Rob Malley, who has worked on Middle East policy in every Democratic administration since Bill Clinton’s, can’t say exactly when he became convinced that the quest for a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine was doomed.
His doubts were cumulative; there was no epiphany. “As I look back, I wonder how much we really believed in the goal that we said we were pursuing,” he said of decades of American-led efforts to bring about a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However sincere all that diplomacy was, it’s ended in ashes.
When we spoke last week, he juxtaposed our current bleak and bloody moment with 1993, the year of the historic Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which seemed at the time to be the beginning of the road toward Palestinian statehood. “Is there any one metric where you would say, thanks to the U.S., things are better today than they were?” he asked.
Malley has coauthored a new book with the Palestinian peace negotiator Hussein Agha, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine.” It is the story of more than three decades of failure. Malley and Agha — who’d been an adviser and confidant to Yasir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, now president of the Palestinian National Authority — met at a Washington dinner in 1999, they write, “at the height of America’s excitement at the possibility of peace.” Their book is a bitter epitaph for that time. “The era of the peace process, of the two-state solution, has vanished,” they write.
The goal of a Palestinian state, they suggest, may have always been futile. It certainly had no chance of succeeding while the United States refused to exert real pressure on Israel.
But even as facts on the ground — the mushrooming of the settlements, the cataclysm of Oct. 7, the decimation of Gaza — have made a two-state solution seem ever more fanciful, it’s a hard concept to abandon. “Deep down, believers in two states, confronted with all reasons to surrender their faith, fall back on a single argument: There is no alternative,” write Agha and Malley. “Partition is considered inevitable even as it becomes harder to imagine because they are not capable of imagining anything else.”
Malley’s indictment of the peace process is striking given his own lifelong role in the foreign policy establishment. He was part of the team that organized the Camp David summit in 2000, a somewhat frantic attempt by a lame duck Clinton, working closely with Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel, to engineer a settlement with the Palestinians. Later, he served as Barack Obama’s point person on the Middle East, where he led negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal. He was Joe Biden’s special envoy for Iran, working with his former high school classmate Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state.
Yet partly thanks to his unlikely family history, Malley didn’t have the same innate bias toward Israel as many of his colleagues. His father was an Egyptian Jew but a committed anti-Zionist Arab nationalist; he introduced a young Malley to Arafat during a family trip to Algiers. Malley didn’t share his father’s radical leftist politics, writing that while his father viewed Israel purely as an illegitimate colonial power, he saw “two competing national movements in need of some kind of coexistence.” But Malley was an outsider to the liberal Zionist culture that shaped many of the Americans he worked with.
He’s long been hated by the pro-Israel right, which was gleeful when, in 2023, he was put on leave from his position in the Biden administration because of an investigation into his handling of classified documents. Malley said his lawyers were told earlier this year that the case had been closed, and he never learned precisely what it was about, describing the experience as “Kafkaesque.” He regrets the fact that, due to his suspension, he couldn’t resign from the Biden administration over its role in Israel’s brutalization of Gaza.
Given his record, nothing Malley says about the Middle East is likely to be taken seriously by conservatives. But even those who cling to the dream of two states should reckon with his and Agha’s analysis. I’m the sort of person they refer to in their book, someone who has lost faith that there will ever be a Palestinian state but can’t envision a workable, tolerable alternative.
Israel is not going to dismantle itself. A binational state with equal rights for all sounds appealing in theory; in practice, the last thing Israelis and Palestinians want is closer relations. In a May poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, only 14 percent of Palestinian respondents favored the creation of a single state for all. Forty-seven percent said they wanted a Palestinian state within the borders that existed before 1967.
In “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” Malley and Agha float a few ideas besides the creation of a single, binational state, including a Palestinian confederation with Jordan. “Israelis, almost viscerally unwilling to entrust their future to the Palestinians, hold a more sympathetic view of Jordan for reasons historical, political and psychological,” they write. They’re aware of all the obstacles to such a confederation, including Palestinian nationalism and Jordanian reluctance to accept millions of new Palestinian citizens. No resolution is without grave difficulties; their point is that options exist.
Malley says he’s reluctant to be too prescriptive, given his own association “with the failures of the past.” What’s urgent is letting go of old assumptions. “We need to give at least some space, some oxygen, to these alternative ideas, rather than say they’re all unrealistic, and therefore we’re going to stick to the one that, not only I would argue is unrealistic, but we just tried and failed and failed again,” he said.
There’s something academic about this entire debate, since there’s not going to be a remotely humane resolution to this conflict anytime soon. In the near term, we’re staring down Israel’s annexation of the West Bank — de facto if not official — and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza carried out with the full support of Donald Trump. For the foreseeable future, the only state between the river and the sea is likely to be Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel.
But as “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” makes clear, the terrible status quo is exactly what makes easy slogans about a two-state solution dangerous. By acting as if a Palestinian state is on the horizon, we perpetuate the illusion that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land is temporary. Invoking two states helps European countries — and the Democratic Party — justify their support for Israel even as they condemn starvation in Gaza. If we believe in two states, we can believe in a future where Israel is both Jewish and democratic, and thus worthy of liberal support. If that future is never coming, then talk of two states is an alibi, not an aspiration.
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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
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