Brooke Gladstone: This is the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. After the peace deal was signed between Israel and Hamas last week, the news coming out of the Middle East was slightly less grim than it's been for the last two years. The remaining living hostages were returned to Israel, and aid trucks began to enter Gaza. For the Gazans returning to their homes to find just rubble, and for the besieged residents of the West Bank, what does this tentative peace deal really mean?

Last month, on the New Yorker Radio Hour, host David Remnick, had a conversation about the fate of the two-state solution. We're replaying it because it provides useful background information on what we might hear in the weeks and months to come. Here's David.

David Remnick: For so long, our hopes for peace in the Middle East lay with a two-state solution, Israel and a Palestinian state recognizing one another's right to exist, with some kind of security guarantees in place, but nearly two years after the October 7th attack, the two-state solution now seems like mere rhetoric, an illusion. The brutality of that attack struck grief and horror into nearly every Israeli, and it emboldened the most hardline elements in the Israeli government.

In Gaza, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed. Nearly every building there has been either destroyed or damaged. Israel faces accusations of war crimes and even genocide. In the West Bank, Israel seems poised to annex the territory entirely, and it goes on and on. The killing, the destruction, the displacement, and so much more. Looking back now, we have to wonder, was there ever a real chance for peace? That's the subject of Tomorrow Is Yesterday. To my mind, an essential book, a book difficult to read, but full of hard truths and no phony optimism.

The authors are veterans of Middle East diplomacy. Hussein Agha was a negotiator for the Palestinians, and he helped draft a key document called A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine. Robert Malley was in the US State Department, and he helped organize the Camp David Summit in 2000. Later, he was the US chief negotiator for the Iran nuclear deal under President Obama. I spoke recently with Hussein Agha and Robert Malley.

Hussein, very shortly after October 7th, I called you to get your reaction, and you said this. "This is a dagger to my heart. It reminds me that I'm a loser. For 55 years, I've been trying to do something, and now it culminates in an act of brutality. Acts of brutality on both sides. It's all meaningless. It didn't amount to a hill of beans." I have to say that despairing note, which you relayed to me not long after October 7th, is threaded throughout this book. Tell me a little bit more about what you were feeling then, and how it's carried over.

Hussein Agha: The involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I was sucked into it. Every time I thought I'm going to get out of it, I was, what was it, Al Pacino in Godfather III? I was sucked back into it. I finished up doing this miserable thing because I thought that I can be of some help, and finished up not to be the case. It was very, very frustrating.

David Remnick: That's a personal angle, but do you think that the attempt to create some political arrangement between the Palestinians and the Israelis has been, over the past half-century, a colossal waste of time?

Hussein Agha: It was treated mostly by the West and by Western-minded Israelis as being something that can be dealt with materially, rationally, with a formulation that lends itself to neat outcomes. That was a big, big mistake because it completely discarded the issue of emotions and history, because they always say emotions has a bad name. You can't be emotional. You have to be rational, you have to be cool, but rational and cool has nothing to do with the conflict.

The language used was to find a kind of solutions that have a technical outcome that are measurable and that can be portrayed by lines on maps, among other things, and that has no resonance with the majority of both communities, but it has a necessity for leaders, mostly in the West, because it leads to neat outcomes. What you finish up with is not the consequences of a rational handling of the conflict, but with the deep emotions involved. People get surprised.

October 7th, people get surprised by the total destruction of Gaza by the IDF. It's not very surprising because that is very much in the nature of what the conflict is about. The deep issue of the psyche of both communities has always-- It was given lip service to, the same way they give lip service to history and to all kinds of issues that do not lend themselves to solutions and move on to simpler ways that distort the nature of the beast. When you do that, you can never resolve it.

David Remnick: Let's go to Rob Malley to extend this thought. What I'm hearing from Hussein and what I get from this book is a very despairing view of not only the situation, but your own work, both of your works, for many, many years, that somehow the attempt to come to a resolution, to come to a two-state solution, was a delusion. This is a very dark place to come to, and God knows we're living in a dark enough time.

Robert Malley: How could you look at it otherwise? Look at where we were in '93 when the US gets formally involved in trying to resolve the conflict. Almost by any metric, the situation was superior to what it is today. How could you look at that and just objectively not say, this was-- A waste of time is almost a charitable way to look at it because things are so much worse today. It cannot be, and I'm going to turn to the US because I was a US official in several of the administrations during that 30-year period.

The US, with all the power it had, having designated this conflict as one of its priorities, and at the end of that 30-year-or-so period, we are in every way-- we, I mean, the Israelis and Palestinians, are in a worse situation than before the US got so heavily invested. It's hard not to look at it and say something was fundamentally wrong or sick about this. When we speak about deceit, we specifically say it may not have started as a deceit, but when after all these years you hear the same regurgitated problem about two-state solution, we're trying to do it and we're going to do everything we can, and everything that is being done is in fact moving in the other direction, then at that point it does become a lie. You speak about despair.

David Remnick: In fact, you both use the phrase, "dangerous gimmick." You say the two-state solution, the attempt to create a Palestinian state side by side, in the Israeli interpretation, a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with a shared Jerusalem, and so on, or the vision of the '90s, that that was a dangerous gimmick.

Robert Malley: The gimmick is not the effort to achieve it. It's the way people went about it, the Americans and others went about it. Why dangerous? Because what did it do in the end? It froze out other possibilities.

David Remnick: Such as?

Robert Malley: Who knows how Israelis and Palestinians might coexist, but again, look at it today, hard to see. I would say impossible to see how you're going to get two states. You didn't get them under much, much better conditions. How are you going to get it now? It ruled out other possibilities of coexistence, from one state to confederation to federation with Jordan. It protected the US peace process, protected Israel from pressure. It propped up a feckless Palestinian Authority, the authority that was set up by the Oslo Accords to rule the Palestinians-

David Remnick: In the '90s?

Robert Malley: -in the '90s. It gave the Palestinians the illusion that the Americans were going to rectify the glaring imbalance between Israelis and Palestinians, which they didn't do. It elbowed out other potential participants, Arabs in particular, who were viewed as cumbersome in this process. It really was a ménage à trois between the US, Israelis, and Palestinians.

What it did, and this I saw directly, is that this notion that we were progressing towards a two-state solution led the United States and Israelis to say there are forms of Palestinian activism that are off-bounds, that are illegitimate. Going to the International Court of Justice, trying to get forms of accountability, boycotts, divestment, sanctions, whatever they are, the Palestinians were told, if you do that, that's going against the grain of the attempt to reach a two-state solution, so we're going to sanction you. Those forms of activism were excluded.

At the same time, and again, I didn't witness this directly, the Israeli forms of unilateral action, like settlement construction, they were criticized, but they were excused in the name of the search for a two-state solution. One administration after another would say, "Let's not make too much of a fuss about this," about the home demolitions, about the settlement construction, because once we get a two-state solution, all of that will go away. That's why we say it's a dangerous gimmick. It's because it's been used to cover and to perpetuate a status quo that is in every way moving in a direction opposite to the stated goal.

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David Remnick: I'm speaking with Robert Malley and Hussein Agha. We'll continue in just a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

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David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I've been speaking today with Hussein Agha and Robert Malley. They're former negotiators, both involved for many years in attempts to resolve the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Since the 1990s, the United States backed efforts to achieve what's called a two-state solution, in which Israel would exist side by side with the Palestinian state. That was the goal for a very long time.

In their new book, Tomorrow Is Yesterday, Hussein Agha and Rob Malley look back and conclude that they and all the parties involved were part of a charade. Agha and Malley have come to the grim, retrospective conclusion that there was never any way that a two-state solution could fully satisfy either the Israelis or the Palestinians. Their historical and emotional grievances just ran too deep to overcome. We'll continue our conversation now.

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David Remnick: I did a long profile. Obviously, I couldn't speak to him, but I tried to do a long profile of Yahya Sinwar, who was then the head of Hamas in Gaza. What was Sinwar trying to do on October 7th, now that we've had in excess of 700 days to think about this?

Hussein Agha: There's a Western and Israeli fantasy that Sinwar was building this grand strategy, of which October 7th was the trigger to get the region, Hezbollah, to open another front, and eventually lead to the end of Israel. This is nonsense. Sinwar, when he left prison--

David Remnick: Sinwar was in prison for two decades for killing Palestinians.

Hussein Agha: For a while, yes. When he left the prison, he promised his comrades in prison that he will not forget them, and he will get ways of freeing them. He thought, we can kidnap more Israeli soldiers and trade them with prisoners. I think this really is the core motivation for Sinwar for October 7th. Nothing more. He did not think that October 7th is going to "liberate Palestine." He's not stupid.

David Remnick: Do you agree with that, Rob? There's a great deal of evidence that the ambition on the part of Hamas was greater than that. There's a lot of evidence that Hamas feared a widening Abraham Accord in which Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, would normalize their relations with Israel while completely overlooking the fate of the Palestinians.

Robert Malley: I've not seen no evidence that that was the motivation. That would really surprise me, that the motivation was to stop normalization. I don't think that was--

David Remnick: It was announced by Hamas's own--

Robert Malley: Spokesman. I'm not sure you're going to believe that argument that they make. Listen, I think certainly the fact--

David Remnick: Hamas says it's their motivation. Why shouldn't it be?

Hussein Agha: Remnick, Remnick.

David Remnick: Yes.

Hussein Agha: You have to read between the lines. This is not an issue where you can translate what they say into English and believe it. You have to resort to hermeneutics in the words of Habermas and Heidegger, where you have to interpret what they say, why they say it, not the content and the meaning of the words.

David Remnick: Why would they give it a grander interpretation, even on the day itself?

Robert Malley: That makes sense, to give it a grander interpretation. I think what we say in the book is that it's a longstanding Palestinian way of doing things, which is, yes, their goal is to liberate their comrades. That's what Palestinians have done, Fatah has done for many, many decades. Do they have the hope, perhaps, that this will be the trigger for something bigger? Of course. Now, on the issue of normalization, my own view on this is certainly the fact that the Palestinian--

David Remnick: Normalization, meaning Saudi Arabia [crosstalk].

Robert Malley: Between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The fact that the Palestinian issue was being buried, that nobody was paying any attention to it, that formed part of the context within which Hamas hatches its plan. It's not so much, oh, we need to prevent Israel and Saudi Arabia normalizing, but this is a way to remind the world that the Palestinians are not going anywhere.

David Remnick: Let's turn the clock back here a little bit, Hussein. You were both involved in intense negotiations that seemed very promising at the time. The standard narrative in American political discourse and in Israeli political discourse was that there was a great opportunity in 2000 at Camp David, and Yasser Arafat, then the head of the PLO, walked away from it. What actually happened at Camp David, in your view, when to this day Bill Clinton says they had it all and Yasser Arafat walked away from it?

Hussein Agha: Show me the deal that was offered in Camp David. Show me anything official that really can be construed as an offer that was rejected. They were ideas. They were brainstorming. They used to go to Arafat, and they say, one, two, three, four, five, and Arafat used to ask the president, "Is this the Israeli position?" The president said, "If you accept them, I may get the Israelis to agree to them." It's not good enough for Arafat because if he accepts them, he's already made the concessions in return for something which is vague and non-existent at that stage.

David Remnick: Hussein, did Arafat want a deal?

Hussein Agha: Arafat is probably the only Palestinian leader ever who wanted a deal. I think the successors, they knew they could not deliver a deal. Don't forget, the two-state solution for a long time for the Palestinians was an act of treason, and Arafat, almost single-handedly, turned it into the objective of the National Liberation Movement of the Palestinians. Now, you don't have a figure, post-Arafat, who can transform the concessions that the Palestinians have to make into achievements.

Robert Malley: Hussein and I debated for a long time how much emphasis to give to Camp David in the book. In the end, we gave it its proper due, in part because of the point you made. I hear so many American politicians, some of whom I worked for, who say to this day, the Palestinians could complain about what happened after October 7th, but if only they had accepted. No less an authority than Shlomo Ben-Ami, Foreign Minister of Israel, has said, if he had been in Arafat's shoes, he never would have accepted, as Hussein said, the very vague promises that were made at Camp David because those would have amounted to a basic betrayal of the Palestinian cause in exchange for very little.

You don't need to agree with them to recognize that for them accepting to move on from their aspiration, which is of all of Palestine, they believe that what happened in 1948 that they were dispossessed of their land. When they accept the 1967 borders, all of the West Bank and Gaza, that for them is a historic concession. They're then told, "Sorry, we're going to pocket that. Now you're going to make a concession on your concession. It's going to be 80% or 90% of the West Bank. You're not going to have the right to have your defense forces, you're not going to have control over your airspace, you're not going to have control over your borders," whatever it may be.

For the Palestinian, their own psyche, their emotions, this is about 1948 and the catastrophe, the Nakba, that they suffered. We can make similar arguments about why it was difficult for Israelis to accept a genuine Palestinian state. We could come to that. On the Palestinian side, I think this notion, first of all, that because they rejected offers in the past, they only have what they deserve, I think we really need to be very careful playing [crosstalk].

David Remnick: Rob, from the Israeli point of view, the objection toward a potential Palestinian state, even on the basis of Camp David's suggestions, as you put it, was that the claims would not stop, that the violence would not stop. Can you address that?

Robert Malley: Obviously, that's one. It's also, and again, we write about it, that today, at least from the Israeli experience, whether you accept their narrative or not, they feel they withdrew from Gaza, they got missiles, they withdrew from Lebanon, they got missiles.

David Remnick: How do you address that?

Robert Malley: From the Israeli perspective, by the same token, their yearning, their aspiration, is for full security, full freedom, to feel like they could never be threatened again, which is hard to distinguish from full dominion, and that's very hard to achieve if you have a genuine sovereign Palestinian state. What is really driving the two sides is very hard to accommodate within the confines of the two-state solution, even assuming that there was ever any seriousness on the American side to try to make that happen.

David Remnick: Now, as I recall, Hussein, after the summit collapsed in 2000, you drafted a proposal that you thought reflected the interests of both sides. It included a swap of territories, it recognized both sides' claims to Jerusalem in some way. Why was your draft proposal more viable than what Camp David proposed?

Hussein Agha: We had the proposal before Camp David, and when we went to Camp David, Barak refused to look at it.

David Remnick: Ehud Barak, the prime minister at the time?

Hussein Agha: Yes. When we went, me and Rob, with this new formulation or a kind of trying to capture what happened in Camp David in a way that is agreeable to both parties, the Palestinians were not interested in looking at it because they thought they let us down, and now they want to take us back again to discuss the same things we discussed before, and the moment had passed. When the political moment had passed, then whatever agreement you have, it will not fly.

The Intifada started slowly, and the Israelis, with the prime minister Barak, hit very hard against it, which accelerated it. Culturally, they could not communicate because the Israelis, like the Americans, they have a material matrix, and that is its cost-benefit analysis. It's like, 'This is good for you, you should take it." That's not how the Palestinians think.

David Remnick: How do they think? How would you say they do?

Hussein Agha: They think in terms of their feelings, of their emotions, of their history, of things like dispossession, dispersal.

David Remnick: How can they possibly be addressed?

Hussein Agha: You need to have a new framework to refer to all these issues. I don't have a blueprint, but I tell you, everybody who has a blueprint, this blueprint not only does not work, it leads to outcomes that aggravate the situation rather than try to solve them. October 7th, and the war against Gaza is the outcome of 35 years of interaction and negotiation and engagement between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

David Remnick: Here we are two years later after this, and the reality is this. There are tens of thousands of Palestinians dead in Gaza. The infrastructure of Gaza is all but destroyed. Israel has moved increasingly to the right. Its sense of grief, resentment is intense. Other than assessing these realities and looking at them with both grief and clear-sightedness, where are we, and what's even remotely possible? What's possible?

Robert Malley: I want to echo what Hussein just said. We're not in the prescription business. We were in that business. I was in that business for too long, given that the prescription [crosstalk]-

David Remnick: You feel humbled by this.

Robert Malley: -to say the least. I don't know. The first part is to put an end to this war.

David Remnick: We're not there yet.

Robert Malley: We're not there yet, but the only way it's going to happen is if there are consequences that Israel incurs for continuing the war. Those consequences can't be European leaders saying that they're going to recognize a Palestinian state. It has to be consequences that make Israel think twice about continuing on the course it's on right now.

David Remnick: For what they did?

Robert Malley: Stop any military support. From an American perspective, but even from Euroean--

David Remnick: Above all, from the United States.

Robert Malley: That would make the biggest difference. If you want to go back, because nobody expects it or few expect it from Trump, that's where the real indictment of the Biden administration stands, to, on the one hand, say we need to end this war, but to continue to provide the weapons that fuel the war. That is an inconsistency, to put it mildly, that I don't think I'll ever be able to explain away. Israelis and Palestinians are going to have to put on the table ideas that were there yesterday. Why did we call the book Tomorrow Is Yesterday? It's because where we are today is very much where we were a decade, two decades, five, six decades ago.

David Remnick: Only with thousands and thousands of people dead.

Robert Malley: True, but after the catastrophe of 1948, many Palestinians were dead as well. There are times of pure naked violence where neither Israelis or Palestinians have a shared idea, not just a roadmap, but even what the destination should be. Where ideas that are rooted in the past, ideas such as a binational state or confederation or federation with Jordan, those are on the more "promising side." Then ideas like annexation or ethnic cleansing. All those ideas--

David Remnick: Annexation and ethnic cleansing seems to be exactly where we are.

Robert Malley: If you ask me where I think we're headed, I think we're headed, unfortunately, towards a worsening of the situation with forms of ethnic cleansing and forms of annexation, even if it's not formalized, it could be, it doesn't have to be. You don't have to announce annexation. It's happening every day on the ground. At some point, one would hope Israelis and Palestinians will realize that neither side is really going to go away, and they're going to have to find ways to coexist. That's where some of the ideas of the past that were discussed among Israelis and Palestinians before the straitjacket of the two-state solution took hold, those ideas one could only hope will flourish again. I'm not going to stand here and say here's how we get from A to Z.

David Remnick: The focus on the hostages in the Israeli media is intense. Far less, needless to say, focus on Palestinian suffering. In Palestine, in both the West Bank and Gaza, everybody almost has lost multiple relatives, multiple friends, and the sense of rage and grievance, no matter what their politics individually are, I have to think are going to be not just long-lasting, but generational. How is a politics of any kind possible after that, Hussein, for a long time to come?

Hussein Agha: Before we get there, let's not forget about the Palestinian hostages that are in Israeli jails for some of them for decades, without going through due process. All of them, as some of the news that came out recently, have been subjected to all kinds of inhuman practices and violation of their rights. There is this monopoly of suffering of Israeli hostages. I'm totally against taking hostages, so let's make that clear. The question is, I do not believe in the resolution of the conflict anymore. I think it's the kind of conflict that will not be resolved. I believe in arrangements. One idea, I know it's not very popular anymore, about a decade ago, Hamas suggested the hudna.

David Remnick: A truce with some conditions lasting a period of years.

Hussein Agha: Yes. What if in these 5 years and 10 years, we found out that we can co-exist? You have to reach arrangements, and arrangements not based on trust. You see, people say there is no trust between Israelis and Palestinians, and that's one reason you don't have an agreement. I say, no, any agreement based on trust is very fragile. You cannot base agreements on trust. You have to base them on conditions and specifications that will ensure their permanence, but resolution? Forget it. Not this generation, not next generation. Next generation is going to be much more radical than this generation.

David Remnick: On both sides?

Hussein Agha: On both sides.

David Remnick: What is Palestinian politics going ahead after this war ends?

Hussein Agha: [chuckles] It's not going to be very pleasant, and it's not going to be very predictable. It's going to be a throwback to the past, and that's the title of the book. It's going to go through a period of being the lost Palestinians looking for their objectives that make sense, looking for a political system that they can live within, looking for the leadership that represents them. Now, how long will that take? I don't know. Is there a blueprint for that? Definitely not. It's not a matter of blueprint. It's a matter of process that you cannot really pin down. You have to find clarity in the confusion, as Jean-Luc Godard used to say. [laughs]

Robert Malley: This is another of the legacies of the peace process, which is the state of Palestinian politics today, because weakening the Palestinian authority, that has been a trademark of the last 30 years. Isolating and excluding Hamas, even after Hamas won the elections that the Bush administration, George W Bush, had called for. They win the elections, and then they become sanctioned and excluded.

Then keeping the Palestinians divided between Fatah and Hamas and enabling that division, all of that is part of the legacy of a process that was saying we're moving to a two-state solution, so we want to keep Hamas out, and we don't want to put too much pressure on Israel because we need their support for the two-state solution, which only weakens the Palestinian authority. You're not going to have peace between Israelis and Palestinians if you don't have a representative Palestinian national movement. It's just impossible to do that. Divided, impotent, feckless, that's the leadership with which you're going to negotiate something that's going to last. That's a contradiction in terms.

Hussein Agha: It is worse than that. Don't forget the political system in Palestine and the political parties in Palestine are parties of liberation, not parties of building a state, unlike the Zionists. The Zionists wanted to build a Jewish state. Very clear, very straightforward, very successful. The Palestinians were not interested in governance, and governance kind of came as an afterthought, that, "Okay, now we have part of Palestine, we have to run it," and they were not good at it, because they were not prepared for it.

David Remnick: Let's talk about Iran, because in the Israeli conversation, particularly about what's happened in the last two years, they saw, or certainly Netanyahu saw, October 7th as something that was initiated by Hamas, but was part of the Ring of Fire concept, that really what was behind this was Iran, and that somehow October 7th would have ignited a holistic assault on Israel. How do you view what's happened there, and what will the effect of that be, Rob?

Robert Malley: It's a little bit strange for people to say this was all part of a plot that Iran was masterminding when Iran sat on its hands after October 7th for a long time.

David Remnick: Some would say that Hezbollah is an extension of Iran.

Robert Malley: Hezbollah, as you said, didn't go after Israel in the way that some people thought they might.

David Remnick: No, it wasn't full [crosstalk].

Robert Malley: If this was a plan, if there ever was a moment, and like you're saying, what happened on October 7th, I would agree, it's horrible what happened to Israelis, so I'm not saying that this should have happened, but if the plan had been to really go after Israel, the time to do it was October 8th. Israel was at its weakest. You could say maybe Iran was not in the loop, so they thought they're going to wait for some other day to launch the operation? That's what I'd say on that. Hussein, I knew he'd want to jump up on this, and then--

Hussein Agha: Yes. Remnick is right about what the Iranian strategy was. It was to create a ring of fire, definitely. That strategy was almost explicitly stated by Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian revolutionary leader who was killed by the Americans during Trump's first term. That strategy was there, but what wasn't there was the coordination on the tactics.

David Remnick: Netanyahu, it is very clear that from his very emergence in politics, both in the United States and at the UN, and then as a Knesset member, and then beginning in his first term as prime minister in the '90s, was out to achieve at least two things. One was to put the Palestinian question out of sight, and two was to make the focus on Iran, that more than anything, his focus, even early speeches 25 years ago, 30 years ago, was about the peril of the Iranian nuclear program. Now, the opportunity presented itself because the Israelis had knocked out Hezbollah to a great degree, and eventually--

Robert Malley: The Iranian defenses.

David Remnick: The Iranian air defenses. Where are we now with that?

Robert Malley: First, I think there I have to go back to what we were talking about earlier, and the nuclear agreement that the Obama administration reached with Iran. I still believe that if your real preoccupation was Iran acquiring a bomb, then that deal at least gave you the 10 years where you could say--

David Remnick: A Hoodner, one could say. Yes, a truce.

Robert Malley: Not a bad term, but maybe more than 10 years, where you could at least not worry about it and try to see whether you could reach the next iteration of a deal. There was logic to that. The notion of throwing it out, which was what Benjamin Netanyahu convinced President Trump in his first term to do, that was completely at odds with the stated objective because, as we know, Iran accelerated its nuclear program than what they had prior to the agreement. It's hard for me to say yes, this was all because of this obsession about the nuclear program, because if that was really the concern, there were other ways to deal with it than what they did.

Now, where we are today, I have no doubt that Iran's nuclear program is far, far, far from what it was. It's degraded significantly. I don't expect Iran is going to try to reconstitute its program anytime soon because it fears Israeli penetration, American intervention, but do they have this latent desire at some point to have the deterrent? I assume they have it more today than ever before.

David Remnick: Deterrence, you say?

Robert Malley: The nuclear weapon, for whatever purpose, yes, deterrence would be the one.

David Remnick: We could talk about this for hours, and if over time we obviously will. Right now, where we are is extremely dark, extremely depressing, and there's no getting around it, and your book doesn't mince words about where we are. There's no jolly ending to your book. There's no blueprint for the future. We have the president that we have who's suggested, maybe, in effect, further ethnic cleansing, voluntary, involuntary, and the construction of the Fontainebleau and the Riviera in Gaza. What possibly could the United States do to move things forward, Hussein?

Hussein Agha: Ask Rob first. He's the American.

David Remnick: Okay.

Robert Malley: Very hard to answer, particularly in the immediate future. I'd say the main thing is do no harm, which probably means stay away.

David Remnick: Stay away. Disengage.

Robert Malley: Of course, they're never going to completely stay away because they will continue to support Israel. It's hard for me to see something good coming out of any of these plans, some of which we're hearing about for Gaza, the future of Gaza. My hope, if there is a hope in the US, is more that in the future. Hussein spoke about the dynamic politics of Israel. US politics on this issue have not been particularly dynamic from the time that I was a young man to today, but my new profession is teaching. I see students.

I see how they are assessing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the US role in it, how uncomfortable they feel with the moral hypocrisy, the compromises, the deceit. You could imagine an American politics that will emerge in which you could start thinking about what America could do that would be positive. Very hard for me to see something coming out in the immediate future, but maybe Hussein is both more creative and optimistic than I am.

David Remnick: Hussein?

Hussein Agha: Yes. I think a very important step that the Americans managed to carry out successfully last, during Trump's last tenure, was the Abraham Accords.

David Remnick: You're referring to the normalization agreements, which they wanted to expand to Saudi Arabia and beyond.

Hussein Agha: I think if the Palestinians can be incorporated in the Abraham Accords in the sense of if you want to have negotiations with Israel, the Palestinians will be part of a larger Arab delegation that will negotiate with Israel to make it worthwhile for Israel to see the returns of why it should make concessions to the Palestinians and to give the Palestinians the depth and support that they need and they don't have. That will be a positive move.

We have to take it back to its origins because the Palestinians don't have much to give to Israel in return. Everything they tried to give in the past finished up not working out, whether Hamas in Gaza or the PA in the West Bank. I don't see any hope or any future in any bilateral Israeli-Palestinian engagement. I see that the consequences of the Abraham Accords have not been fully made use of as yet, and they have great potential to be something much more than what they are.

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David Remnick: The book is Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine. Hussein Agha, Robert Malley, thank you so much.

Robert Malley: Thanks, David.

Hussein Agha: Thanks, David.

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David Remnick: You can read an excerpt from Hussein Agha and Robert Malley's important book at newyorker.com. It's an essay called What Killed the Two-State Solution? Of course, you can subscribe to The New Yorker there as well, newyorker.com.

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Brooke Gladstone: Thanks for listening to the Midweek Podcast. Check out the Big Show, which posts on Friday around dinner time, to hear about how ICE is trying to seize the narrative about what's going on in American cities.

 

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