It began with a sentence that sounded less like the opening of a diplomatic talk and more like the opening pitch at an accelerator demo-day. Economy Minister Nir Barkat – whose résumé lists two tech exits before it lists “mayor of Jerusalem” – stepped onto the Jerusalem Post Conference stage in New York and said he was tired of hearing that the West Bank was unsolvable.
If a product fails, he told the room, you either ship a better one or the market walks. His “product” was the Palestinian Authority; his better version was a Palestinian chapter of the Abraham Accords. “One day – hopefully soon – Arabs in Judea and Samaria will decide they’ve had enough of the PA and ask to join the accords,” he said.
“If they work with Israel, we’ll help them build Dubai. If they fight Israel, they’ll end up looking like Gaza.”
Phones came up like periscopes. The routine chatter about Saudi Arabia’s eventual normalization vanished. Barkat was talking about Rawabi, Abu Dis, perhaps even Jenin, not Riyadh or Jakarta.
In his model, clusters of West Bank towns would bypass Ramallah, plug directly into Israeli security and Gulf capital, and trade under commercial annexes adapted from the UAE-Israel playbook. No midnight shuttle diplomacy, no flags raised over Rose Garden lawns – just container IDs, escrow instructions and profit-and-loss sheets.
Arab leaders consider joining the Abraham Accords
He refused to name which towns or clan elders were already whispering with him, citing the start-up rule that you “build outside the system and invite the system in only when the prototype runs.” But anyone who spends an afternoon in the industrial zones of Binyamin hears the same arithmetic Barkat hears: Gulf money is flowing everywhere except here; PA fees bleed local manufacturers; Israeli checkpoints, however resented, at least keep the road open.
LATER, BEHIND the scenes, Barkat showed me clear evidence – many local Palestinian leaders would consider signing the Abraham Accords.
His audacity landed because Israelis have run out of patience for euphemism. The fresh poll from the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs that we published on our site the morning of the conference shows why: Some 81% of Jewish Israelis fear a West Bank reprise of October 7, 85% refuse to leave Hamas in control of Gaza in any uniform – military or civilian – and 78% oppose a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines even if Riyadh waves a normalization banner.
Pollsters can parse the numbers all week, but they add up to one line of code: from now on, every proposal will be judged in terms of life expectancy, not diplomatic pedigree. Barkat’s binary – Dubai or Gaza – fits that new calculus.
Ideas this wild need partners. Step forward Yisrael Gantz, head of the Binyamin Regional Council, who sparred onstage with our news editor Alex Winston a few hours later. When Alex cited UK-French-Canadian threats of settlement sanctions, Gantz first corrected the map – “It’s Judea and Samaria” – then turned the diplomatic scolding back on Israel itself.
The real failure, he said, is not their rhetoric but our indecision. “If we ever allow a Palestinian state in the center of Israel, we invite Gaza to jump the fence at Kfar Saba.” He described the PA as a 45,000-strong army parked a stone’s throw from Highway 6.
His prescription overlaps Barkat’s but is cast in soldier’s diction: apply Israeli law, dismantle what he calls the PA army, replace it with county-size local councils that police their own streets yet accept an Israeli security envelope, and offer Gulf-funded industrial parks as the antidote to terror stipends. “No Hamas, no jihad – then we build the clinics and factories,” he said. The applause suggested that in a post-October 7 politics, entrepreneurial carrots and strategic sticks are no longer rival concepts.
THE CONFERENCE’S other headliners supplied the missing gears. Former IDF chief Benny Gantz, nowadays head of the National Unity Party, sharing that very stage, gave the cruel timetable beneath the headlines. Erasing Hamas from Gaza, he reminded us, will take at least a decade; detoxing its curricula a generation. A thriving Palestinian logistics hub in Samaria, he argued, could become both proof of concept and leverage: succeed here and Gaza’s misery becomes the cautionary tale rather than the model.
Adam Boehler, Donald Trump’s former hostage envoy, offered the leverage mechanism: “Hamas negotiates only when the IDF is moving.” Security first, spreadsheets second – a sequence every Gulf investor understands instinctively. Congressman Brian Mast, the double-amputee combat veteran who once washed dishes on an IDF base, stripped the language to its base layer: “We don’t have time for nonsense. It’s Judea and Samaria.” Legitimacy begins with names, he said, and legitimacy attracts capital.
Then came Dan Diker of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs to remind everyone why Israelis are looking for a different blueprint in the first place. Oslo, he said, was “the greatest strategic catastrophe since the state’s founding.” Awarding Yasser Arafat a Nobel Prize turned the moral telescope backwards: the terror chief became the peacemaker, the victim became the obstacle.
Three decades later, the idea that symbolism can precede security still defects into our headlines. Barkat’s venture-capital annex, Gantz’s legal annexation and Mast’s verbal precision all pulse with post-Oslo fatigue: if a framework handcuffs Israeli self-defense, scrap the framework and keep what works.
No one pretended the execution risks are small. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will brand any West Bank mayor who signs a Gulf term sheet a traitor. Hamas will convert the first memorandum of understanding into a literal hit list.
Progressives in Tel Aviv fear that an economic-peace track cements occupation; nationalists grimace at the notion that Gulf billions might bankroll a Palestinian proto-state by stealth. European diplomats, wedded to the two-state template they have funded since 1993, are already preparing their frowns.
Yet money is stubborn. In the corridor after Barkat’s talk, three Palestinian manufacturers swapped WhatsApp numbers with an Emirati logistics executive – no entourage, no selfies, only shipping costs and delivery windows. Mirages don’t fill order books.
BARKAT ALSO unveiled a second start-up, this one aimed at Doha. Qatar, he said, has bought a trillion dollars’ worth of influence from university endowments to think-tank panels while hosting Hamas leaders in five-star suites. The existing legal taxonomy cannot keep pace, so he wants to legislate a new category – “enemy-supportive state” – to sanction Doha the way one cuts oxygen to a terror fund. Only a tech founder, I thought, would propose writing a bespoke legal class when the legacy code no longer catches the bug.
Will the first Palestinian appendix to the Abraham Accords roll out next year? Probably not. Could a contract marked “Jenin Industrial Cluster – Gulf Investment Phase 1” land on my desk before year-end? I would not bet against it. The PA can’t sell statehood if it can’t keep the lights on; Hamas can’t sell resistance if its tunnels are flooded and its bankrollers frozen; Israel now offers dividends only after results. Dubai or Gaza is no longer a slogan; it is the market test.
I left the ballroom thinking of Ben-Gurion’s line that in Israel, to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
Today’s miracle would not be a handshake in the Rose Garden: it would be a freight manifest stamped in Hebrew, Arabic and Emirati Arabic rolling through an upgraded checkpoint that used to be a flash point.If that document ever appears, remember that you first heard the pitch in a Midtown hotel, from a tech founder turned minister who looked at the West Bank and saw nothing more mystical than a broken market begging for a disruptive upgrade. The region may yet decline his offer – but no one in the hall that day doubted he had given it a business plan.
