Oslo failed, Part 1: Now what? Village Leagues revisited

Oslo failed. Oslo was the most catastrophic and failed initiative since the establishment of the State because it inverted Israel’s legitimacy on the international stage in favour of the PLO. And now there is the opportunity to return to the Village Leagues that we had in the 1970s. There were seven main villages run locally in cooperation with the IDF.

This statement sparked my interest. I had never heard of the Village Leagues until a particularly critical reader mentioned its failure in response to my suggestion that Mordechai Kedar’s Emirates proposal (described briefly later in this piece) had the potential for resolving Israel’s conflict with the Palestinian Arabs in Judea & Samaria (J&S). And then, suddenly just a few days later, Dr. Dan Diker¹ threw out the statement above during a panel discussion a few meters in front of me during an Israel Security Summit² hosted by Israel’s Defense and Security Forum (IDSF-Habithonistim) at Israel’s Channel 14 studio.

Since I believed, until that moment, that Kedar’s was the only proposal to address the tribal nature of Arab society, I wanted to delve into this new (for me) idea. Dr. Diker spoke with me on the phone.

I opened the interview by asking if the Village Leagues was appropriate for both Gaza and J&S. Diker said that the

. . . only option for Gaza is a gated villages structure under Trump’s plan. The families have been in J&S much longer than in Gaza and the family notables are more deeply embedded in the social fabric of Palestinian areas, making it a viable option for J&S.

He explained that it would consist of municipalities that would all be self-sufficient units with security cooperation with the IDF.

The villages would be subsets of the seven major Arab cities and the proximity of the various notable families would militate toward their cooperation and collaboration in keeping the smaller areas safe in contrast with the competition of larger families and tribes as we see in Gaza where they are all vying for control of power and assets.

The seven cities are: Ramallah, Hebron, Jericho, Tul Karem, Jenon, Nablus, and Bethlehem. These are all cities within the region designated in the Oslo Accords as Area A and already under exclusive Arab control.

But, because my critical reader had so informed me, I knew that it had been tried and failed. Diker gave me reasons for the failure:

It didn’t work because Israel’s political right didn’t want to concede any territory in J&S. This was ten years before Oslo and the movement for Eretz Yisrael Hashlema³ (Greater Israel) was still strong.

The left didn’t like it because they were advancing a PLO two-state option; journalist and peace activist Anat Saragusti, together with Uri Avneri, had already met with Arafat in Beirut in 1982 [a landmark journalistic accomplishment] and they wanted to see a Palestinian state.

And many of the Arabs didn’t want to recognize Israel and recognizing the villages meant recognizing Israel.

Diker recommended I read up on the details of the earlier plan in an article by MEMRI Founder and President Yigal Carmon, who was involved in the Villages League from its inception. That article gives the political/diplomatic complexities that are beyond the scope of an essay such as this one. To whet your appetite and encourage you to click and read that article, I will tell you that a major hindrance was Dayan and his attitude to the lands Israel liberated from Jordan in 1967.

Briefly, further objections to the plan were due to:

1. The Israeli employees of the Military Administration didn’t like the fact that they stood to lose their jobs if their roles were handed over to Arabs in the villages

2. Conflicts between the IDF upper echelons and the Civil Administration of the Defense Ministry over status and power (ego) issues;

3. IDF and government leaders who believed Dayan’s approach was correct;

4. Foreign media and governments who supported the PLO and the idea of a Palestinian state;

5. Jordan’s ambiguity – sometimes in favour, sometimes opposed to the idea.

This leads to the question, why should it work now when it did not work 40-50 years ago? Is the environment different enough and is there a way to overcome Arab unwillingness to cooperate with Israel?

He first addressed the Israeli objections to the plan in the past:

Israel conceded certain territories to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the Oslo Accords, so the objection by some sectors in Israeli society to giving up any land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is less relevant today. The Village Leagues is better than the Oslo option which concentrated power in a pre-state authority that ended up destabilising the region rather than securing it.

Also, our institute’s poll shows that there is virtually zero appetite in Israel for another terror state in the hills of J&S, especially following Oct 7^th. It would be my assessment that autonomous control will not extend beyond what they already have in Area A. [link added]

Diker noted that there may be other options that can be considered, but they must be local and they must replace the PA.

“How can we go back to pre-Arafat?” Diker asks rhetorically, and then answers:

Because, according to polls conducted by Columbia University-trained pollster Shikaki, 85% of the Palestinians want President Mahmoud Abbas to go home. Everyone is sick and tired of the PA. They spy on everyone, make arbitrary arrests.

Currently, local militias have control and are connected with PFLP⁴, Iranians, Hamas, and Palestinian Jihad. If we empower local forces to defend their homes from these monsters, they will be invested in the plan and will cooperate with the IDF. If Israel asserts its power and they know there is a new sheriff in town, they will play ball.

According to Diker, challenges will arise, however, because the PA wants to maintain its power, of course, and “the IDF likes the centralized PA security force that cooperates with them by dispatching the IDF to do what it needs to do to prevent terror attacks.”

In other words, the plan is still on the drawing board with lots of work ahead.

Finally, I wanted to know the difference between the Village Leagues plan and Kedar’s Emirates plan. Diker explained:

Kedar is one of the most revered Arabists in Israel and has been advancing this idea for years. His proposal is modeled after the United Arab Emirates, which is based on one noble family for each Emirate and has a well-defined power structure; if applied to J&S or Gaza, it would have to address the challenging issue of competing crime and mafia families trying to defeat each other and it will have to take into consideration the ongoing wartime situation here. Different culture.

Well, “competing crime and mafia families” does not seem like a good basis upon which to establish any administrative unit exerting control over a population. I will explore this in a future essay after conducting the relevant interviews.

My conversation with Diker gave me hope that alternatives are being considered and perhaps even some brainstorming going on so that new ideas have a chance to take us out of the doldrums of out-of-date unimaginative so-called solutions.

Appendix

1. Dr. Dan Diker is President of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, former Secretary-General of the World Jewish Congress, and a Research Fellow of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University.

2. Security Summit: The Israel Defense and Security Forum held a summit at the Arutz 14 studio on 3 April 2025, entitled: Strategic Assessment 2025/The Year of Opportunity.

3. Eretz Yisrael Hashlema movement arose after the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel liberated the Sinai, Gaza, Judea&Samaria, and the Golan from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, respectively. Their platform was for Jewish settlement to be re-established. There are still groups promoting the extension of Israeli sovereignty to these territories (the Sinai was returned to Egypt when a peace deal was signed in 1979 and the Golan was annexed to Israel in 1981).

4. PFLP – Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine