SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
On this day - September 13 - in 1993, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands at the White House and signed a framework for peace between Palestinians and Israel. I was in Jerusalem at the time. Everyone on all sides had lost someone. People said they just wanted peace, to get on with their lives free from terrorism, occupation and hatred. There was hope. Thirty-two years later, what happened? Hussein Agha and Robert Malley have both been a part of negotiations to end the conflict, Hussein Agha on behalf of Palestinians, Robert Malley for the U.S. under Presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden. They've written a sharp and unsentimental new book, "Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death And The Pursuit Of Peace In Israel/Palestine." Gentlemen, thank you for being with us.
ROBERT MALLEY: Thank you.
HUSSEIN AGHA: Thank you.
SIMON: Why did the peace process fail?
MALLEY: Well, you know, why it failed - that could take us several hours. But I think at bottom, it was premised on false assumptions. It was premised on a complete dissonance between what Israelis were looking for and what Palestinians were looking for. What Palestinians wanted - they wanted justice. They wanted a sense of redress. They wanted something to undo the catastrophe of 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost their land. And what Israelis wanted was absolute security, absolute normalcy. And those things were not the same. And so for decades, people were working on a map and seeing whether you could divide the West Bank, whether you could divide Jerusalem, whether you could find a way to reconcile the two. But they were not even talking the language that most Israelis and most Palestinians held dear.
SIMON: Mr. Agha?
AGHA: For me, the peace process from day one was a fake process and could not have succeeded. It was a combination of illusions, delusions, lies, noise, missteps, misreadings. It was laden with all kinds of forces that are not amenable to success.
SIMON: You assign plenty of blame, but you especially believe that the U.S. has not been a good mediator over the years. Let me get you both to respond to that, if possible.
MALLEY: OK. Maybe I'll start. This is a conflict that is between Israelis, Palestinians. It's not a conflict that involves the U.S. But neither one of them was really willing to make the compromises that were necessary to get the outcome, the two-state solution that the U.S. said it was seeking to achieve. So if you wanted to achieve in that pursuit, the U.S. needed to have a firm hand so that both sides understood the consequences of going in one direction, the consequences of going in another. But at bottom, the U.S. spoke one language but didn't really put its effort where it said it wanted to go.
And so you've had this really pretty paradoxical situation of the most powerful nation on Earth - certainly, that was the case in 1993. After the Cold War, it was the sole superpower. Several presidents said that achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace was their priority. And yet they acted as if it was one of a series of concerns. They never put the weight into it that a superpower that claims that it is one of its main objectives would have put. And we could discuss what it is. But one of the diagnoses that we come out with in the book is that pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace was subordinate to other objectives that the U.S. was pursuing.
AGHA: I think from the beginning, the process was not well-thought-out because if you want to resolve a problem, you have to look and properly identify and define the core of that conflict. And I think the Americans never did that. They thought simply it was a material thing of dividing, partitioning the land between the two communities and then everything will be OK. It was not about that. The importance of history, the emotions, the feelings, the aspirations, the yearnings - they were never factored in. What was really exclusively looked at was very technical, and this is not a technical conflict.
SIMON: Are both Hamas and the current government in Israel, for their own reasons, just as satisfied to continue with the current state of affairs and continuing losses?
AGHA: I tell you - one thing about the current confrontation is that it crystallizes the true nature of the conflict. What Hamas has done is really more representative of what the Palestinians feel deep inside. Sorry to use terms that are not really very precise, but that's the nature of things. Things are not very precise.
SIMON: You mean the October 7 attack that killed innocent people?
AGHA: The October 7 attack. And then the war in Gaza was really a culmination of the feelings of the Israelis towards how to deal with the Palestinian threat and to - how to get their security guaranteed, while at the same time, it did not have any political horizon to the kind of confrontation that diplomats could not resolve. Both sides were very determined on one thing, which was revenge.
MALLEY: You know, if you just look at sort of the reaction in Israel to the war - and, you know, we - I always hear people saying, well, this is Bibi, and it's his government. And he's perpetrating this war because he wants to escape his legal problems. All of that may be part of the picture, but look at the state of Israeli public opinion. Look at the polls. Look at the demonstrations. Do you see demonstrations, vast demonstrations against what's happening in Gaza, which increasing number of experts are calling a genocide? Do you see people up in arms?
SIMON: I mean, I believe you do.
MALLEY: No. You - what you see is people demonstrating because they want the hostages back. But the support for the campaign for the decimation of Gaza - that has been a consensus in Israel, including among members of the opposition, that people like to point to as possible alternatives. So as we say in the book, this is not Netanyahu's war. This is Israel's. And on the Palestinian side, again, you didn't see large demonstrations against what Hamas did on October 7. To the extent there was criticism, and it's been more with time, it's criticism because they say, look at the consequence. Not sort of, on a moral plane, it was wrong, because for many Palestinians, Israelis got their comeuppance. After decades of dispossession, of displacement, of Gaza living like an open-cage prison, the captives finally could take their revenge on their captors.
So this doesn't sound - it sounds very unpleasant to say. But it is true that, you know, if you look at how Israelis reacted to the war, if you look at how Palestinians reacted, there is far more consensus than people believe when they say, well, we need to find moderate Israelis and moderate Palestinians. Need to understand how deeply the feelings went on both sides, not - I'm not saying to applaud it, but to say, if that's the state of how both sides feel, it means that something has gone terribly wrong in the 32 years that you mentioned.
SIMON: Is there any hope? Do you see any possibility for two people living together in peace, if not happiness?
AGHA: Oh, the possibility of them being able to live in peace together is there. But you have to have a way of trying to address the conflict by starting by knowing what the conflict is, by defining it and identifying it properly to be able to deal with it. And this has not been the case. And as long as it's not the case, we'll be doing the same things over and over and over. And by the way, there is no accountability for the people who are doing the same thing over and over and over, and nothing happens.
MALLEY: And I - listen, I'll answer this way. Why did Hussein and I choose to write this book? Partly it's because we saw that so many people were saying, oh, it's happened, October 7 and everything. That's an aberration. That's an anomaly. How did it happen after this peace process? Whereas we argue it is a consequence of everything that preceded it and is in line with so much that preceded it. And we wrote the book to sort of shake things up and try to question some assumptions. And hopefully, people who read the book, people who are going to think about this issue, will come up with a prescription and better ideas. But at a minimum, they won't keep their head in the sand and continue trying what has been done for so long and led to the disaster we're in today. So there's a lot, I think, we try to put on the table so that we rethink this conflict anew, because the way it's been thought of in the past has... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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