Local rule: clans, cities and cantons
Instead of one national government per people, power lies with local communities that already govern themselves: Arab clans and cities, Jewish towns and communities, federated or coordinated above.
The case for it (in all its variants): the land is not two uniform peoples but many very different local communities. On the Palestinian side, much of social and political life runs through extended families and clans (the hamula), Bedouin tribes, and strong city identities: Hebron is not Ramallah, and Nablus is not Gaza. On the Israeli side, Haredi towns, kibbutzim, settlements, Druze villages and Tel Aviv live by very different norms. National governments on both sides have struggled to rule all of them from the top. Proper local control, among people who already trust each other, may be the level at which coexistence actually works, and the national question then matters less.
What happens to Israeli Jews
Depends on the variant. In the emirates plan, Israel keeps sovereignty and much of the West Bank countryside. In the confederal variant, Jewish communities govern themselves inside a shared structure, with no Jewish state.
What happens to Palestinians
Depends on the variant. In the emirates plan, city-states under clan leadership, normalised with Israel but with no Palestinian nation-state. In the confederal variant, self-government everywhere with shared power above.
What it requires
- Recognising local leaderships (clan councils, city governments, community bodies) as the real authorities, with a thin shared level for security, borders, water and the economy
- Local leaders with real legitimacy among their own people, not appointed from outside
- Security arrangements between the local units, and armed groups disarmed or folded into accountable local forces
- Shared rules on land, residence and movement between the local units
- Both national movements accepting that the nation-state is not the main unit of government, which each has spent a century fighting for
Who supports it
Variations: (1) Mordechai Kedar's 'Palestinian Emirates' or eight-state plan (from 2012): city-states under clan leadership in Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Jericho, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Arab Hebron and Gaza, with the rural areas under other arrangements. (2) The July 2025 letter from Hebron sheikhs led by Wadee' al-Jaabari proposing an 'Emirate of Hebron' that would leave the PA and join the Abraham Accords; other members of the clan disavowed it, and Hamas and the PA condemned it. (3) Israeli attempts since 2024 to work through Gaza clans and local armed groups instead of Hamas or the PA. (4) Democratic confederalism ('Apoism'), from Abdullah Öcalan's writings and practised in Rojava: communes and co-chaired councils of every community, federated from below. Öcalan founded the PKK (listed as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the EU and the US), which dissolved itself in May 2025 at his call. No major Israeli or Palestinian party currently runs on any variant.
What history says
- Israel's 'Village Leagues' (1978 to the mid-1980s): governing the West Bank through rural notables, rejected as collaboration, and abandoned
- Rojava, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (from 2012–14): co-chaired multi-ethnic councils, praised for women's participation and local pluralism, criticised for one-party dominance and for forced displacement documented by Amnesty International (2015). In March 2025 it agreed to integrate into the new Syrian state.
- The Gulf emirates: stable, clan-based city-states, but monarchies, not democracies
- Switzerland: cantons with their own languages and religions sharing a small federal centre, built after a civil war (1847)
- Bosnia after Dayton (1995): ethnic cantons that froze the division
The hard questions
- Is it local rule from below, or divide-and-rule from above? Palestinian critics compare the emirates idea to the Village Leagues and South Africa's Bantustans. What makes a local leadership legitimate rather than installed?
- Who guarantees security between the units when one of them is ruled by an armed movement that rejects the whole arrangement?
- Clan rule can entrench elders, patriarchs and armed families rather than democracy. Who protects women, dissidents and minorities inside a unit?
- Local autonomy cuts both ways. Israel's Haredi communities already largely govern themselves, with their own schools, rabbinical authority and, until the Supreme Court's 2024 ruling, exemption from the draft. The fight over sharing duties with the rest of the country is one of Israel's deepest crises. Arguably the harder test of local rule is on the Jewish side.
- What happens in the countryside between the cities, where the settlements and most of the land are?
What stands in the way
- Each side reads the other through its worst quote — Local leaders who deal with the other side get branded as collaborators or traitors.
- A state as staging post ↔ security as permanent control — Armed local units, and who disarms them, decide whether cantons are safe.
- Whoever moves first loses — Handing power to local leaders is a concession each centre fears.
- Distrust as premise — Same.