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David Remnick: How The Two State Solution Ended in Disaster
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Hussein Agha and Robert Malley spent decades trying to negotiate peace in the Middle East, and they know why it failed.
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- [00:00]
David Remnick
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Robert Malley
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David Remnick
Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates.
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Robert Malley
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David Remnick
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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. But 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.
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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. And 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 Aga 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 Aga 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. And 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.
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Hussein Aga
It'S carried over the involvement in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I was kind of sucked into it. And every time I thought I'm going to get out of it, I was, what was it? Al pacino in Godfather 3? I was sucked back into it. But 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. So it was very, very frustrating.
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David Remnick
Now that's the 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?
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Hussein Aga
It was treated mostly by the west and by Western minded Israelis as being something that can be dealt with materially, rationally, with a kind of formulation that lends itself to neat outcomes. And 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 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 the both communities. But it has a kind of necessity for leaders, mostly in the west, because it leads to neat outcomes. And what you finish up with is not the consequences of a rational handling of the conflict, but with the emotions, with the deep emotions involved. So people get surprised. October 7th, people get surprised. 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 kind of issues that do not lend themselves to solutions and move on to simpler ways that distort the nature of the beast. And when you do that, you can never resolve it.
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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.
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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. So how could you look at that and just objectively not say this was, I mean, a waste of time is almost a charitable way to look at it because things are so much worse today. So 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. So 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. And at that point it does become a lie. And you speak about despair, I mean.
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David Remnick
How, in fact, you used the phrase, you both used 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.
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Robert Malley
But the gimmick is not the effort to achieve it, it's the way it was. 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, right? Such as 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? So 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 effectless Palestinian Authority, the authority that was set up by the Oslo Accords to rule the Palestinians 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 kind of cumbersome in this process. It really was a menageri trois between the U.S. israelis and Palestinians. And what it did in this I saw directly is that this notion that we were progressing towards a two state solution led the United States to try to and Israelis to say there are forms of Palestine 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. They were always told, the Palestinians were told, if you do that, that's going against the grain of the attempt reach a two state solution. So we're going to sanction you. So those forms of activism were excluded. And at the same time, and again I witnessed this directly, the Israeli forms of unilateral action like settlement construction, those were kind of, you know, they were criticized but they were excused in the name of the search for two state solution. And 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 if once we get a two state solution, all of that will go away. So 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 Aga will 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 Aga 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 a Palestinian state. That was the goal for a very long time. But in their new book, Tomorrow Is Yesterday, Hussein Aga and Rob Malley look back and conclude that they and all the parties involved were part of a charade. Aga and Mali have come to the grim retrospective conclusion that there was never any way that a two state solution could fully satisfy either. The Israelis were the Palestinians. Their historical and emotional grievances just ran too deep to overcome. We'll continue our conversation now. 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.
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Hussein Aga
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 to be involved, Hezbollah to open another front and eventually lead to the end of Israel. This is nonsense. Sinwar, when he left prison.
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David Remnick
Sinwar's in prison for two decades for killing Palestinians.
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Hussein Aga
Well, yes, but when he left the prison, he promised his comrades in prison that he will not forget them and he will get to get ways of freeing them. So he thought we can kidnap more Israeli soldiers and trade them with prisoners. I think this is really is the core motivation for Sinwar for October 7, nothing more. He did not think that October 7 is going to liberate Palestine, quote, unquote. He's not stupid.
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David Remnick
Do you agree with that, Rob? I mean, there's a great deal of evidence that the ambition on the part of Hamas was great. 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.
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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. That's not, I don't think that was.
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David Remnick
Announced by Hamas own, the spokesman on.
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Robert Malley
Jeddah, who are going to believe that argument that they make. Listen, I think certainly the fact that.
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David Remnick
Hamas says that's their motivation, why shouldn't they?
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Hussein Aga
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. And then you have to.
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David Remnick
So why would they give it a grander interpretation even on the day as well?
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Robert Malley
Because, I mean, that makes sense to give it a grand interpretation. I think what we say in the book is that it's a long standing 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.
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David Remnick
Fact that the Palestinian mobilization, meaning Saudi.
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Robert Malley
Arabia, the fact that the Palestinian issue was sort of 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.
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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. And 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. So what actually happened at Camp David, in your view, was when to this day, Bill Clinton says they had it all and Yasser Arafat walked away from it.
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Hussein Aga
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 like brainstorming. They used to go to Arafat and they say, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And Arafat used to ask the President, is this the Israeli position? The President said, if you accept to 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.
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David Remnick
Hussein, did Arafat want a deal?
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Hussein Aga
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 single handedly, 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.
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Robert Malley
Hussein and I discussed, debated for a long time how much emphasis to give to Camp David in the book. And in the end we gave his 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 7, 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 Arfat shoes, and 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 greet 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 was, you know, that it was that they were dispossessed of their land. So when they accepted 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. So for the Palestinian, their own psyche, their emotions, this is about 1948 and the catastrophe, the Nakba that they suffered. I mean, we can make similar arguments about why it was difficult for Israelis to accept a genuine Palestinian state. We could come to that. But 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 Rob, from the Israeli.
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David Remnick
Point of view, the antipathy toward 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?
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Robert Malley
I mean that's 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 get missiles, they withdrew from Lebanon, they get missiles. So they do have. How do you address that 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 with full dominion. And that's very hard to achieve if you have a genuine sovereign Palestinian state. So 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.
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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.
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Hussein Aga
Than what we had? The proposal before Camp David? When we went to Camp David, Barak refused to look at it.
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David Remnick
And then Ehud Barak, who the prime minister at the time.
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Hussein Aga
So when we went, me and Rob, with this, a 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 then now they want to take us back again to discuss the same things we discussed before. And the moment had passed. And 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. And 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 passion is staying.
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David Remnick
How do they think? How would you say they do?
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Hussein Aga
They think in terms of their feelings, of their emotions, of their history, of things like dispossession, dispersal.
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David Remnick
And how can they possibly be addressed?
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Hussein Aga
Well, you need to have a new framework to refer to all these issues. And 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.
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David Remnick
Well, here we are two years later after this, and the reality is this. There are tens of thousands of Palestinians dying 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?
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Robert Malley
I want to echo what Hussein just said. We're not in the prescription business. We were in that business. At least I was in that business for too long. Given that, the prescription business, you feel humbled by this, to say the least. And I don't know, I mean, the first part is obviously to put an end to this war. And that means.
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David Remnick
And we're not there yet.
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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. And 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 happening now. What would they be? Stop any military support? I mean, from an American perspective, but even from European, well, that would make the biggest difference. And that's where, 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 a inconsistency, to put it mildly, that I don't think they'll ever be able to explain away. We have to think, not we, but Israelis and Palestinians are going to have to put on the table ideas that were there yesterday. Why did we call the book Tomorrow's Yesterday is because where we are today is very much where we were a decade, two decades, five, six decades ago.
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David Remnick
Only with thousands and thousands of people dead.
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Robert Malley
True, but after the catastrophe of 1948, there were many Palestinians were dead as well. So there are times of sort of pure, naked violence where neither Israelis or Palestinians have a shared idea, not just a roadmap, but even what the destination should be and where Ideas that are rooted in the past, ideas such as a binational state or confederation or federation with Jordan, those are sort of on the more quote unquote promising side. And then ideas like annexation or ethnic cleansing, all those ideas.
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David Remnick
But annexation and ethnic cleansing seems to be. Exactly, that's where we're, where we are.
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Robert Malley
So 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 they're gonna, neither side is really gonna go away and they're gonna have to find ways to coexist. And 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. But I'm not going to stand here and say, here's how we get and get from A to Z.
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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.
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Hussein Aga
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. And all of them, as some of the news that came out recently, have been subjected to all kind of inhuman practices and violation of their rights. There is this kind of monopoly of suffering of Israeli hostages. I'm totally against taking hostages. So let's make that clear. Your 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.
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David Remnick
Hudda, a truce with some conditions lasting a period of years.
- [28:11]
Hussein Aga
Yeah, what if in these five years and 10 years we found out that we can coexist? 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.
- [28:54]
David Remnick
On both sides.
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Hussein Aga
On both sides.
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David Remnick
What is Palestinian politics going ahead after this war ends?
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Hussein Aga
It's not going to be very pleasant and it's not going to be very predictable. And it's going to be a throwback to the past and thus the title of the book. It's going to go through a period of being kind of 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 that represents them. Now, how long will that take? I don't know. Is there a blueprint for that? Definitely not. So it's not 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.
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Robert Malley
This is another of the legacies of the peace process, which is the state of Palestine politics today. Because weakening the Palestinian Authority, that has been a trademark of the last 30 years. Keep 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, and then keeping the Palestinians divided between Fatah and Hamas and Kurd, 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 a peace between Israelis and Palestinians if you don't have a representative Palestinian national movement. It's just impossible to do that. So 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.
- [30:54]
Hussein Aga
It's worse than that. I mean, don't forget the political system in Palestine and the political parties in Syria, 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 was 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.
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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?
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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.
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David Remnick
Well, some would say that Hezbollah is an extension of.
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Robert Malley
But Hezbollah, as you said, it didn't go after Israel in the way that some people thought they might.
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David Remnick
No, it wasn't full. It wasn't full.
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Robert Malley
So if this was a plan, if there ever was a moment, and I'm not, you know, like you're saying what happened on October 7th, I would agree, was, you know, it's horrible what happened to Israeli. 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 was October 8th. Right. Israel was at its weakest. So, you know, you could say maybe Iran was not in the loop, but still, what were they? You know, so they thought they were going to wait for some other day to launch the operation. So that's what I'd say on that. I know Hussein. I knew he would want to jump up on this.
- [32:52]
Hussein Aga
And then 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 American during Trump's first term. So that strategy was there, but what wasn't there was the coordination on the tactics.
- [33:19]
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. And now the opportunity presented itself because the Israelis had knocked out Hezbollah to a great degree, and eventually, and the Iranian defenses and the Iranian air defenses. So where are we now?
- [34:15]
Robert Malley
So 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 that was. If your real preoccupation was Iran acquiring a bomb, then that deal at least gave you the 10 years where you.
- [34:35]
David Remnick
Could say a hudna, one could say.
- [34:37]
Robert Malley
Not a bad term, and 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 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. And so, you know, 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. So 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.
- [35:40]
David Remnick
Deterrence, you say?
- [35:41]
Robert Malley
The nuclear weapon, for whatever purpose. Yes. Deterrence would be the one.
- [35:46]
David Remnick
We could talk about this for hours and over time, we obviously will. But right now, where we are is extremely dark, extremely depressing, and there's no getting around it. And your book, it doesn't mince words about where we are. There's no jolly ending to your book. There's no blueprint for the future. And we have the president that we have, who 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?
- [36:33]
Hussein Aga
Ask Rob first. He's the American.
- [36:36]
David Remnick
Okay.
- [36:38]
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, right?
- [36:43]
David Remnick
I mean, there's never stay away, disengage.
- [36:46]
Robert Malley
Of course, they're never going to completely stay away because they will be continued to sort of to support Israel. But 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 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.
- [37:42]
Hussein Aga
Hussein, Yes, I think very important step that the Americans managed to carry out successfully during Trump's last tenure was the Abraham Accords.
- [37:56]
David Remnick
Yeah, you're referring to the normalization agreements which they wanted to expand to Saudi Arabia and beyond.
- [38:01]
Hussein Aga
And I think if the Palestinians can be incorporated in the Abrahamic codes 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. So we have to take it back to its origins because the Palestinians don't have much to give to Israel in return and 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 kind of bilateral Israeli Palestinian engagement. And 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.
- [39:16]
David Remnick
The book as Tomorrow as Life, Death and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel, Palestine Hussein Aga, Robert Malley, thank you so much.
- [39:24]
Robert Malley
Thanks, David.
- [39:25]
Hussein Aga
Thanks, David.
- [39:29]
David Remnick
You can read an excerpt from Hussein aga and Robert Malley's important book@New Yorker.com it's an essay called what Killed the Two State Solution? And of course you can subscribe to the New Yorker there as well. New yorker.com.
- [39:44]
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.
- [40:06]
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