Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters killed more than 1,100 Israelis and took more than 200 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 their new book Tomorrow Is Yesterday, veteran negotiators Robert Malley and Hussein Agha 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 U.S. presidents (Clinton, Obama, and Biden) and the Palestinian leadership (Arafat and Abbas),  and their participation in secret talks over decades, Malley and Agha 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