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.”