How the “Dangerous Gimmick” of the Two-State Solution Ended in Disaster

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1:19This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For so long, our hopes for peace in the Middle East lay with a two-state solution, Israel and a Palestinian state recognizing one another's right to exist, with some kind of security guarantees in place. But nearly two years after the October 7th attack, the two-state solution now seems like mere rhetoric, an illusion. The brutality of that attack struck grief and horror into nearly every Israeli, and it emboldened the most hard-line elements in the Israeli government.

2:02In Gaza, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed. Nearly every building there has been either destroyed or damaged. and last week Israel ordered the evacuation of all of Gaza City. Where those Palestinians will go and live is unclear. Israel faces accusations of war crimes and even genocide. And in the West Bank, Israel seems poised to annex the territory entirely. And it goes on and on. The killing, the destruction, the displacement, the hostages, and so much more. Looking back now, we have to wonder, was there ever a real chance for peace? That's the subject of Tomorrow is Yesterday.

2:47To my mind, an essential book. A book difficult to read, but full of hard truths and no phony optimism. The authors are veterans of Middle East diplomacy. Hussein Agha was a negotiator for the Palestinians, and he helped draft a key document called A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine. Robert Malley was in the U.S. State Department, and he helped organize the Camp David summit in 2000. Later, he was the U.S. chief negotiator for the Iran nuclear deal under President Obama. I spoke recently with Hussein Agha and Robert Malley. Hussein, very shortly after October 7th, I called you to get your reaction, and you said this.

3:31This is a dagger to my heart. It reminds me that I'm a loser. For 55 years, I've been trying to do something, and now it culminates in an act of brutality. Acts of brutality on both sides. It's all meaningless. It didn't amount to a hill of beans. And I have to say that despairing note, which you relayed to me not long after October 7th, is threaded throughout this book. Tell me a little bit more about what you were feeling then and how it's carried over. the involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I was kind of sucked into it. And every time I thought I'm going to get out of it, I was, what was it, Al Pacino in Godfather III.

4:20I was sucked back into it. But I finished up doing this miserable thing because I thought that I can be of some help and finished up not to be the case. So it was very, very frustrating. Now, that's the personal angle, but do you think that the attempt to create some political arrangement between the Palestinians and the Israelis has been, over the past half century, a colossal waste of time? It was treated mostly by the West and by Western-minded Israelis as being something that can be dealt with materially, rationally, with a kind of formulation that lends itself to neat outcomes. And that was a big, big mistake because it completely discarded the issue of emotions and history because they always say emotions has a bad name.

5:20You can't be emotional. You have to be rational. You have to be cool. But rational and cool has nothing to do with the conflict. The language used was to find a kind of solutions that have a technical outcome that are measurable and that can be portrayed by lines on maps, among other things. And that has no resonance with the majority of both communities. But it has a kind of necessity for leaders, mostly in the West, because it leads to neat outcomes. And what you finish up with is not the consequences of a rational handling of the conflict, but with the emotions, with the deep emotions involved.

6:09So people get surprised. October 7, people get surprised. The total destruction of Gaza by the IDF. It's not very surprising because that is very much in the nature of what the conflict is about. the deep issue of the psyche of both communities has always, it was given lip service to, the same way they give lip service to history and to all kinds of issues that do not lend themselves to solutions and move on to simpler ways that distort the nature of the beast. And when you do that, you can never resolve it. Let's go to Rob Malley to extend this thought. What I'm hearing from Hussein and what I get from this book is a very despairing view of not only the situation, but your own work, both of your works for many, many years.

7:12that somehow the attempt to come to a resolution, to come to a two-state solution, was a delusion. This is a very dark place to come to, and God knows we're living in a dark enough time. How could you look at it otherwise, right? Look at where we were in 93 when the U.S. gets formally involved in trying to resolve the conflict. Almost by any metric, the situation was superior to what it is today. So how could you look at that and just objectively not say this was, I mean, a waste of time is almost a charitable way to look at it because things are so much worse today. So it cannot be, and I'm going to turn to the U.S.

7:49because I was a U.S. official in several of the administrations during that 30-year period. The U.S. with all the power it had, having designated this conflict as one of its priorities. And at the end of that 30-year or so period, we are in every way, we, I mean, the Israelis and Palestinians are in a worse situation than before the U.S. got so heavily invested. So it's hard not to look at it and say something was fundamentally wrong or sick about this. When we speak about deceit, we specifically say it may not have started as a deceit, but when after all these years you hear the same regurgitated problem about two-state solution, we're trying to do it and we're going to do everything we can, and everything that is being done is in fact moving in the other direction, then at that point it does become a lie.

8:34And you speak about despair. In fact, you both used the phrase dangerous gimmick. You say the two-state solution, the attempt to create a Palestinian state side by side in the Israeli interpretation, a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with a shared Jerusalem and so on. Or the vision of the 90s, that that was a dangerous gimmick. But the gimmick is not the effort to achieve it. It's the way it was. People went about it. The Americans and others went about it. Why dangerous? Because what did it do in the end? It froze out other possibilities, right? Such as? Who knows how Israelis and Palestinians might coexist.

9:15But again, look at it today. Hard to see. I would say impossible to see. How are you going to get two states? You didn't get them under much, much better conditions. How are you going to get it now? So it ruled out other possibilities of coexistence from one state to confederation to federation with Jordan. It protected the U.S. peace process, protected Israel from pressure. It propped up a feckless Palestinian authority, the authority that was set up by the Oslo Accords to rule the Palestinians in the 90s. It gave the Palestinians the illusion that the Americans were going to rectify the glaring imbalance between Israelis and Palestinians, which they didn't do.

9:53It elbowed out other potential participants, Arabs in particular, who were viewed as kind of cumbersome in this process. It really was a menage a trois between the U.S., Israelis, and Palestinians. And what it did, and this I saw directly, is that this notion that we were progressing towards a two-state solution led the United States to try to, and Israelis, to say there are forms of Palestinian activism that are off bounds, that are illegitimate. Going to the International Court of Justice, trying to get forms of accountability, boycotts, divestment, sanctions, whatever they are. They were always told, the Palestinians were told, if you do that, that's going against the grain of the attempt to reach a two-state solution, so we're going to sanction you.

10:35So those forms of activism were excluded. And at the same time, and again, I've witnessed this directly, the Israeli forms of unilateral action like settlement construction, those were kind of – they were criticized, but they were excused in the name of the search for a two-state solution. And one administration after another would say, let's not make too much of a fuss about this, about the home demolitions, about the settlement construction, because if once we get a two-state solution, all of that will go away. So that's why we say it's a dangerous gimmick, because it's been used to cover and to perpetuate a status quo that is in every way moving in a direction opposite to the stated goal.

11:21I'm speaking with Robert Malley and Hussein Agha. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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15:55This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I've been speaking today with Hussein Agha and Robert Malley. They're former negotiators, both involved for many years in attempts to resolve the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Since the 1990s, the United States backed efforts to achieve what's called a two-state solution, in which Israel would exist side by side with a Palestinian state. That was the goal for a very long time. But in their new book, Tomorrow Was Yesterday, Hussein Agha and Rob Malley look back and conclude that they and all the parties involved were part of a charade.

16:32Aga and Mali have come to the grim retrospective conclusion that there was never any way that a two-state solution could fully satisfy either the Israelis or the Palestinians. Their historical and emotional grievances just ran too deep to overcome. We'll continue our conversation now.

16:54I did a long profile, obviously, I couldn't speak to him, but I tried to do a long profile of Yahya Sinwar, who was then the head of Hamas in Gaza. What was Sinwar trying to do on October 7th, now that we've had in excess of 700 days to think about this? There's a Western and Israeli fantasy that Sinwar was building this grand strategy, of which October 7 was the trigger to get the region to be involved, Hezbollah to open another front, and eventually lead to the end of Israel. This is nonsense. Sinwar, when he left prison... Sinwar's in prison for two decades, and for killing Palestinians. For a while, yes.

17:48But when he left the prison, he promised his comrades in prison that he will not forget them, and he will get to get ways of freeing them. So he thought we can kidnap more Israeli soldiers and trade them with prisoners. I think this really is the core motivation for Senoir for October 7. Nothing more. He did not think that October 7 is going to liberate Palestine, quote-unquote. He's not stupid. Do you agree with that, Rob? I mean, there's a great deal of evidence that the ambition on the part of Hamas was greater than that. There's a lot of evidence that Hamas feared a widening Abraham Accord in which Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, would normalize their relations with Israel while completely overlooking the fate of the Palestinians.

18:44I've not seen no evidence that that was the motivation. That would really surprise me, that the motivation was to stop normalization. That's not, I don't think that was at the top. It was announced by Hamas' own spokesman on Jeddah. And you were going to believe that argument that they make? I think certainly the fact that... When Hamas says it's their motivation, why shouldn't it? Remnik, Remnik, you have to read between the lines. This is not an issue where you can translate what they say into English and believe it. You have to resort to hermeneutics in the words of Habermas and Heidegger, where you have to interpret what they say, why they say it, not the content and the meaning of the words.

19:28So why would they give it a grander interpretation, even on the day itself? Because, I mean, that makes sense to give it a grand interpretation. I think what we say in the book is that it's a longstanding Palestinian way of doing things, which is, yes, their goal is to liberate their comrades. That's what Palestinians have done. Fatah has done for many, many decades. Do they have the hope, perhaps, that this will be the trigger for something bigger? Of course. Now, on the issue of normalization, my own view on this is certainly the fact that the Palestinian— Normalization, meaning Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Idris.

20:00The fact that the Palestinian issue was sort of being buried, that nobody was paying any attention to it, that formed part of the context within which Hamas hatches its plan. It's not so much, oh, we need to prevent Israel and Saudi Arabia normalizing, but this is a way to remind the world that the Palestinians are not going anywhere. Let's turn the clock back here a little bit, Hussein. You were both involved in intense negotiations that seemed very promising at the time. And the standard narrative in American political discourse and in Israeli political discourse was that there was a great opportunity in 2000 at Camp David and Yasser Arafat, then the head of the PLO, walked away from it.

20:44So what actually happened at Camp David, in your view, when to this day Bill Clinton says they had it all and Yasser Arafat walked away from it? Show me the deal that was offered in Camp David. Show me anything official that really can be construed as an offer that was rejected. There were ideas. There were like brainstorming. They used to go to Arafat and they say, one, two, three, four, five. And Arafat used to ask the president, is this the Israeli position? The president used to say, if you accept them, I may get the Israelis to agree to them. It's not good enough for Arafat because if he accepts them, he's already made the concessions in return for something which is vague and nonexistent at that stage.

21:33Hussain, did Arafat want a deal? Arafat is probably the only Palestinian leader ever who wanted a deal. I think the successors, they knew they could not deliver a deal. Don't forget, the two-state solution for a long time for the Palestinians was an act of treason. And Arafat single-handedly, almost single-handedly, turned it into the objective of the national liberation movement of the Palestinians. Now, you don't have a figure, post-Arafat, who can transform the concessions that the Palestinians have to make into achievements. Hussein and I discussed, debated for a long time, how much emphasis they give to Camp David in the book.

22:18And in the end, we gave, you know, its proper due, in part because of the point you made. I hear so many American politicians, some of whom I worked for, who say to this day, you know, the Palestinians could complain about what happened after October 7th, but if only they had accepted no less an authority than Shlomo Ben-Ami, Foreign minister of Israel has said if he had been in Arfat's shoes, he never would have accepted, as Hussein said, the very vague promises that were made at Camp David because those would have amounted to a basic betrayal of the Palestinian cause in exchange for very little.

22:49You don't need to agree with them to recognize that for them accepting to move on from their aspiration, which is of all of Palestine. They believe that what happened in 1948 was, you know, that it was that they were dispossessed of their land. And so when they accept the 1967 borders, all of the West Bank and Gaza, that for them is a historic concession. They're then told, sorry, we're going to pocket that. Now you're going to make a concession on your concession. It's going to be 80 or 90 percent of the West Bank. You're not going to have the right to have your defense forces. You're not going to have control over your airspace.

23:20You're not going to have control over your borders, whatever it may be. So for the Palestinian, their own psyche, their emotions, this is about 1948 and the catastrophe, the Nakba that they suffered. I mean, we can make similar arguments about why it was difficult for Israelis to accept a genuine Palestinian state. We could come to that. But on the Palestinian side, I think this notion, first of all, that because they rejected offers in the past, they only have what they deserve. I think we really need to be very careful playing. Rob, from the Israeli point of view, the antipathy toward the objection toward a potential Palestinian state, even on the basis of Camp David's suggestions, as you put it, was that the claims would not stop, that the violence would not stop.

24:05Can you address that? I mean, obviously that's one. It's also, and again, we write about it, that today, at least from the Israeli experience, whether you accept their narrative or not, they feel they withdrew from Gaza, they got missiles, they withdrew from Lebanon, they got missiles. So they do have— How do you address that? But from the Israeli perspective, by the same token, their yearning, their aspiration is for full security, full freedom to feel like they could never be threatened again, which is hard to distinguish for full dominion. And that's very hard to achieve if you have a genuine sovereign Palestinian state.

24:37So what is really driving the two sides is very hard to accommodate within the confines of the two-state solution, even assuming that there was ever any seriousness on the American side to try to make that happen. Now, as I recall, Hussein, after the summit collapsed in 2000, you drafted a proposal that you thought reflected the interests of both sides. It included a swap of territories. It recognized both sides' claims to Jerusalem in some way. Why was your draft proposal more viable than what Camp David proposed? We had the proposal before Camp David. When we went to Camp David, Barak refused to look at it.

25:16And then Ehud Barak, the prime minister at the time. Yeah. So when we went, me and Rob, with this new formulation or a kind of trying to capture what happened in Camp David in a way that is agreeable to both parties, the Palestinians were not interested in looking at it because they thought they let us down. And then now they want to take us back again to discuss the same things we discussed before. And the moment had passed. And when the political moment had passed, then whatever agreement you have, it will not fly. The Intifada started slowly, and the Israelis with the Prime Minister Barak hit very hard against it, which accelerated it.

26:00And culturally, they could not communicate, because the Israelis, like the Americans, they have a material matrix. And that is its cost-benefit analysis. It's like, this is good for you. You should take it. That's not how the paciologists think. How do they think? How would you say they do? They think in terms of their feelings, of their emotions, of their history, of things like dispossession, dispersal. And how can they possibly be addressed? Well, you need to have a new framework to refer to all these issues. And I don't have a blueprint. But I tell you, everybody who has a blueprint, this blueprint not only does not work, it leads to outcomes that aggravate the situation rather than try to solve them.

26:48October 7 and the war against Khazadeh is the outcome of 35 years of interaction and negotiation and engagement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Well, here we are two years later after this. And the reality is this. There are tens of thousands of Palestinians dead in Gaza. The infrastructure of Gaza is all but destroyed. Israel has moved increasingly to the right. Its sense of grief, resentment is intense. Other than assessing these realities and looking at them with both grief and clear-sightedness, where are we and what's even remotely possible? what's possible? I want to echo what Hussein just said.