I sat down with Rob Malley—one of the chief American negotiators on Israel-Palestine over three decades—to discuss his book, Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel-Palestine, co-authored with Hussein Agha, who sat on the opposite side of the table, advising the PLO.
The book is, in large part, a reckoning with failure. Malley and Agha describe a process that continually reinforced a terrible status quo, never imposed meaningful consequences on Israel, and ultimately set the stage for October 7 and the genocide that followed. The last 2.5 years have not been a rupture, they argue, but a return to the conflict’s more “primitive form,” now stripped of “the pretense of a hollow peace process.”
The interview is long, but we cover a tremendous amount of ground. I highly recommend listening in full if you want to cut through the myths and false narratives that pervade the discourse and hear from someone who was actually in the room.
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We start with the foundational mismatch between the political objectives of the peace process and actual Palestinian aspirations, unpacking how it benefited elites on all sides, regardless of the outcome. We deconstruct the two-state solution—a foreign concept with little connection to realities on the ground—and how it became a convenient shield for American politicians to feign concern for Palestinians without ever acting on their behalf.
We talk about the U.S.’s role more broadly, of which he writes: “Far from improving the situation, its involvement in Israeli-Palestinian affairs and stranglehold on the peace process often made things worse… It is worth pondering where things would stand if the United States had not bothered with the conflict at all.”
Malley provides a firsthand account of the Oslo Accords, whose failure “may be the least surprising thing about it, given the deceit on which it was built.” We go deep on Camp David and how the summit has been mythologized, including by both Bill and Hillary Clinton in viral clips over the last several years, claiming the Palestinians squandered a once-in-a-lifetime peace opportunity.
We examine the Palestinian Authority as a mechanism for depoliticizing Palestinian nationalism—transforming the PA into a security subcontractor for Israel and a “giant ATM” for a class of functionaries dependent on Western money. We discuss the fragmentation of the Palestinian national movement and the 2006 election of Hamas, which many have used to assign collective blame to Palestinians for October 7, and imagine the alternate history in which Hamas is diplomatically engaged.
We cover the déjà vu of the Biden administration’s post-October 7 failures—“criticizing with one hand Israeli policies it enabled with the other”—as well as his sudden invocation of the two-state solution, as though the conditions for it had somehow emerged from genocidal violence.
We discuss Trump—hopelessly ignorant, corrupt, and cruel, but at least a relief from “America’s moral vanity, feckless expressions of empathy, and convictions devoid of courage. If you are not going to lift a finger for the Palestinians, have the decency not to pretend to care.”
And we close on what new frameworks might actually be useful for thinking about what comes next: “The days that lie ahead will be more instinctive and raw than cerebral or logical. They will be inhospitable to ready-made grand solutions. This is not a world built by or for Americans. They will be at sea.”
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