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Two insiders explain why the Israeli–Palestinian peace process failed, and anticipate what lies ahead.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters killed more than eleven hundred Israelis and took more than two hundred hostages, prompting an Israeli response that has in turn taken tens of thousands of lives and devastated the Gaza Strip. The conflict upended the region and the world. Why did this happen, and can anything be done to grant peace and justice to Israelis and Palestinians alike?
In Tomorrow Is Yesterday, the analyst Hussein Agha and the diplomat Robert Malley offer a personal and bracing perspective on how the hopes of the Oslo Peace Process became the horrors of the present. Drawing on their experience advising the Palestinian leadership (Arafat and Abbas) and US presidents (Clinton, Obama, and Biden) and their participation in secret talks over decades, Agha and Malley offer candid portraits of leading figures and an interpretation of the conflict that exposes the delusions and lies of all sides. They stress that the two-state solution became a global goal only when it was no longer viable; that Hamas's onslaught and Israel's war of destruction were not one-offs or historical exceptions but historical reenactments; and that the gaps separating Israelis and Palestinians have less to do with territorial allocation than with history and emotions. They show how US officials preferred technical schemes and linguistic formulations to a frank reckoning with the past.
In incisive prose and revelatory anecdotes, Agha and Malley lay bare the inner workings of a peace-processing industry that failed to achieve its goals because it created an alternative, inauthentic reality and substituted it for what truly mattered to and moved Israelis and Palestinians. Throughout, they illustrate how there is no better guide to what lies in store tomorrow than what happened yesterday.
Hussein Agha has been involved in Palestinian politics and peace negotiations for more than three decades. He was a senior associate member of St. Antony's College, Oxford, for twenty-five years and participated on behalf of the Palestinians in backchannel negotiations that gave rise to the Beilin–Abu Mazen document, which remains the most authoritative basis for an eventual two-state solution, as well as in the Obama Administration's efforts to broker an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement. He is the coauthor with Ahmad Khalidi of A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine.
Robert Malley has served at senior levels in several US administrations. Under President Obama, he served as Special Assistant to the President, Senior Advisor to the President for the counter-ISIL campaign, and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf Region. He served as Special Assistant to the President for Arab–Israeli affairs under President Clinton. Most recently, he was Special Envoy for Iran in the Biden Administration. He was also president and CEO of the International Crisis Group and is the author of The Call from Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution, and the Turn to Islam.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters killed more than eleven hundred Israelis and took more than two hundred hostages, prompting an Israeli response that has in turn taken tens of thousands of lives and devastated the Gaza Strip. The conflict upended the region and the world. Why did this happen, and can anything be done to grant peace and justice to Israelis and Palestinians alike?
In Tomorrow Is Yesterday, the analyst Hussein Agha and the diplomat Robert Malley offer a personal and bracing perspective on how the hopes of the Oslo Peace Process became the horrors of the present. Drawing on their experience advising the Palestinian leadership (Arafat and Abbas) and US presidents (Clinton, Obama, and Biden) and their participation in secret talks over decades, Agha and Malley offer candid portraits of leading figures and an interpretation of the conflict that exposes the delusions and lies of all sides. They stress that the two-state solution became a global goal only when it was no longer viable; that Hamas's onslaught and Israel's war of destruction were not one-offs or historical exceptions but historical reenactments; and that the gaps separating Israelis and Palestinians have less to do with territorial allocation than with history and emotions. They show how US officials preferred technical schemes and linguistic formulations to a frank reckoning with the past.
In incisive prose and revelatory anecdotes, Agha and Malley lay bare the inner workings of a peace-processing industry that failed to achieve its goals because it created an alternative, inauthentic reality and substituted it for what truly mattered to and moved Israelis and Palestinians. Throughout, they illustrate how there is no better guide to what lies in store tomorrow than what happened yesterday.
Hussein Agha has been involved in Palestinian politics and peace negotiations for more than three decades. He was a senior associate member of St. Antony's College, Oxford, for twenty-five years and participated on behalf of the Palestinians in backchannel negotiations that gave rise to the Beilin–Abu Mazen document, which remains the most authoritative basis for an eventual two-state solution, as well as in the Obama Administration's efforts to broker an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement. He is the coauthor with Ahmad Khalidi of A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine.
Robert Malley has served at senior levels in several US administrations. Under President Obama, he served as Special Assistant to the President, Senior Advisor to the President for the counter-ISIL campaign, and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf Region. He served as Special Assistant to the President for Arab–Israeli affairs under President Clinton. Most recently, he was Special Envoy for Iran in the Biden Administration. He was also president and CEO of the International Crisis Group and is the author of The Call from Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution, and the Turn to Islam.
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Reviews
"A coruscating book . . . that surveys the folly and missed chances of Israeli-Palestinian relations"
David Remnick, The New Yorker
"[A] probing book on the failure of [the peace process] . . . Grim and unflinching."
Adam Shatz, London Review of Books