Could Hebron join the Abraham Accords?

Spectator

11 hours ago

You've heard of the two-state solution (or delusion, as I call it). But have you heard of the eight-state solution? Or the Palestinian Emirates plan? This is the idea of Professor Mordechai Kedar, who I spoke to in February 2024, just four months into the war started by the Palestinians on 7 October, 2023. If his vision once seemed outlandish or unrealistic to many, it now seems considerably less so in light of the fascinating developments emerging from Hebron.
A Wall Street Journal report explains that a coalition of Hebron's most powerful clan leaders, led by Sheikh Wadee' al-Jaabari, has issued a public declaration of intent to break away from the Palestinian Authority (PA), establish an autonomous Emirate of Hebron, and seek membership of the Abraham Accords. In doing so, they recognised Israel as the Jewish nation-state (something the PA has never done) and rejected decades of Palestinian rejectionism. Their letter, addressed to Israeli economy minister Nir Barkat, marks an unprecedented rupture with the Palestinian national project as defined by the PLO, and is therefore a welcome shift towards a realistic vision of potential coexistence.
And at the heart of this development is Professor Kedar himself. As the Wall Street Journal reported, it was Kedar who introduced Sheikh Jaabari to Barkat and who has, for years, quietly cultivated ties with traditional clan leaders across the West Bank. His blueprint, long dismissed by western diplomats, may now be finding traction precisely because the alternatives have collapsed in blood and failure. Kedar is an expert in Arab culture and a fluent Arabic speaker; a controversial and outspoken academic, he became internet famous in 2008 for schooling an Al Jazeera anchor on the Qu'ran in fluent Arabic.
The core of Kedar's argument is sociological. In our 2024 conversation, he laid it out with characteristic clarity: the Arab world is divided into two categories of states. The failing states – Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Yemen – are all patchworks of sectarian, tribal and ethnic groups forced into artificial unity by post-colonial fiat. The successful ones – the Gulf monarchies, particularly the United Arab Emirates – are coherent clan-based structures where legitimacy flows from traditional authority, not abstract ideology.
Kedar argues that Palestinian society fits the former mould: deeply clannish, inherently fragmented, and resistant to imposed national identities. The PLO and later the Palestinian Authority attempted to overwrite these loyalties with a centralised nationalist bureaucracy. The result? Corruption, repression, and dysfunction. As Kedar put it, 'the PA is illegitimate… just like Assad in Syria or Gaddafi in Libya.'
In contrast, the eight-state or 'emirates' solution proposes a federation of autonomous city-states, each run by its dominant local clan (Hebron, Jericho, Nablus, Ramallah and so on) with rural areas remaining under Israeli sovereignty and offering Israeli citizenship to those who desire it. The model is explicitly drawn from the UAE, where seven emirates function under a federal structure, each rooted in a strong tribal base.
Kedar is unapologetic about the cultural foundations of his model. Democracy, he argues, is not merely an institutional framework but a cultural ecosystem, one that is fundamentally alien to much of the Arab world. 'What we treat as sacred cornerstones of democracy,' he told me, 'are totally unacceptable in Islamic societies.'
October 7th did not just end the credibility of the Palestinian Authority; it ended the credibility of the two-state paradigm itself. The horror of that day, the slaughter of 1,200 Israelis by Palestinian terrorists, was not an aberration but the culmination of decades of indoctrination, incitement and international indulgence. To continue proposing a sovereign Palestinian state governed by the same ideological and institutional forces that birthed that massacre is not diplomacy, it is moral and strategic derangement.
None of this is guaranteed to deliver peace. The sheikhs of Hebron may not succeed. Their vision may be undercut by Israeli inertia, international opposition, or internal division. But their initiative represents something that has been absent from this conflict for too long: strategic imagination rooted in social reality.
If Palestinians are to have a future beyond war, indoctrination and kleptocracy, the starting point is to abandon the delusions of the past and begin building with the materials at hand: a commitment to non-violence, recognition of Israel as Jewish state, local leadership, economic pragmatism and a willingness to coexist.
The Hebron initiative is not merely a proposal, it is a mirror held up to decades of failed policy. And for those willing to look, it might just be the beginning of a new path.