the two-state solution is necessarily more viable. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict may indeed lack an immediate solution. But the problem is not, as many are now claiming, a lack of original ideas or an unwillingness to think outside the box. The problem is a refusal to recognize the reality that two peoples live between the river and the sea and are deeply attached to the land, and the only way to solve the problem that doesn’t involve actual genocide or massive ethnic cleansing is to find a way to share the land equitably. This prognosis remains true whether or not one blames the Palestinians or the Israelis for the impasse. What it certainly doesn’t need are fantasies that dress up apartheid-style Bantustans in Gulf emirate clothing.
“ Even had the whites had historic roots in Africa, the Bantustans would still have been Bantustans.” And of course the Afrikaaners did have a centuries-long presence in South Africa.
> functioning Arab states like Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco
Your threshold for functioning is remarkably low