Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine. This item is unavailable.Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine

Two insiders explain why the Israeli–Palestinian peace process failed, and anticipate what lies ahead. On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters killed more than eleven hundred Israelis and took more than two hundred hostages, prompting an Israeli response that has in turn taken tens of thousands of lives and devastated the Gaza Strip. Why did this happen, and can anything be done to grant peace and justice to Israelis and Palestinians alike? In Tomorrow Is Yesterday, the analyst Hussein Agha and the diplomat Robert Malley offer a personal and bracing perspective on how the hopes of the Oslo Peace Process became the horrors of the present. Drawing on their experience advising the Palestinian leadership (Arafat and Abbas) and US presidents (Clinton, Obama, and Biden) and their participation in secret talks over decades, Agha and Malley offer candid portraits of leading figures and an interpretation of the conflict that exposes the delusions of all sides. They stress that the two-state solution became a global goal only when it was no longer viable; that U.S. officials preferred technical schemes to a frank reckoning with the past; that Hamas’s onslaught and Israel’s war of destruction were not historical exceptions but historical reenactments; and that the gaps separating Israelis and Palestinians have less to do with territorial allocation than with history and emotions.

Hussein Agha has been involved in Palestinian politics and peace negotiations for more than three decades. He was a senior associate member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, for twenty-five years and participated on behalf of the Palestinians in backchannel negotiations that gave rise to the Beilin–Abu Mazen document, which remains the most authoritative basis for an eventual two-state solution, as well as in the Obama Administration's efforts to broker an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement. He is the coauthor with Ahmad Khalidi of A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine.