Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pages, $30.00

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley have written a challenging book on the failure to negotiate a two-state solution to the Israel–Palestine conflict. Why did this sensible and humane idea, supported by a near-universal international consensus, so pitifully fail to take off? Having served intermittently as peace process diplomats for a generation, the two authors conclude that, while the vicissitudes of timing and politics invariably worked against an agreement, negotiations may have failed largely because of weaknesses in the idea itself. Those who support two states out of conviction, inertia, or lip service—that is to say, 90 percent of the politically influential people in the West and other developed countries—need to reckon with their arguments. 

Who are Agha and Malley? Hussein Agha comes from a cosmopolitan Beirut background. He joined Fatah as a University of Beirut undergraduate in the early ’70s, went to Oxford, and was soon tapped by Fatah’s leadership for a role greater than militant and fighter—as someone who could speak comfortably to the Western powers in their own idiom. He was in the room as a young man when Yasser Arafat and his close colleagues learned that Egypt’s Anwar Sadat planned to abandon the united anti-Zionist Arab front and make peace with Israel; when he stayed silent amidst the cacophony of betrayal charges, Arafat took him aside and asked his view. When he explained he saw the consequences of Sadat’s initiative as not necessarily bad, Arafat told the young man he agreed, if politics prevented him from saying so. 

Beginning in the next decade, Agha would be involved in nearly every serious Palestinian–Israeli or Palestinian–American negotiation. In 1999, during one of these, he met Rob Malley, who was on President Clinton’s Mideast staff. 

Malley’s background, more left-wing, is comparably interesting. He is the son of Simon Malley, a moderately famous Egyptian Jewish anti-Zionist and communist who founded Afrique-Asie, a Parisian journal devoted to Third World socialist revolution. Sometime after noticing that these great revolutions produced little more than tyranny under a new guise, if not far worse, the younger Malley left his radicalism behind sufficiently to work for the U.S. government. He remains probably the most “Arabist” figure to work at high levels in recent American administrations and is a regular target of Israel lobby accusations. But like his co-author, he’s been there time and again, with Clinton, Obama, and Biden, working collegially with Aaron David Miller et al., if never quite accomplishing their mutual goals.

The authors’ experience as negotiators shows itself well in this joint work. No one would mistake them for ardent Zionists, but the narrative often displays empathy for Israeli attitudes and fears and an ability to treat Israel’s legitimate concerns (like the fact that when Israel withdraws militarily from some previously occupied territory, the security threats emanating from that territory increase) as understandable and legitimate. Their book is an argument about the failure of the two-state solution, not an anti-Israel polemic. 

The Camp David summit in the final months of the Clinton administration necessarily merits a substantial chapter. Camp David was a pivotal step in the breaking of momentum flowing from the Oslo accords of 1993, themselves possible after the Palestine Liberation Organization for the first time formally stated that its goal was a state on the territory Israel occupied in 1967, thus recognizing Israel diplomatically and acknowledging, in a way, its legitimacy. They push back against the Israeli and Clinton administration line that the failure at Camp David was entirely Arafat’s fault, and point to hasty American summit preparation and the administration’s failure to control the discussions with their own narratives and bridging proposals. They note, as have others, that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s unprecedented offers—ceding to the Palestinians a not particularly contiguous state in Gaza and most of the occupied West Bank—were never put forward in writing. But they note as well that Arafat never responded, never put forth counterproposals. They speculate that a leader like Arafat, not democratically elected, reliant on his astute sense of what his followers would accept, may have less leeway to stretch the limits of his constituents’ political consensus than one with a formal democratic mandate. In any case, Camp David failed, and a bloody intifada ensued, partially provoked by Ariel Sharon’s foray into a Muslim holy site with a squadron of armed riot police. 

In the ensuing 15 years the two sides saw negotiators draw ever nearer to agreement, at least in theory. There were the Clinton parameters, the informal Taba negotiations, Ehud Olmert’s offer—regrettably meaningless because his cabinet did not back it and he faced indictment over corruption charges—the Kerry proposals, the London backchannel. All pointed to a Palestinian state on a large percentage of the West Bank with land swaps to accommodate Israeli settlements, fancy legal rhetoric to depict sovereignty over Jewish and Muslim holy sites, and deft formulae about the right of return of Palestinian refugees, acknowledged in principle but not happening in practice. No Israeli government accepted any of these, for many reasons but in part because it was not obvious that acceptance would actually end the conflict. Looking back at Camp David, the authors acknowledge the negotiations might have failed no matter how skillful American peace processors had been: “[T]he two state solution is not the natural resting place for either Israelis or Palestinians… it runs counter to the essence of their national identities and aspirations.” Even if the most skillful diplomacy, timed perfectly to the internal politics of each side, had produced an agreement, “it likely would not have truly ended the conflict. One or both sides at some point might well have called the deal into question, their unrealized hopes rising up against the compromise.”   

Most American readers will be somewhat familiar with Israel’s internal politics and the invariably unsuccessful efforts by American presidents to persuade Israel to trade land for peace. But the most arresting passages of Tomorrow Is Yesterday deal with Palestinians—whose enthusiasm for a small state was at its zenith at the time of the 1993 Oslo Accords, a feeling that withered over the coming decades. It is a telling  exploration of the importance of psychology in politics, how what is felt subjectively can trump more practical and material considerations. 

At the beginning, a state stood for something Palestinians had won, or were about to win, as a result of their steadfastness and resistance; their political leadership, Arafat’s PLO, was a “liberation movement” and not a governing body. The authors write, “Among Palestinians, the idea of statehood had caught on when it was a proxy for something more elusive and ethereal—liberation, self-determination, dignity.” After Arafat’s death in 2004, the terms of discussion shifted. The authors sardonically record some of the pro-two-state arguments repeated ubiquitously for the past twenty years. “A Palestinian state was the best way to protect the Jewish state against the perils of a one state solution… It was the best way to defeat Hamas…to isolate Iran, to foster Israel’s  regional acceptance.”  

But what was in it for Palestinians? “Little by little, the prize of statehood lost its luster,” the authors write. “Full of bluster and bravado, Yasser Arafat could make Palestinian setbacks such as the Oslo compromises taste like victory… his successors were liable to make even an achievement such as the birth of a state resemble a loss… What counted was how the outcome would be experienced: as the gift that is received or the right that is wrested… The act of fighting justified what Palestinians were fighting for, even if it was only a state. Offered on a platter, served courtesy of the United States to protect Israel, it lost its flavor—a reheated, tasteless glob.”  

In the 2000s, in the aftermath of the second intifada, progress towards peace came to rest upon the Palestinian Authority proving to Israel and the world that they were worthy of a state. Arafat’s successor, the pragmatic Abbas, appointed the very able Western-educated technocrat Salam Fayyad to clean up Palestinian Authority corruption and begin to build the institutions of a functioning West Bank state. The strategy made sense in every way except, perhaps, in the realm of Palestinian sentiment. The authors write, “Every attempt to prove to non-Palestinians that Palestinians were worthy of a state diminished that state’s value in Palestinian eyes. You do not admire something for which you have to beg. You grow contempt for it. The two state solution’s legitimacy was further eroded by the West’s suffocating embrace—a bear hug made worse for its being American.”   

The critical milestone in the disaffection process was the 2006 Hamas victory in Palestinian elections, in a campaign run largely against the corruption of the Palestinian Authority. A short civil war later, Hamas controlled Gaza, while the PA was left to administer a disconnected patchwork of towns and villages on the occupied West Bank.  Some Palestinians were intermittently in open war with Israel, others were keeping things calm on the West Bank, and Palestinians were fighting each other. The two-state peace process, even when backed by Americans as committed to it as Obama and John Kerry, was dead without knowing it.

Much has been written about the run up to the Hamas attack of October 7,^, 2023, which was unparalleled in the history of Palestinian terror attacks (or what Palestinians and their allies call resistance) in its success and scope. Agha and Malley concur with the accepted wisdom that Israel “fell asleep,” so confident was it in its mastery of the situation. They readily acknowledge that the attack was not some isolated gambit carried out by a small faction of Palestinian society. 

The scale of killing on October 7—Hamas forces were able to run rampant for hours in southern Israel before they faced serious military resistance—was a consequence of Israeli complacency. Palestinians had carried out operations to kill civilians or secure hostages many times in the past, but never in such numbers. The authors acknowledge that many Palestinians reacted with pride and elation at the events, sentiments that Israelis took as justification for the ferocity of their response. As losses in Gaza mounted, Palestinian second thoughts certainly grew. But, the authors write, there is no denying that Palestinians largely embraced the events of October 7 because they spoke to their most profound feelings. “October 7 was Palestinian to the core,” they write. That was true in Gaza, the West Bank where the Palestinian Authority still was in charge, and among Palestinians abroad, in New York, London, and elsewhere.  

What does one take away from this honest, incisive, powerfully written book? Certainly not a great deal of hope for the future. The authors lightly explore some outcomes which might improve the status quo which don’t involve a Palestinian state: More local autonomy might improve the lives of West Bank Palestinians as much or more than a neutered state. Not uninteresting is the notion that the West Bank could be given back to Jordan and remain demilitarized. One can see this might have obvious benefits for Palestinian life on the West Bank, choked as it is by Israelis-only roads and military checkpoints, and one could imagine the idea would appeal to many Israelis. As for the Jordanian monarchy, forced into a war for its survival against the PLO in 1970, it is difficult to see much upside. 

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Then there is a question of political morality, of what does one want to happen. I am of course aware that colleagues, family members, golf buddies, and many others have become more pro-Palestinian and more anti-Israel since October 7, a sentiment reflected dramatically in recent opinion polls. Apparently, few have shifted, even slightly, in the other direction. But October 7 and the horrific war that followed, combined with the explosion of anti-Israel sentiment on the American left, have seeded, or more precisely, unearthed, contrary thoughts, generally suppressed but clarifying. 

One can acknowledge that a wrong was done to the Palestinians in 1947 and ’48; one might, as I do, retrospectively sympathize with Secretary of State George Marshall and the American diplomats who thought a Jewish state would usher in endless series of unneeded problems for the United States, and that therefore partition should be opposed. One can acknowledge that Agha and Malley are right in their claim that the two-state solution always stood on tenuous ground because it dealt with the consequences of 1967 and not those of 1948. One can concede to the authors that the skilled and appealing technocrats on Fayyad’s staff—I spent many hours with several of them on a visit in 2011—were by then already widely perceived as extraneous to the Palestinian national struggle.

Nonetheless, much has happened since 1948. In the most profound ways, Hamas, which unambiguously aims for Israel’s liquidation, and its numerous allies in the “from the river to the sea” movement are not on the same plane as Israel. A new cure for a childhood cancer, a scientific breakthrough which enables mankind to generate energy without burning fossil fuels—these are 10,000 times more likely to come from Israel than from any institution connected historically, politically, psychologically, institutionally, or any other way with Hamas. A capacity to move the world forward counts for a great deal. A central charge against Israel on American university campuses is that it is an outpost of “settler colonialism”—the name for a now widespread academic discipline designed to generate hatred not just against Israel but against all Western societies.  (The father of New York City’s newly elected mayor is a leading ideologist of this movement.) There was once a way to support Palestinian rights without fellow-traveling with such people. A surely unintended consequence of this very important book is to call that into doubt.