This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
On Oct. 9, the Israeli government voted to ratify an agreement between Israel and Hamas brokered by the Trump administration, Qatar and Turkey that, it is hoped, finally brings an end to the conflict.
This deal has already led to the release of the remaining 20 Israeli hostages. Their coming home was an incredibly emotional thing to watch.
There was also a release of Palestinian prisoners, a cessation of hostilities — which has more or less happened. There is the bringing in of much more help for Gazans who are starving, who are homeless, who have endured unimaginable suffering and devastation over the last two years. There’s an Israeli withdrawal farther back from Gaza. This is Phase 1.
The deal also has a Phase 2, a much more ambitious and ambiguous phase, where it is much easier to imagine a lot going wrong and things falling apart. But it also perhaps offers possibilities that have not been on the table for some time.
Rob Malley has worked on Middle East policy under former President Obama, under former President Biden, under former President Clinton. Malley is the former president and chief executive of the International Crisis Group and currently a lecturer at Yale.
Hussein Agha has been a negotiator on behalf of the Palestinians who worked under Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, and under Yasir Arafat, the P.A.’s former president, and in many, many both public and not so public negotiations with Israelis and other stakeholders in the region.
Agha and Malley, together, have written a fantastic new book, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday.” It is a very up-close and personal history of how these negotiations played out and why they have failed over and over and over and over again. These are two people who have devoted their lives to trying to find a solution and have emerged very realistic about how hard an enduring solution is to find.
Ezra Klein: Hussein Agha, Rob Malley, welcome to the show.
Robert Malley: Thank you.
Rob, why don’t we begin with you? Tell me about the cease-fire deal as you understand it.
Malley: So there’s everything to criticize about the way the deal was brought about, the way its components — I mean, it was a deal that was done without real consultation with the Palestinians. It’s a deal that seems to ask of the Palestinians to atone for the massacre of Oct. 7, but doesn’t ask Israel to atone for the war that followed. It asks for the deradicalization of Gaza. It does not ask for the end of Israel’s messianic tendencies.
It’s going to have every foreign intervention, and how, in the future of Palestinian governance. And it was brokered by a president who for months gave all power to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government to lead the war the way they wanted to and to famish Palestinians.
So that’s the backdrop. Plus it has vagueness. It is full of contradictions in terms of having no time tables, no arbiter — nowhere to go if there’s a violation, as we’ve already seen in the last few days.
And yet, having said all that, President Trump achieved what his predecessor was incapable or unwilling to achieve, which is an end to this awful, horrendous war, and freedom for the Palestinians and the Israelis who had been held in detention. And hopefully also an influx of humanitarian assistance. So that’s the balance sheet.
Hussein, the deal has a Stage 1, which Rob described somewhat: the return, thankfully, of the hostages, the release of Palestinian prisoners, an enduring — hopefully — cease-fire, Israel’s pulling back.
Then there is this much vaguer Stage 2. And I’ve seen people debating whether or not you should even understand the deal as having anything beyond Stage 1 — Stage 1 being a cease-fire that, in many ways, I think, could have been achieved far earlier.
Do you understand the deal as having anything beyond a Stage 1? And if so, what deal?
Hussein Agha: Deal, schmeal.
In our region, in our part of the world, deals do not matter. What matters is what can be achieved, how soon it can be achieved and what it will lead to. And this deal, if it stops the slaughter permanently in Gaza and the prisoners have been released, that by itself is a big achievement.
Everything else is padding. Everything else — our hopes. Everything else — our trying to be politically correct to satisfy the parties — it’s all verbal. It never goes beyond that.
Look at all the deals. I mean, Oslo — Oslo was a deal that had many stages.
Hussein, just to remind people, can you say what the Oslo Accords were?
Agha: The Oslo Accords were an agreement that was reached discreetly between Israelis and Palestinians settled bilaterally. It was made up of stages. And the only stage that was relevant was for the Palestinians to go back to the West Bank and Gaza and to have some kind of security cooperation. Everything else did not happen.
It has expired, but people keep on referring to it. So don’t go by text. Don’t go by deals.
Rob, over the past two long years that this war has been ongoing, the stated objective from Prime Minister Netanyahu has been to completely destroy Hamas. As people said that the war should end, there should be a cease-fire, there should be a deal, he would respond by saying: We have an objective here. The objective is the destruction of Hamas, and the war cannot end until that objective is achieved.
We are obviously talking about some entity still called Hamas in this deal. Hamas is talking to Qatar. They are in the deal. Israel is treating them like an entity.
What is Hamas now? What is their expected role going forward? What kind of power do they hold and not hold?
Malley: So first, the objective of completely defeating Hamas was never a realistic objective. It was a recipe for endless war, which is why it was stated as such. There was never any prospect of completely defeating Hamas, and I think the Israelis must have known that.
What is Hamas today? I mean, of course, they have to account for the fact that they are the ones who led to this through their actions, which provoked this absolute catastrophe for the Palestinians and led to this barbaric war that Israel waged.
But they’re still there. And just look at the pictures in Gaza today. Who are the ones who are ensuring law and order? In fact, President Trump himself has said that he’s given a green light to Hamas to play this role because no other party in Gaza can do it.
So however weakened Hamas is — and this was always going to be the case from Oct. 7 on, no matter what was going to happen — it could be weaker than it was before, but relative to others, the most powerful party was going to be Hamas.
And think of who the other Palestinian actors are. Where was the Palestinian Authority? Where was Fatah in the negotiations over the deal that we were just discussing? They were there as bystanders, commenting from afar, and then coming to the ceremony at the end to applaud a deal that they had nothing to do with.
Again, Hamas has real problems: It’s going to have to explain to its people how it planned to provoke Israel — but didn’t have any plan to deal with the inevitable reaction to that provocation. But in terms of its presence on the ground, in terms of its influence with regional parties — Qatar and Turkey — they’re still there, and they’re still standing.
Hussein, where have the Palestinian Authority and Fatah been during this period? This has been the period, probably in my lifetime, of the most attention to Israel, to the Palestinians, to their social media — there have been just absolute, endless waves of attention. And the P.A. has, from what I can tell, been quite quiet compared to what I think would have been possible. Why have they appeared so weak and reactive in this period?
Agha: The P.A. has been weak and reactive for a long time. In 1982, Sharon decided to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization by invading Lebanon. The P.L.O. was decimated in Lebanon, and they left to Tunis. In no time, they finished up being in Ramallah, Gaza and Jericho. Since then, they’ve been torn between continuing to be a liberation movement or a government.
They were not primed to be a government. They’re not interested in governing, and therefore, they have on the whole failed in governing.
There is one aspect only for which Israel kept the P.A. going, which is the security coordination. Keeping the security in the West Bank and Gaza through Israel became too costly for Israel, so it needed to branch out and find somebody who was acceptable to the local population to take care of that matter. The P.A. played that role.
And the P.A. was never in a position in the war in Gaza where it could have done anything else besides the way it behaved. As a matter of fact, even in areas it controls, it has not been able to defend its people against Israeli incursions, against settler incursions and against all kinds of activities that threaten it.
They don’t have the capacity, the capability or the mandate by the rest of the world to do that. Because if they do that, then automatically they become less useful for the world that wants to have a Palestinian address that is docile.
Malley: If you look at it, the P.A. is one of Israel’s most extraordinary accomplishments. Here you have an entity that is entirely subservient and dependent on Israel. Israel, from one day to the next, could bring it to its knees.
And yet, it’s an entity upon which Israel can count to finance the occupation. The P.A. is the one that has to raise funds to stay alive and to provide services to its people, which it does to some extent. And it’s an agent that is a subcontractor for the security cooperation, as Hussein just said. So it provides security, it maintains the occupation, it finances the occupation, and it is entirely dependent on the occupier.
That’s a setup. I’ve studied national liberation movements. I can’t recall one that looks quite like this. From an Israeli perspective, it worked quite well.
I believe it’s Smotrich who said that Hamas is an asset and the P.A. is a liability.
Malley: I think that Hamas may have been an asset in some respects and the P.A. an asset in other respects. I don’t think it’s true that the P.A. has been a liability for Israel.
In terms of the occupation, it has allowed Israel to subcontract many of the duties that, under international law, Israel should normally fulfill. But they’ve been fulfilled by Palestinians who had no independent agency — because again, everything from whether they could move, whether they could continue to survive as a Palestinian entity, was dependent and subordinate to Israel’s will.
What I understood Smotrich as saying when he said that is that if you had a P.A. that the international community looked on and the world looked on and saw as strong, and if Palestinians looked upon it as viable, that would be very difficult for Israel.
If there was what gets called in the parlance of this a partner for peace, that would put Israel in a harder position. Whereas Hamas, which was understood as an organization that Israel cannot make peace with, justified much of Israel’s approach, certainly its approach to Gaza over the years.
And so a stronger P.A., as I understand it, has been considered a problem for Israel. And yet, in this framework that has now been agreed to, the idea is that the P.A. will be reformed, it will be made more technocratically competent — maybe more like what former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad had made it into some years ago — and then eventually it will be handed over control of Gaza.
It certainly seems to me that there’s a contradiction at the heart of that, that Israel’s strategy has been to keep the P.A. weak and to keep Gaza and the West Bank divided. Now you see this piece of paper that at least says we’ll make them stronger and then unite the territories under them.
It’s part of this that I’m quite skeptical of, but I’m curious to hear how you understand it.
Agha: That skepticism is totally justified. And your analysis of the relation between Hamas, the P.A., and this Smotrich and his ilk is the correct one.
They want the P.A. to be strong enough to play some role in controlling security in the West Bank — but not that strong for it to be independent. They want Hamas to be able to run the lives of the Gazans — but not go beyond that and not go back to pricking Israel every now and then militarily.
This is the ideal setup for Israel. To have both these entities — and it is also important to have them separate — and to have them at loggerheads with each other, to keep away the myth, in their mind, of a united Palestinian people. Because a united Palestinian people is the only party that can actually negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians for a resolution.
So if the Palestinians are not united among themselves, how do you expect them to be united vis-à-vis Israel? And that is an ideal situation for not just Smotrich but for many Israelis.
How has Mahmoud Abbas — who’s now 89 years old, who has about as low approval ratings as it is possible for a public figure to hold, and who by wide agreement has been ineffective at securing Palestinian goals and creating governance that people are proud of — how has he held on through all this? How has there not been a succession yet?
Agha: The importance of Mahmoud Abbas derives from the nature of Palestinian society and its views of its own politics. Mahmoud Abbas is a historical figure for the Palestinians — perhaps the last of a generation who have been responsible both for the struggle outside and getting back to Palestine, and running the show from Palestine.
Abbas represents Palestinians across the board — the old, the young, the diaspora, the Palestinians, even the Palestinians in Israel who look up to him and respect him, the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Palestinians in Gaza.
He’s not powerful. He put all his eggs in trying to reach a diplomatic resolution with Israel. He failed. But he has a history of struggle against Israel because he’s one of the founders of Fatah. And Fatah is the backbone of the P.L.O. and is the political body responsible for the Palestinians being where they are now — which everybody, including most members of Fatah, will admit is miserable. But they can’t go anywhere else because that is the framework, the formal entity, through which they operate.
The obvious way this deal’s framework could fall apart is that the deal envisions the disarmament of Hamas. And already, just in the past couple days, we saw a Hamas sniper shoot an Israeli soldier. We saw Israel bomb a building in response.
What happens if Hamas does not disarm? What is the guarantee of that disarmament?
How do you read that part of the deal, which, as I understand it, is supposed to be the bridge between the cease-fire and something sustainable that involves the international community and eventually involves other forms of Palestinian governance?
Malley: I’d go back to what Hussein said at the beginning: The details of the deal really are not that important. In a sense, I wonder whether President Trump is aware of the 20 clauses of the deal. What he cared about and what he achieved so far, more or less, is the end of the slaughter and the release of the prisoners.
That was something that I think, at this point, Hamas and Israel were prepared to live with, each for their own reasons. They had their reasons those elements were acceptable to them.
Israel remains in occupation of about half of Gaza. Hamas remains on its feet and can still police the streets of Gaza — again, something President Trump himself said he thought was normal.
The next stages — disarming Hamas, bringing in an international stabilization force, bringing in a new Palestinian technocratic government, full Israeli withdrawal, etc. — that’s where there’s divergence, not between the U.S., Hamas and Israel, but neither Hamas nor Israel has an interest in that.
Hamas doesn’t want to disarm. It’s not clear to me that Israel really wants to see an international stabilization force that would stand as a buffer between them and the Palestinians — and, therefore, restrain their freedom of action, which is a core principle of their security doctrine and would perhaps serve as a precedent for what would happen in the West Bank.
So I think from Stage 1 — what we are seeing now — to the next stage is where Hamas and Israel have many, many reasons to object. And I could add to the list of objections. Neither one truly wants to see the Palestinian Authority — or a real Palestinian Authority — come back into Gaza. Again, a whole list of things that neither one wants to see.
And they’re probably counting on the fact that President Trump’s attention span is not going to be that great. He could chalk this up as another achievement for him, and that’s enough. He said: I ended the war, a 3,000-year war — whatever he calls it — and that’s good enough. And so he goes to Israel, and he sings Israel’s praises, and he sings his praises even more, and that may suffice.
Now the question is: What do other countries do? What do Turkey and Qatar do? As Hussein was saying, do they push for more because they want to see more changes on the ground? Do other countries? Does President Trump decide that maybe he wants to achieve even more than he has so far?
The least common denominator is what we’ve seen so far: the end of the fighting, the release of the prisoners, some humanitarian assistance, and that’s it.
Well, let’s take another moment, Rob, on President Trump here. The book the two of you wrote is scathingly critical of the way U.S. presidents have approached deals, frameworks, negotiations before now. One place where you end your analysis is by saying there has been an overreliance on technocratic rationality.
You talk about Bill Clinton dismissively saying: I think we’re really down to just debating wording and formulations here.
And you argue that this conflict, to the extent it will ever be resolved, if it will ever be resolved, that its resolution will not be rational. It will not be an equation that balances out land exactly on the two sides.
In this way, Trump seems to fit the kind of figure you are talking about better than the people who have come before him: He doesn’t care that much about either the Israelis or the Palestinians. He would like a Nobel Peace Prize, if anything.
He’s not unwilling to use his power against either side. He is himself unpredictable. He is himself somewhat irrational. He is himself driven by emotion and intuition and willing to use leverage when he needs it.
Yes, his attention span is certainly an issue here. But you could, I think, read your book and then look at the fact that it was Trump who got this deal and not Joe Biden, and say that maybe Trump is the kind of figure you need to make progress. Not because he is a moral or historically informed figure on this. But precisely because the moral and historically informed figures who could have told you every subclause of their 20-point frameworks have failed, in your view, in part because they approached it as being about these 20-point frameworks.
Malley: Yes, I think what you said is absolutely right and captures what we say in the book. And in some sense — and we even say it — President Trump, after years of faux outrage from Democratic presidents, in particular, some genuine cynicism, was a breath of fresh air, which is why a lot of Arabs welcomed his coming into office a second time, knowing his bias toward Israel and everything he had done in his first term.
To add to your list of attributes, if that’s the word, of President Trump: He’s also immune to the laws of American political gravity. I mean, we’ve seen it. Who’s going to criticize him if he puts pressure on Israel or if he talks to Hamas. He sent Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to talk to them. He claimed that he spoke to them, which I doubt. But in any event, he could very well do it — because who’s going to criticize him?
Not the Republican Party, because they’re lock step behind him. And Democrats criticizing him, that he’s being too tough on Israel or too soft on the Palestinians? That wouldn’t fly, either.
So he really has the ability to do things that others wouldn’t. And as you say, he’s not wedded to text. As I said, I don’t think he’s read his own 20 points. He’s a politician of intuition.
Now, having said all that, I wish that all those unconventional, unorthodox attributes were married to something more than narcissism and ego. And I think that’s where we may run into a much bigger problem, because with President Trump, who knows what tomorrow will bring?
But the break he represents from the past is something that was needed. I’m not sure that he’s the break I would have chosen if I had had my druthers.
Hussein, how do you understand the role of the incentives here of some of the other key states in the region that could become significant parts of the future?
Toward the end of the book, you both describe the possibility of much more involvement from Jordan. Certainly, the Biden administration imagined the linchpin of a future here being a deal with Saudi Arabia. Obviously, Egypt and Qatar and Turkey are intimately involved in this moment of it.
Describe the power centers here and what the different stakeholders or participants might want.
Agha: What’s common to what they all want is some kind of stability and peace in the region. Because in the past 50 years, the absence of stability and peace has created problems for all the regimes in the region. So that’s the first priority.
Second, there is a special place for the Palestinians and the Palestinian cause in the hearts of most of the people of the region — the Arab people of the region, the Muslim people of the region. However, taking that into account does not go as far as sticking their necks out to try to come up with solutions to this issue.
There’s another aspect of it, which is that they all realize that Israel is an entity that is going to be there, and it’s not going anywhere. And it has certain capabilities that they might want to make use of.
In an ideal world, they’d like to be at peace with Israel, to be able to cooperate with Israel, but they know the limitations to that is the poison — if you want to call it poison — of the unresolved Palestinian issue.
The Arabs spent 50 years on the streets, in the trenches, in formal wars and informal wars, fighting Israel. For them to end that conclusively, it takes a lot.
There were some bilateral deals that, as we saw, have worked out. Sadat and Begin and the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel have survived. The peace between Jordan and Israel has survived. The Abraham Accords — which are a completely different paradigm that depends on having peace with the Arabs first, and then you move to the Palestinian issue, as opposed to the traditional logic that the only way to peace with the Arabs is through peace with the Palestinians — has on the whole worked, as well. It is under tension now, but it has worked.
The trick for the Arabs is — maybe they will not articulate it in this way — is if they can combine the Abraham Accords with some track that will lead to the resolution of the Palestinian dimension of the regional scene, so that things can stabilize and countries can look after their own particular interests.
These are the usual kind of trends in the region. Plus now, for the first time, especially after the so-called Arab Spring, the Saudis find themselves in a unique position of being able to speak on behalf of all Arabs. As opposed to the recent history, where they used to be only the leader of one camp against another camp.
Because all the other Arabs are either weak or have their own problems or, to a large extent, are dependent on Saudi generosity to survive, the Saudis have a unique opportunity to play the role of a leader of the whole Arab nation. They’re playing it very well.
They have to build a domestic model that is attractive to the rest of the Arabs, the way other contenders in the past — like Nasser, like the Baathists — could not do in their countries. Nasser could not build a model in Egypt that was attractive to most of the Arabs. The Baathists could not build a model in Iraq and Syria that was attractive. But the crown prince of Saudi Arabia is building a model that balances tradition with modernity in a way that most Arabs will understand and most Arabs would like to be part of.
It has a unique position that is going to actually define the nature of the power structure in the region, if it continues along these lines, for a long time.
Rob, Hussein just mentioned the other big way that the balance of power in the region has changed, which is Iran. If you go back a couple of years, Iran was understood to be moving toward nuclear capabilities. It is a sponsor of Hamas. It’s a sponsor of Hezbollah, which is understood to be quite potent, and which Israelis really fear, in real ways. There’s also the Houthis.
The other way this period has really reshaped the region is that Israel decapitated Hezbollah, and that led — and then was able to pull the U.S. in — to strikes on Iran. I don’t think we really understand what those did or did not do to the nuclear program, but they showed that Israel could pull the U.S. in on its interests there.
And Iran at least looks a lot weaker than it did two years ago, or four years ago. How do you understand whether or not that’s true? And given whether or not it’s true, what does it change or not change about the path forward?
Malley: I mean, there’s one level at which it’s undeniably true: Iran had built a security structure that was designed to prevent precisely what happened. They built up Hezbollah, they built up a proxy network, they built up their own missile program, they built up their own nuclear program, they built up ties with Russia and China — all of which were designed to deter the kind of attack that they succumbed to not that long ago. So something went wrong in their calculation.
Now I think if you were to speak to Iranians, they would say that’s overstated. Hamas is still alive — we just spoke about it. Hezbollah is not disarmed, and it’s not about to disarm. Iran is still standing.
The regime is still strong. At least, as far as I can tell, there’s no prospect of it falling in the foreseeable future. And they could say that they withstood America and Israel and that they’re the only country actually in the region that directly attacked the Israelis. That would be their narrative.
They’d also say, on the nuclear front, the uncertainty about their program is an asset, and they’re about as far today, if they wanted, to building bombs as they were on the eve of the 12-day war. So that would be their narrative.
Clearly, as I said, I think there’s going to have to be some self-reflection on their part, because this is not the outcome they wanted. So on almost every score, they’re worse off. They’re still standing.
I think their approach right now is going to be to hunker down, not give in more, wait for better days. They still could count on the assets that they have — the uncertainty about their nuclear program, some of their regional allies and the fact that they have withstood these attacks — and again, wait for better days or wait for a time when they could reach a deal.
Now you ask how that changes the picture. The one thing that it does change pretty fundamentally is that if you speak now to countries in the Gulf who not long ago were saying their big fear was of Iranian hegemony, they’ll say: Yeah, we’re against Iranian hegemony — not because we were against Iran but because we’re against hegemony. And the fear of a regional hegemon now is no longer Iranian — it’s Israeli.
So whatever alliance Israel thought that it could build with these countries against Iran — and we hear reports that there’s still a security cooperation between Israel and Gulf countries — the Gulf countries are also fearful of what an unbridled, unchecked Israel could do.
You saw the attacks in Doha. But that was just one of a series of steps that Israel has taken that leads officials in Riyadh or in Abu Dhabi or in Doha to say: Wait a minute — our goal was not to substitute an Israeli hegemon for an Iranian threat.
Well, that raises a question, Rob, of what Israel has learned — or believes it has learned — about itself in the last two years.
You go from two-and-a-half years ago, before Oct. 7: Israel has a lot of internal political division. There are protests in the streets over the judicial reforms, and the country is thinking very little, if at all, about Palestinians. It’s worried about Iran, it’s worried about Hezbollah, but it’s not thinking much about Gaza.
After Oct. 7, the country is traumatized. It’s frightened. It can’t believe this happened. It can’t believe it let this happen. On my reporting trips and reporting there, the level of fear and insecurity was profound. Benjamin Netanyahu was considered completely finished, the most failed prime minister in Israeli history.
And over the past year, it seems to me, it’s gone through an internal revolution again of Israel believing that, if anything, it had underestimated its own strength. Yes, it had become inattentive in defending the border with Gaza, but look what it did to Hezbollah. Look what it was able to withstand in terms of U.S. pressure. Look at what it did in its strikes against Iran. Look at what it has done in absolutely flattening Gaza. Look at the Mossad operations it has been able to pull off.
And at least, until now, its ability to pull the U.S. along with it is beyond, I think, what most of us would have thought.
How do you understand how this has changed Israeli politics and Israel’s understanding of how it should manage its own geopolitical position and might?
Malley: The reason we titled the book “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” has, in part, to do with what you’re saying — not only there’s a big picture, but Israel is back to where it has been in the past, which is this notion that the only thing it could rely on to protect itself is force and power and the projection of power. If it’s not enough, you need a projection of more power.
If mowing the lawn isn’t enough — their own philosophy where you mow the lawn every time a threat appears — now you’re going to mow everything, including dirt and earth. You’re not going to let anything grow at all.
That’s a philosophy that makes it easy to say: Oh, it’s Netanyahu, it’s Ben-Gvir, it’s Smotrich. Again, as we try to illustrate in the book, this is Israel through and through. It has been in the past, and it has been resurfaced now, wall to wall, that belief in the security doctrine.
There’s another part of their mind, I suspect, that is thinking: Well, what are we going to do about the Palestinian question?
At what point do they figure out that they’re going to have to resolve this question because the Palestinians aren’t going anywhere? You mentioned the trauma of Oct. 7. But right now, what seems to predominate is exactly what you said: a brush with disaster — which then leads to a resurgence with Israeli force and a return to that belief.
And just as we see the Palestinians back to where they were, the Israelis are back to where they were, as well.
Hussein, there’s been wide reporting that part of Hamas’s calculations in launching this attack was the belief that the Palestinian question was being removed, the Palestinians were becoming invisible, that Israel was going to make a deal with the Saudis with America as an intermediary, and nothing significant would be done.
Hamas launched a murderous attack that provoked the absolute devastation of Gaza, the deaths of around 70,000 people, the destruction of that society, functionally. What they got in return is the wrecking of Israel’s image in much of the world. Many people have seen what they believe to be a genocide, including a not small proportion of young American Jews. You’ve had a number of European countries recognize Palestinian statehood.
Is any of that meaningful? Does that change the situation for Palestinians? Is Israel vulnerable to external pressure or its image in the world being worse — or is that not significant given the interest of the players here?
Agha: It’s more than meaningful. It’s probably the most powerful meaning of the whole affair. Don’t forget, with Oct. 7 and the war on Gaza, the whole traditional, historical Israeli security doctrine has collapsed.
The security doctrine was based on three elements: First, you do not allow the war to take place on your own territory. Oct. 7 showed that that’s not the case.
Second, the war has to be short and finished very quickly. That did not happen.
Third, the victory has to be decisive. Again, that did not happen.
Israel, as you know, relies very much on the thought processes that justify and explain and promote its military actions. These have gone. As a result, you find this tension between the political echelon and the military security echelon. This is one.
The second thing is that through all these military victories — which are technical military victories — it has not been able to cast them anywhere. Iran is still there, and it might come back faster than we think. Hezbollah is not disarmed. There are no prospects of its disarming. Hamas is back in Gaza.
And third, and as important, as some Israelis are increasingly talking about, the dependence on the United States has become so vast that it’s not very clear to what extent Israel is still a sovereign, independent country.
If after one week of fighting some irregular elements in Gaza you need to have such a huge influx of American military aid, it makes you wonder to what extent you are free to do what you want to do.
Without the United States, they will be in a very, very tenuous position, and they don’t have a solution for that.
Added to this, over the past 20 or 30 years, they began to make inroads into the non-Palestinian Arab world. And as a result of their military victories and the achievements and the war in Gaza and Oct. 7, all these achievements are not really as clear as they were and are threatened.
So, they have to deal with that, as well. You can tell me that militarily, the Israelis hurt Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, but strategically, they are much more vulnerable than they have ever been in their whole existence.
If you talk to Israelis, you feel that vulnerability. And they have to find a new way, and that new way has not been defined yet.
I think it will come because the Israelis are a very dynamic, intelligent people and society. And they will eventually think of how to get out of this. But it’s not there now. And that’s a major blow to the Israeli psyche.
Malley: It makes me think, if you put all of our conversations together, there’s three paradoxes or discrepancies.
Israel, at some level, has never been more powerful regionally. You just described it.
And yet, as Hussein says, both the vulnerability and the pariah status — they have never been more ostracized and more condemned by the world.
The Palestinians have never enjoyed — and few liberation movements have ever enjoyed — such universal acclaim, such universal support in the streets of Rome, of London, not to mention the global South, campuses in the United States. And yet their leadership, their movement, has rarely been more adrift and more at a loss without any sense of direction.
And then on the American side, you’ve rarely had an American president who has had so much power to get things done as we’ve seen, so much independence from the laws of political gravity in the U.S. — and yet without a vision of where he wants to bring things.
So, on all three sides, you have a discrepancy between huge assets and then huge liabilities and no bank in which to transfer the assets to make up for the liabilities. That just means a lot of things could still change. A lot of things could still move because there’s so much influx and so much uncertainty.
Agha: May I add one more thing? The rise of genuine antisemitism in the world is frightening, and it is there in ways that it has not been for a long, long, long time.
You do not know the number of people who have nothing to do with the Middle East, who have nothing to do with politics, who are flirting with antisemitism. This is a major, major thing that has to be dealt with.
Let me continue with the financial metaphor, Rob. One thing I have wondered is the degree to which Israel is borrowing strength from the future and putting it into the present, without really a plan for how to build it back.
What I mean by that is, Hussein mentioned the intense reliance on America, and America is really, in a way, now Israel’s last friend. There are other transactional relationships, some of them with Gulf states, etc. But America is the key ally of Israel.
And Israel has, certainly among young Americans, decimated its political legitimacy. Not among everyone. I know many young Jews who have become more Zionist in this period. I don’t want to erase complexity. But the amount of moral legitimacy it held when I was growing up and what it holds now are very different.
Rob, you’ve served in a number of Democratic administrations. I think what Democrats see when they look at the relationship between Biden and Netanyahu and Israel over the past couple of years is that Netanyahu absolutely screwed them.
Netanyahu screwed Obama before Biden, and then he screwed Biden. And you have a Democratic Party where the base has become much more pro-Palestinian, much more skeptical of Israel.
If you imagine that four or eight or 12 years into the future, during some other crisis or flashpoint, with a different constellation of Palestinian leadership and where America is in that might be very different.
There seems to me to be a tension between how much capital Israel spent in the present in terms of its relationship with America and in terms of how Americans and the world see it, and then what support it will be able to rely on in the future. I think the hope is they have just enough material capacity that they don’t have to face that.
But if I was thinking about risks to Israel, in addition to the antisemitism, which affects both Israeli Jews and non-Israeli Jews, that feels very alive to me in the long run.
Malley: Just first a comment: When you say American presidents that I served have been screwed by Israel, some would say they’ve been willingly screwed. Not to extend the metaphor too much — that’s a different topic.
I think you’re absolutely right. But people would understand it’s a human trait to say: We’re going to do what we can to have as powerful a position as we need today, and we’ll think about the future when it comes. We’ll live to fight another day.
Other things will change tomorrow. Maybe there will be a different leadership in the U.S. Maybe the Palestinians will do us a favor of some other horrendous attack. Who knows what will happen?
So I think you’re absolutely right. And if I were an Israeli official or just an Israeli, I would be very worried about this trend, particularly in the United States, because I think it is a real demographic shift and a generational shift. We’ll see, but that’s every indication I get from teaching on campuses.
So, yes, I think that they’re sacrificing to some extent the future for the sake of the present. But as I said, I don’t think that’s specific to Israel. I think that’s a human way of reacting to events.
I do wonder about the reaction that you think will happen among Democratic administrations, or for that matter, among Republican administrations. This is something I’m more in touch with than I am public opinion in the Arab world or even in Israel.
And my sense is that you’re seeing something happening here, not just on campuses — younger Republicans in power, younger staff Republicans, are understood to be much less pro-Israel than older Republicans.
You see Tucker Carlson, I think, in many ways, almost flirting with antisemitism. You see Charlie Kirk, before he was murdered, being much more skeptical of the American relationship with Israel. There was a real change happening among the younger MAGA-aligned Republican cohort. So this is not just a Democratic thing.
Then among younger Democrats, you are seeing a sea change. An easy representative of it is Zohran Mamdani, who many young Democrats believe to be the most exciting young Democrat in America, who is very likely to be New York City’s next mayor. He just conceded recently that he would let Zionists serve in his administration.
The idea of somebody saying something like that in American politics would have been unthinkable just a couple of years ago. Meanwhile, huge numbers of young Jews I know in New York are enthusiastically supporting him.
So in terms of the people staffing these administrations, in terms of the people who will be writing the briefs and eventually moving up into positions of being a congressman, a senator, etc., it feels very different on both sides to me — more so than in any time I can remember.
Malley: One hundred percent. I feel exactly the same way. I think the question is how sustained this is and how much staying power it has.
To take the Democratic side, I think you’re seeing on the part of former Biden officials a rethinking, by some of them, of whether they made mistakes during the Gaza war.
And people who at the time were never prepared to envisage withholding military aid are now saying it. Is that because they’re genuinely convinced of it or because they could read the politics — who knows?
I think the test for that part of the Democratic Party is going to be, if and when the war ends, you have a different Israeli government that is not quite as right-wing as this one. So maybe Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are gone. Do they then say: OK, we’ve seen the back of the worst of Israel, but now we’re going to go back to our old ways and turn a blind eye to what Israel does in the West Bank, and even what it’s doing in Gaza, so long as it’s not flirting with genocide?
That would be a test in terms of the establishment. And I think that’s going to depend on whether the young people, the voters, turn this into a wedge issue — sort of like Iraq: This is how we’re going to test officials. And I don’t know because I don’t know how important it’s going to be to voters.
Is this going to be the litmus test? Or is it going to be what position you took on the shutdown or health care or something else on the Republican side?
I’ve just only recently started to meet with some of the MAGA folks who feel this way. It’s not as strong, it’s not as widespread. But in some ways it’s more intrinsic to the identity because it doesn’t come from a humanitarian impulse about Palestinians. It’s about “America First,” which is really what the MAGA movement is about.
So I completely agree with you. For some of them, it’s obnoxious antisemitism that is there. But for others, it’s a very simple question: Why should the United States subcontract its policy, provide $3.8 billion a year — and even more if you count what we’ve done since Oct. 7 — to Israel and be dragged into wars by Israel when all of our effort and all of our attention should be on what’s happening at home?
I think on both sides, for very different reasons, it’s transpartisan. But like you, I can’t help but observe that compared to when I was on the same campus I’m teaching on now, things that are being said, things that are being thought, that would have been completely out of the question 30, 40 years ago — or even 10 years ago.
Hussein, we can largely understand the way that American political leadership will change in the coming years, or at least we hope we can. We can understand how Israeli elections will be held and the set of players within that. Will it be Naftali Bennett? Or will Benjamin Netanyahu hold on?
How does Palestinian leadership emerge and reformulate itself? Is it still even under the structures we have come to see it under? That feels very opaque.
As we mentioned, Abbas is 8. Just physically he cannot hold on forever. It’s not at all clear what happens in terms of Gazan leadership.
I’ve seen many pieces and statements from people in Gaza who want to be able to build leadership out of an organic process. Obviously, Israel and the U.S. have not currently been supportive of that.
How do you imagine the next structure of Palestinian leadership either looking or even just emerging and forming?
Agha: Tomorrow is yesterday. What is happening in Palestine for the Palestinians is that they’re going back to being adrift, not being unified, not having a clear process of leadership, not having a program, not having objectives, trying to find their way back into some kind of structure that they have lost and they have not been able to replace with anything.
They’re not happy with the activities or policies that Hamas represents. They’re not happy with the policies of Fatah. But they do not have alternative policies. There is a civil society that talks the language of the West — of transparency, accountability, democracy, liberalism, but they have no resonance among the majority of the people.
So we are back where we started. For me, it reminds me very much of the period between 1948 and 1965: The Palestinians were completely lost. And the lost Palestinians, through some magical process, produced the P.L.O., and from there on the P.L.O. set the pace and the nature of the political path.
Right now, they are back to being lost. We do not know what this new body is that will emerge. If it’s a body. What kind of leaders will emerge — are they are actual leaders? Will they be from the diaspora, where the majority of the Palestinians live? Will they be from the West Bank? Will they be from Gaza? Or will they be, which has a good chance, from among Israeli-Arabs or Israeli-Palestinians, who seem to be much more dynamic politically than the rest of the societies.
So we are in a period of flux, the outcome of which is totally not only unpredictable, the options are not there.
Rob, when I look at this framework and I listen to you describe it, it seems very possible to me that after all of this, we will end up in what will be, for Gazans, a postapocalyptic version of what reigned before.
Hamas is functionally in control, and when Hamas is seen to pose some threat to Israel, Israel attacks — mows the grass, in the way the Israelis speak of it. There is nothing on the other side of this. After all this death, after all this destruction, it’s the same players engaged in some way in the same dance.
Malley: Listen, I think that’s extremely possible, maybe even probable.
Hussein and I described it recently as going from the absolute hell that was the war to the mere nightmare of where we are today and where we’ve been in the past, and where Gazans have been in the past. So a vast refugee camp with people who have been refugees once, twice, sometimes three times over, being kept alive through international humanitarian assistance.
And the Palestinian issue in Gaza being reduced to a security problem that Israel tries to deal with and a humanitarian problem that the world deals with, but not a political problem that needs to be resolved. As you say, if all things being equal, I think that’s the most likely outcome.
It’s going to be now a matter of whether the countries that have an influence on President Trump and for President Trump himself to decide whether that’s a status that they could live with or whether there needs to be something better.
As we come to a close here, the book the two of you wrote together is really a history of failure. It is a history of deals and processes you’ve both been often involved in that have had high hopes around them and come to naught.
We are clearly entering a period in which another series of political leaders — Tony Blair, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump, etc. — are going to at least make some attempt at another process.
If they came to you for advice — if they said: Just tell me what not to do this time — what would both of you tell them? Starting with you, Rob.
Malley: That’s a tough one because, at this point, I think there is really no clear blueprint.
The best advice, I guess, is what you’re referring to, which is what not to do and not to replicate the ways of the past — which I think they’re unlikely to do in any event — but not to simply decide, as we see some people doing, jumping to the next shiny object, which is: Let’s try to revive the two-state solution. Let’s try to revive negotiations between the two sides.
It hasn’t worked, and it hasn’t worked for 30 years under the much, much more auspicious circumstances than we see today. So we have to discard all of the formulas, all of the plans that people may come up with, however tempting they may be. And, in the case of the two-state solution and the pursuit of peace, it’s not a couple of mishaps. It’s decade after decade after decade — not just of mishap but of failures that have led to the catastrophe, the horrors of Oct. 7, and of what followed.
It’s not as if Oct. 7 and the war that Israel waged on Gaza afterward are disconnected from what came before. They’re the logical consequence of those failures, of the pursuit of an illusion and of the quieting of any alternative in the name of that illusion, which is that we’re going to get a hard partition on the basis of two states — which neither Israelis nor Palestinians continue to believe in after some time.
I don’t think they need to hear it from me, but I think that the reflex to go down to plans, whether it’s 20, 30, 40 points and let’s just apply to the two sides — I think at this stage, it really is a matter of the deep emotions of the two sides, which have been exacerbated by the last two years: coming to terms with those, breaking convention, talking to all sides. Not just the sides that we’re comfortable with, the ones who parrot our words and who dress like we dress. I speak about Americans, but there’s going to be Islamists, and there’s going to be refugees, and there’s going to be settlers, and there’s going to be religious Zionists.
It is not going to be a quick solution. It’s probably not even going to be a solution at this point. It’s going to be some form of coexistence between the two sides until they themselves can work out a better future.
But tabula rasa of the past and try to think of a way forward, breaking convention, being prepared to put pressure on both sides and being prepared to talk to all. I think they could do worse than to follow that advice.
Hussein.
Agha: The first thing you have to do is you have to completely forget about reason and rationality when you deal with this region. The Western ways of doing things do not hold, and they have no resonance among the inhabitants of this part of the world.
It’s messy, and you have to be ready for this messiness by not trying to straitjacket it into neat resolutions because the resolutions are neat in your mind. In the nature of the reality of this region, you have to look for clarity in the confusion and not deny the confusion and not believe that there are simple quick fixes to the problem you are facing.
It’s not a matter of lines on maps. It’s not a matter of convincing people of what’s good for them or what’s not good for them.
So if I were you, forget it. Forget it for some time and think about it. And I think the person who successfully has done that at this stage — for how long, I don’t know — is President Trump. Because he’s not resorting to pure reason. He’s willing to change his view at the drop of a hat or a coin or whatever you want to drop.
He’s willing to adjust to realities. He’s willing to talk to people who, for decades, were deemed to be terrorists and just completely nonkosher. And these are the kind of ways that work in the region.
You have to deal with it. Unfortunately, the cadre in the West that deals with these matters — with the exception of Trump — again, the people around Trump, I do not know how much they’re interested in the region. They’re interested in the security of Israel, maybe. But beyond that, I do not think they know very much about the societal elements in the region. The one side who knows how to deal with all this, I think in the future, will probably be the Russians and the Chinese.
I’m not very optimistic.
And then always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience? Rob?
Malley: So I actually have four, if I can. One book that has everything to do with what we’ve been discussing and whose title alone deserves a prize is “One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This” by Omar El Akkad.
A second book that doesn’t appear to have much to do with our discussion but actually really does — it’s about Northern Ireland, the dilemmas of struggle and justice and what one kills and dies for. And that’s “Say Nothing” by Patrick Radden Keefe.
And then, if I may, a pair of books that not only appear to have nothing to do with what we’ve been discussing, but they’re also fictional. They’re two plays kind of in conversation with each other, and yet they, too, have everything to do with the subtext that we’ve been talking about and the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians — the price of loyalty, of conviction and justice. “Dirty Hands” by Jean-Paul Sartre and “The Just Assassins” by Albert Camus, which are two plays that, as I say, are in conversation with one another and are wonderful reads.
Hussein.
Agha: I don’t read much contemporary stuff. I rely mostly on classics.
Even better.
Agha: So, therefore, I’m going to suggest a rereading of Thucydides’ “The History of the Peloponnesian War.” That explains to you, really very accurately, very much of the processes that are taking place now. It talks to you — it will explain to you the nature of democracy, the nature of power, the nature of leadership — in ways that no contemporary book does.
The other book that I would recommend is “The Man Without Qualities” by Robert Musil. The beauty of that book is it’s a satire that crystallizes all the themes and the issues of today in ways that other books that are more analytical do not.
The third book, for comic relief, is a book that I enjoy reading every now and then — even though it’s debunked and everybody says it’s nonsense: Kenneth Anger’s “Hollywood Babylon.” I find that very — how should I say? — amusing. It’s a very funny book, and I think Kenneth Anger is very underrated.
That is definitely the first recommendation of “Hollywood Babylon” on the show, I’ll say that for it. Rob Malley, Hussein Agha, thank you very much.
Malley: Thank you, Ezra.
Agha: Thank you, Ezra.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Jack McCordick. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Chris Wood and Ashley Clivery. Transcript editing by Andrea Gutierrez and Sarah Murphy.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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