Tomorrow Is Yesterday

A Best Book of 2025 The New Yorker . Foreign Affairs . NPR . Foreign Policy . Responsible Statecraft 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, veteran negotiators Hussein Agha and 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 US 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 Israeli-Palestinian affairs and negotiations for more than half a century. He was a senior associate fellow at Chatham House and, until 2023, was a senior associate member of St. Antony's College, Oxford, for over twenty-five years. He has coauthored books on Syria, Iran, Palestinian national security, and Track II diplomacy with A. S. Khalidi. He is the editor of Mideast Mirror. Robert Malley served in senior Middle East positions in the administrations of Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden. He was president and CEO of the International Crisis Group. He is the author of The Call from Algeria and currently is Senior Fellow and Lecturer at Yale University's Jackson School. Hussein Agha and Robert Malley's joint writings have appeared in several major publications.