| ||||
|
| Smoke rises during an Israeli military operation Tuesday as displaced Palestinians fleeing northern Gaza move south. (Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters) |
| We’re approaching the grim two-year anniversary of the events of Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas’s attack on southern Israel killed more than 1,200 people and saw hundreds of hostages abducted into the Gaza Strip. The ensuing military campaign by Israel inflicted magnitudes greater damage, flattening much of the enclave, killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, triggering a sprawling humanitarian disaster, and convulsing the Middle East in cycles of escalatory violence. On Monday, President Donald Trump touted a possible peace deal as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House. But its terms remain contested, with Hamas yet to accept the agreement and Netanyahu, whose far-right allies seek Gaza’s conquest and ethnic cleansing, trying to tweak some of the conditions Trump announced. Looming beyond a potential deal is the prospect of a Trump-led interim entity presiding over Gaza’s reconstruction. As seismic as the past two years have been in the region, it may be a mistake to see the current moment as one of rupture. In their new book, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine,” Robert Malley and Hussein Agha show how the disaster of the present has myriad antecedents and precedents from the past. The two negotiators had prominent seats at the table in the heady years of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — Agha as an adviser to the Palestinians, and Malley as a key diplomat in the Clinton administration — and offer a clear-eyed account of how the Oslo Peace Process failed, of the delusions and denials that led to the collapse of a genuine two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, and about the deep emotions and histories that make the conflict seem intractable. I spoke with Malley at an event for the book in Washington on Monday evening. What follows are excerpts from our long conversation, edited for brevity and clarity. Was this book motivated by the events of Oct. 7? Paradoxically, very much yes and very much no. Yes in the sense that Oct. 7 is the exclamation point of the failure of decades of the peace process. But no in the sense that part of the theme of the book is that Oct. 7 is not that unique. And the [Israeli] response to Oct. 7 is not that unique either. I think on both sides, there’s the sense of a raw, brutal, communal, existential fight that is reminiscent of the past. It’s not like Netanyahu and his government landed from Mars and have nothing to do with Israel, or that Hamas and the Islamists are these messianic forces that also landed from another planet. It’s a hard reality, but this is why we wanted to write the book. You don’t have to go too far back in Palestinian history to see before Hamas, Fatah and other movements, non Islamist movements, that hijack buses, kill civilians, kidnap civilians, with the goal for them to say, ‘we’re going to get the Israelis to taste their own medicine, and we’re going to make them fear the way we fear, and we’re going to invade their territory like they invaded ours, and we’re going to use violence and hostage taking in order to release our prisoners.’ Oct. 7 was special because it was more quote-unquote successful, not because there was anything particularly unique about it. And the response by the Israelis — the overwhelming use of force, the targeting of civilians, the demolition of everything that’s in their way, whether it’s a threat or not a threat — that too is not new. The prospect of [former British Prime Minister] Tony Blair running some sort of Middle East governorate again is also an echo of the past. It’s ironic. To have a trusteeship or mandate led de facto by a Brit without consulting the local Palestinian population. The ideas that are being bandied around — from ethnic cleansing on the one hand to trusteeship on the other — all of these are echoes of the past. And, if we don’t realize that, then we’re missing the core of the story. | ||||||||||||
| |
| Robert Malley, Middle East and North Africa Program Director at the International Crisis Group, testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Jan. 23, 2007, in Washington. (Jamie Rose/Getty Images) |
| In the midst of negotiations in 1999 and 2000 at the Camp David summit, could you imagine the kind of rightward drift of Israeli politics that came after — the extent to which settlements would proliferate around the West Bank, the extent to which the facts on the ground had been so irrevocably changed in so many places? One of the themes of the book is that, under the guise of the peace process, which was supposed to bring the two parties closer to a two-state solution, everything on the ground was moving in the opposite direction. And under President Clinton — under the three presidents I served — [Israeli] settlement expansion in the West Bank accelerated even as we were talking about a two-state solution and claiming that’s what we’re going to try to achieve. Regarding the right wing shift, it’s been long coming. I think it’s a mistake to focus too much on the individuals, either in Hamas or on the extreme right in Israel. Because, again, the trend was there even before [the ascension of current finance minister Bezalel] Smotrich or [national security minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir. When people say they can’t wait for the day that Netanyahu goes and then finally we’ll go back to the good old days — the good old days we’ve seen, and they are what led to the bad days. The most likely replacement for Prime Minister Netanyahu would be [Naftali] Bennett, who was one of his predecessors. Did he slow down settlement construction? Did he agree to the principle of the Palestinian state? No. So, the annexation [of the West Bank] may not be as obvious, it may not be as quick, but the trend would be there. And in some ways, people would pay less attention. What role does the United States have in this drift? The U.S. needs to take a very hard look at itself. In the name of this peace process, which was supposed to lead to two states, the United States allowed and enabled the perpetuation, aggravation of the status quo. What did the United States say? I had to write some of those talking points. What do we tell the Palestinians? Don’t do anything that’s going to disturb that process. Don’t go to the International Court of Justice, don’t engage in civil disobedience, don’t call for boycotts of Israel. Don’t do anything that could possibly upset the apple cart, because if you do, then you’re never going to get two states. Unilateral actions by the Israelis are given impunity, because [U.S. administrations believed] that’s what the Israeli government needs to stay in power and deliver peace. Unilateral actions by the Palestinians are viewed as inimical to the peace process because they’re going to upset the apple cart. The two-state solution — which most governments at the United Nations have called for, which is the stated goal of a now-defunct peace process — seems lost. Is it still the panacea it’s been made out to be for so many years? At what point do we say no, maybe the pursuit itself is what was wrong? That the pursuit of two states misdiagnosed the core of the conflict, which is not simply a conflict about how are we going to divide the West Bank and Gaza, draw a line on the map and then call it peace. Palestinians are looking for something much more: What happens to their story about the Nakba [the catastrophe of their dispossession in 1948]? What happens to millions of refugees? How could they say the conflict is over forever? It’s a permanent status deal when that has not even been addressed. And for Israelis, how do they accept a deal and say it’s permanent and we accept peace if they don’t believe the other side has accepted the legitimacy of the Jewish presence and attachment to all of the land? And so there’s something there that the two-state solution that I’ve been involved in trying to achieve simply didn’t address. So in that sense we say, what if we misconstrued what the conflict was about, and therefore had to misconstrue what the solution would look like? The picture you’re painting here is quite bleak. We really hope this book is not read as a message of pessimism or despair, because the real pessimism is to say you’re going to go back [to the era of peace talks]. That’s the kind of optimism that kills, because it’s the optimism that leads to where we are today. It’s a more difficult kind of optimism that we’re calling for, which is to say, end the war in Gaza, and then open your mind, because Israelis and Palestinians are going to have to coexist. Neither side is going to go away, and that means they are going to have to be more creative in finding ways to do that. | ||||||