America’s Two-State Delusion

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Rob, thanks so much for joining me.

ROBERT MALLEY

Thanks so much for having me.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

We are having this conversation in New York on the afternoon of Monday, October 20. At this moment, the cease-fire in Gaza is still mostly holding. There have been some strikes back and forth, and it’s very unclear what the long-term viability of the cease-fire or even more of the broader issue is, but we will talk about what we know now. But before we get to the situation on the ground at this moment, we want to step back and consider how we got here.

The essay that you and Hussein Agha wrote for Foreign Affairs last month drawing on your new book, Tomorrow Is Yesterday, offers a fairly unsparing critique not just of U.S. policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the last couple of years, but really going back several decades calling into question the really fundamental logic of Washington’s policy, which was driven by the pursuit of the two-state solution. You were in the White House, you were in the Clinton National Security Council, I think not at the very beginning and in a very junior role, so I doubt you were driving the policy. But if you could go back and advise [former U.S. President Bill Clinton] and advise your boss at the time about a different approach, given where the approach that started then with the Oslo process took us, what would you tell them? What would’ve been the right way to approach the issue then?

ROBERT MALLEY

That’s a great question. I mean, it’s hard to answer because I think part of what our book argues is that maybe the pursuit itself was a mistake, but let me just take as a given that the administration was seeking a two-state solution. I think the first question is that I would ask the president if I were rejoining the team now and traveling back in time is how badly he wants it because it was something that I think President Clinton mentioned as a priority, as something that I think he felt emotionally he wanted to do almost as a gift to [former Israeli Prime Minister] Yitzhak Rabin, who had been shot, but it was never clear that it was a national security priority, in which case he would’ve been prepared to expend domestic capital and foreign policy capital.

And again, in hindsight, it looks like it was something—a nice to have, not a need to have. And if you don’t make that decision upfront—how badly you want it, how much pressure you’re going to be prepared to put on both sides, how much you’re going to be prepared to accommodate the narratives and the historical grievances of both sides—then you’re kind of throwing yourself into something that is much deeper than what you’re prepared for.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If you had been able to persuade President Clinton that the two-state path was doomed at that point, what would you have done instead?

ROBERT MALLEY

Well, again, at that point I wouldn’t have wanted to persuade him because I thought—I was a firm believer in the two-state solution. So I think what I would’ve mainly told him is two things. One, the United States has to take control of these negotiations, and I’m already thinking about the Camp David summit because, as you say, I wasn’t there at the outset. I joined the team in 1998, so two years roughly before the Camp David summit. And I think one thing that the administration never did is take charge and say, “This is our process,” sort of the way [former U.S. President JImmy Carter] did it for his Camp David, where he had a text that he controlled, he had the pen, didn’t let the Egyptian or the Israelis control it for him. And he went back and forth and made the changes that he thought were necessary that either side demanded. In this case, as we recount in the book, the U.S. team, of which I was a part, lost control almost immediately when there were objections by one or the other side; mainly the objections that we listened to or that the administration listened to were the Israeli objections. And at that point, it became a free-for-all. And so we lost control. That’s number one.

Number two, I think, I would say you’ve got to start this process sooner. You don’t wait until there’s a year—not even a year—left in your administration, when, particularly from the Palestinian point of view, they felt that they were being asked to make, yet again, from their perspective, historic concessions. They felt that they’d already made a major concession by accepting the two-state solution, that what they considered all of Mandatory historic Palestine, they would only get 22 percent of it. And they were asked to make a concession over that concession with a president who was about to leave office and an Israeli prime minister who may not stay much longer. It was hard for the Palestinian leadership at the time to say, “Yeah, we’re going to make this concession” and not know whether anything will come of it.

So I think start earlier, take control, that’s sort of what I would have—and have a U.S. view about how the conflict should have been resolved. Don’t let yourself be overly influenced, again, in this case by the Israeli perception and assumptions about what a resolution should look like. Have a U.S. perspective, informed by U.S. interests, and a U.S. assessment of what’s realistic, but also what’s more or less fair.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

But in your view now, even the most forceful diplomacy, the greatest willingness to take political risks, would not have fundamentally changed the outcome?

ROBERT MALLEY

So I mean, you read the book, and I think people who’ve read it have said there’s a little of a tension in the book, which I think Hussein and I would fully acknowledge, which is on the one hand we say that there were major mistakes, miscalculations, misapprehensions from the Americans, but from others, the parties, as well, which made what was already a very, very heavy lift, too heavy a lift to carry. And so you would’ve needed everything to go right, and everything didn’t go right, at a minimum. I think in hindsight what we write is when a process fails under conditions that were on paper far more auspicious than they are today, and when a process demands—requires, almost—that all the stars be aligned, it may be that the process and the pursuit itself was mistaken.

And again, one of the many theses of the book is that this notion that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is basically a border conflict, a territorial conflict—take a pen, draw a line on the map, and you’ve basically resolved it—that was not really what the conflict was about, at least for the protagonists, for Israelis and Palestinians. They succumbed to that, partly out of U.S. pressure, international pressure, and partly because they felt it was this—they played along, but deep down, that outcome didn’t fit with their yearnings, their aspirations, their fears, the historical aspiration of the Zionist movement, or the historical aspiration of the Palestinian national movement. Neither one of them was defined as, “We want a two-state solution and the borders of [1967].” That was not what they were fighting for. As I say, they kind of played along, they acquiesced in it, but never with the sincerity and the belief that would’ve been required for that to be the outcome that was likely to emerge. So I think one needs to enlarge one’s vision and say, “Okay, what’s the outcome that could fit the national aspirations of the Palestinian people and of the Zionist movement?” And that’s not easy, but it won’t be done at this point, certainly in the confines of the two-state solution as it was defined by the Oslo process.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I noted that you and Hussein wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs in 2002 arguing something very similar to what you’re suggesting now: that the United States needed to impose a much more forceful and clearer vision of what the end state was, not get caught up on process. So you were saying that 20-something years ago—

ROBERT MALLEY

But sorry. I would say if you look at the arc of what Hussein and I’ve written in Foreign Affairs, it wasn’t the only piece, and what we’ve written in other places, we’ve kind of evolved because at the time I think we felt strongly that if the United States put a plan on the table, tried to impose it, we could succeed. I think in hindsight we would question that. We’d say that would’ve given it the better chance. Would it truly have achieved peace when, again, it’s not what the parties were looking for, it’s not sort of what their yearnings were about? I think we would question that, but you’re right, we did write that piece. I’d have to go back and see how much of it I still agree with.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As you read the Foreign Affairs essay or the book, your critique becomes harsher as you move through the decades. It’s understandable in the 1990s and even into the 2000s that American policymakers and policymakers elsewhere thought that we were close to the solution, that there were some technical issues to be worked out. Over time, it became less defensible, and as you lay it out in the book, delusion turned into, as you put it, lies, that policymakers were repeating statements they knew to be false, clinging to this vision. At what point, do you think, did it become clear to you, at what point should it have become clear to American policymakers that this was, in fact, delusional and that there needed to be a real paradigm shift in the policy?

ROBERT MALLEY

I don’t know that I could really time it. I think certainly by the time of the Obama administration, which I joined—or I joined the second term of the Obama administration—there was a very remarkable effort by [former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry]. He truly believed it. I think again, maybe with the benefit of hindsight, it was pretty clear at the time we were not going to achieve a two-state solution. I can’t really comment about the Bush administration because I was not in it, but I think by then I’d say the two-state solution, the mantra which you hear repeated almost like one of these wind-up dolls—whenever there’s a need to say something, you say, “We’re working for a two-state solution”—I think over time it became for people of good faith, a refuge for those who didn’t want to give up any hope, and so they felt this is the only way we could have hope.

And for people of bad faith, it became a refuge for people wanting to say, “Well, we’re at least trying something,” even though they knew it wasn’t going to work. But it really became a slogan. We use the word, as you say, “illusion,” “delusions,” “lie.” I have since been introduced to a term used by a philosopher—I mean, it’s a term that you and I will know—the term “bullshit,” which is very interesting because as it’s described, it’s a term in which the person who uses it, who resorts [to] it, doesn’t really care about the truthfulness of falsity of what they say. They’re saying it for other reasons, not because of its truth value or because it’s a lie. They’re saying it—in this case, they’re saying it again because they have to say something. They want to be on the right side of the debate. “Do you believe in a two-state solution or not?” And they want to park the issue and say, “You see, we believe in it, even if everything that’s happening on the ground is moving in the other direction and even if we’re not doing anything to stop it.”

So I think I might’ve used that word more even than the word “lies,” because I do think at some point it’s just said for reasons that have nothing to do with whether it’s achievable or not. And as we describe in the book, it’s said for reasons that are completely extraneous to the peace process. It’s said sometimes to help build a coalition against terrorism, the so-called war against terror. Sometimes it’s invoked to build a coalition against Iraq or against Iran or to counter the appeal of more Islamist radical movements, or, under the Biden administration, to counter the perception that the administration was complicit in Israel’s horrendous war.

And so the administration finally decided, “Why don’t we go into the drawer and find this two-state solution and claim that we’re working towards it as a means of defending ourselves against those attacks?” But under all those permutations, the people who pronounced those words were not—and who were saying they were fighting for it were not—doing it because they believed in it or because they believed it could be achieved, but because it served some extraneous purpose.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I imagine you were having versions of this conversation with [former U.S. President Barack Obama] and Secretary of State Kerry, and [former U.S. special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations Martin Indyk], someone we’ve both worked with who was involved in negotiations through this entire period. Was there a case that you heard from them that seemed at all persuasive to you about the viability of this path?

ROBERT MALLEY

I mean, I have great respect for Martin Indyk. I think when I speak of people of good faith, he certainly was one of them. He tried really hard. Hussein, I think in the article that we published with you, Hussein recounts one of the last conversations he had with Martin before he passed away, in which Martin was saying, “We can’t give up on the two-state solution. We can’t.” Again, because he felt otherwise, if there’s no hope, there’s only despair. And Hussein said, “Yeah, but Martin, describe to me a realistic pathway from where we are now to the two-state solution, and I’ll be on your team, no doubt.” And Martin had to say, “I don’t have that roadmap, but we still can’t give up the faith.” And I think that captured that conversation.

You mentioned President Obama, and it’s something that I’ll never forget. I think he was very aware of the fact that we were saying things that we knew were not going to be translated into reality. Again, I think he felt he needed to say it. And one observation he had, which for me said it all, he said, “Some of us say Israel is being irrational; it’s acting against its interests.” He said, “Israel is not being irrational; the ones who are being irrational are those who believe that it would be rational for Israel to change its behavior when there are no consequences, no negative consequences for it pursuing its current path.” And so he said, “If there’s no cost to Israeli settlement construction, there’s no cost to its policies in the West Bank or in Gaza, it would be irrational for Israel to change its behavior.” Again, President Obama, for whom I have a lot of respect, also was not prepared to take, or he was not prepared to take the steps—maybe he didn’t think he could—to make Israel pay the price for the continuation of the status quo. I mean, the Obama administration is a story of great rhetoric and, unfortunately, very little, if any progress on the ground.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If I can try to channel Martin here: we did a podcast interview with him a few months before his death. He’d written an essay called “The Strange Resurrection of the Two-State Solution,” laying out a version of this argument and what he said, with a degree of sadness in his voice as he was saying this, knowing that he wouldn’t live to see this thing that he’d worked on for much of his career, devoted much of his life to was, “Look, it may take 30 years of war. I can’t see the path,” as he said to Hussein, “but I know there’s no stable alternative. There’s no better alternative than the two-state solution. So I think that somehow we will get there.” The Martin challenge, I think, would be, if you enlarge our vision here, tell me a path that you would set us on now that has some sense of an alternative vision that you think avoids endless cycles of war and calamity and occupation in the West Bank and Gaza and everything else that we’ve seen for the past decades.

ROBERT MALLEY

So you channel Martin; I’ll channel Hussein’s conversation with Martin, because I think they had this very conversation before Martin passed away. And Hussein, what he said then, and which we reflect in the book, is, “You say there’s no alternative to the two-state solution that would make sense if the two-state solution were a true alternative.” The difference between the two-state solution and other ideas, some of which we mentioned in the book—others, I believe, people more creative than I am, will come up with or hopefully will come up with—the difference is that the two-state solution has been tried and tried again and tried again and again under conditions, as I just said, that on paper and in reality are far more favorable than anything we see now or anything we’re likely to see in the future. Just think of the number of settlers, think of the state of mind of Israelis and Palestinians over the last decade, or more particularly, but not only after October 7.

So when people say the only solution is a two-state solution, they say it because they can’t think of anything else. But of course, there are alternatives, right? I mean, the status quo has far more credibility and sustainability, even though people always say the status quo is not sustainable. It’s much more sustainable and credible than the two-state solution, which has not come into being. And then, part of our argument is the two-state solution—when we say that, we mean as defined after Oslo, sort of part of the Oslo peace process, which is hard partition, the Westphalian notion of two nation-states that are divided by a border and have full sovereignty— that seems to be impossible for all the reasons: demographic reasons, geographic reasons, but also, we would say, reasons having to do with emotions and more amorphous sentiments of the two peoples.

But are there more porous forms of sovereignty? I’m sure you’ve heard, and I think Foreign Affairs has published, people argue, I think, it’s a land for all where there’d be the ability for people on either side to live, take residence in any part of that land between the river and the sea. So think of settlers, maybe they could continue to live under Palestinian sovereignty, but with Israeli citizenship. Maybe refugees, Palestinian refugees, could also live anywhere between the river and the sea under Palestinian citizenship and the sovereignty of the place where they live. That’s just one idea that a number of people have been pursuing, and our message is those who still believe in a two-state solution, the burden should be on them to say how they’re going to get there because at this point, they’ve said it enough. They keep saying there’s no other outcome, but it doesn’t seem to be an outcome in and of itself.

So that’s number one, and then number two, it’s a message to others and everyone else to say the challenge is now to think of something else. Because if we just are going to go back after where we are today and say, “Okay, now let’s go back on that path to get a two-state solution,” it’s not just that it failed; many ideas fail. It’s that that failure led precisely to the horrors that we’ve lived, on and since October 7. It’s not like there’s a discontinuity between the peace process and what happened over the last two years. They are the logical extension of the perpetuation of this myth that we were moving, that we were advancing.

And my word on this is when I hear people say, “We can’t allow the two-state solution to disappear or the idea of it because then people will lose all faith,” do those people who say it really think that Israelis and Palestinians today are fooled by the rhetoric? I mean, we may fool ourselves. I think the French, others, when they say “two-state solution,” as I say, they may be delusional or self-delusional and convince themselves. I don’t know many Israelis or Palestinians—if you tell them, even those who support it, most of them would say, “Yeah, but we’re not going to get there,” for all the reasons that they know far better than we do.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And the polling makes this pretty clear when you see those numbers. I would note we have published in the last several months a number of pieces that are exploring confederation arrangements like the one you’re describing. I think people have tried to come up with one-state-like formulas that might be sustainable, but if you were advising a U.S. president, whether [U.S. President Donald Trump], who may be open to these kinds of solutions, or a future president, you would have U.S. policy exploring those kinds of paradigms?

ROBERT MALLEY

So first, and just another reference to Foreign Affairs, I think you had the great exchange on the whole issue of two states, with, I think it was, Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami, and then Martin Indyk and others responded—that’s a great resource for people who want to explore the back and forth of that conversation. I don’t know that it’s up to the U.S. administration to say, “Here’s an outcome.” I do think that the position of any administration should be in a way agnostic as to the particulars of whether it’s one state, two states, three states, four. It should be that anyone who lives between the river and the sea should enjoy the same political civil rights, right? Everyone should be treated equally, and that’s how U.S. policy—that’s what we will judge other parties’ policies: do they respect that principle or not? I don’t think it’s up to the United States. I think the United States could encourage conversations if they want to; that’s fine.

And there was, I think, some talk at the beginning of the Biden administration by some more junior officials who were saying, “Maybe we should let it be known that we’re thinking of alternatives to the two-state solution.” I think that was quickly shut down, but there were some who thought it’s not serving a purpose because the talk of a two-state solution, A, is serving as cover for the aggravation of the status quo, and B, it’s shutting off other avenues of discussion that people should have.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You served in the Biden administration for the first couple of years. You’re quite harsh about the Biden policy in the book and in the Foreign Affairs piece, and you have a very powerful passage in the piece that is adapted from the book, where you write: “The life of a failed U.S. policy in the Middle East proceeds in stages. First comes the wrong-headed approach, misreading of a situation, deliberate or inadvertent mistake, as when U.S. officials assert that the best way to influence Israel is not through pressure but with a warm embrace.” That “warm embrace” seems directed especially at the Biden policy in the days after October 7. As you look at the response, if we go back to the Hamas attacks, where do you think U.S. policy started to go wrong? And again, you were not advising Biden at that point, but if you were, how would you have shifted U.S. policy in that moment to avert the two years of catastrophic war that followed?

ROBERT MALLEY

Yeah, so first, a critique of the warm embrace—obviously, that precedes the Biden administration. There’s a school of thought in the United States that the best way to influence Israeli policy is mild private criticism and strong public embrace. The experience is that the Israeli leadership takes the embrace, forgets the criticism, and keeps going. And so I think it’s not just under the Biden administration, but just as we say that since October 7, Israeli and Palestinian attitudes were magnified—or on October 7; Palestinian attitudes afterwards—Israeli attitudes, that whole period of after October 7, I think has seen it was everything that’s wrong about American policy magnified, as well. In this case, following Israel’s lead far too much at a time when Israel was committing horrendous war crimes, at a minimum, in Gaza, and the United States had huge leverage, if only because of the military support that the United States was giving.

And so I think early on, the United States should have made clear to Israel: you want to continue this war in Gaza the way you’re prosecuting it, you can’t do it without weapons, right? We’re not trying to weaken Israel because I’ve heard—because I’ve had some of these conversations with Biden administration officials and they would say, “How could we have withheld weapons when Israel was facing a threat, not just from Hamas, but from Iran and from Hezbollah and from the Houthis, and it would’ve been an invitation to all of them to attack Israel?” And I have two answers to that. One is, that’s Israel’s call to make, right? The United States says, “If you’re going to prosecute a war, you have to do it in accordance with our values, whatever those are, but certainly with international law. If you’re not going to do that, you’re not going to get our support.”

I mean, that’s basically—it’s U.S. law, anyway. If Israel is prepared, if the Israeli government is prepared to say, “Well, we’re going to forsake the weapons that you are prepared to give us because we want to wage this slaughter in Gaza,” again, that’s on them. But the second point is, we could have said, “You can’t use our weapons in Gaza. It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to support you if you’re threatened by somebody else, but in Gaza, we’re not going to support you.”

So there were all kinds of different approaches that the Biden administration could have taken. I just think that was a line they were not prepared to cross for all kinds of reasons—emotional, political, strategic, historical—which was to tell Israel, enough; we cannot be complicit in what you’re doing. And right now, in the eyes of the entire world and American public opinion, or large swaths of it, we are complicit in acts that, again, at a minimum, are war crimes. An increasing number of experts call it genocide, but whatever it is, it’s something that the United States shouldn’t have been associated with.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One of the wrenching things about watching the Biden policy toward the war in Gaza from the outside was that it was very clear, maybe not by the end of 2023, but early in 2024, that Biden himself and senior Biden administration officials expected the war to end much more quickly and wanted it to end much more quickly, but did not use any of the tools that seemed to be at their disposal to do that. If you go back again, moving forward a few months after the attacks to those, say, early months of 2024, before we were truly in the election period, what could have happened in that moment that you think would’ve gotten to a cease-fire? I mean, again, if you play that counterfactual, what do you think was possible in that—

ROBERT MALLEY

Yeah, so first, I mean the quote you just recited where we say, “Pursue a policy, it fails you, keep pursuing it, and you keep saying that it’s going to work,” that’s what happened, right? They kept saying the cease-fire’s around the corner, even though each time they felt it was going to happen, it just didn’t happen because, for whatever reason—I think we know the reasons, mainly. No, I think early on, the United States should have taken the position that it was insisting on a cease-fire, and I understand the argument about the hostages, but I think it was pretty clear early on that military pressure was not going to get the hostages out.

And I also think that you cannot justify the perpetuation of a war that, again, without whatever, however you want to describe it, of this kind of war, even if it were associated with the legitimate goal of trying to get the hostages out, A, it wasn’t achieving that, but B, nothing could justify the kind of war that Israel was waging. So I think early on, the United States should have taken that position that they insisted on a cease-fire and that they would use the leverage. There’s different kinds of leverage, but the most obvious one is stopping to provide the weapons without which the war could not continue. So I’ve said this before, but it is part of the deceit, is to say, “We’re working tirelessly for a cease-fire when you continue to provide the weapons that ensure that the fire will not cease.”

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s an argument you hear from [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s] government and supporters of the Israeli approach that goes, roughly: “Look, all of you critics on the outside told us we had to stop this war. There was no way to get Hamas to concede. And in fact, what we saw is with enough pressure or enough Israeli military success, we got Hamas to give up the hostages in ways that people said they wouldn’t to agree to terms of disarmament.” We’ll see whether that happens, obviously, but at least the declared willingness to disarm to some degree and to get something quite close to an Israeli victory here. There’s kind of a triumphalist narrative. What do you make of that argument?

ROBERT MALLEY

My first answer would be, I don’t think that the ends justify the means when these are the means, right? So let’s sort of put that aside, that I try in the book to put ourselves in different shoes. It’s hard for me to put myself in the shoes of people who believe that killing so many civilians who have nothing to do with what was going on was the right way to wage war. Again, at a minimum, war crimes; I think others have used far harsher words.

But then the other point is you hear different accounts about whether a cease-fire was achievable on terms that were not that far from these earlier. Yes, I’m sure Israel is particularly—or the government is pleased that it still controls 53 percent of Gaza even as the cease-fire is in effect. But that really justifies the continuation of the war and the loss of the lives of some hostages, but mainly the suffering of the people of Gaza. To that extent, it just—I mean, for me, those two things, you can’t even put them on the same plane. So maybe Israel would not have achieved as much of its objectives. It would’ve gotten the hostages out early on. Even the Biden administration said it—I forget at what month—that Israel had achieved the goal of making sure that Hamas could not perpetuate an October 7 again; they had basically militarily been defeated. It didn’t mean that the movement was eradicated. They’re not eradicated now, we know that, so that’s not an argument that I think holds much water.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s a great line in the piece—this was written before the cease-fire, so it’s not in reference to this, but it seems to describe the Trump approach very well—where you write: “Power is the ability to stretch one’s capacity beyond its objective measure and direct the behavior of others.” Watching Trump eventually put pressure on Netanyahu and seem to embody that principle in some ways, what do you make of Trump getting this cease-fire now? Was it some degree of exhaustion on the part of both sides of the war? Was there some uniquely Trumpian touch? What’s the lesson of that?

ROBERT MALLEY

There’s a lot we could say with President Trump; maybe we will. But just to answer your specific narrow question, I think it’s a combination. Sure, the circumstances were more favorable to a cease-fire. I think the IDF, the [Israel Defense Forces] had been exhausted. I mean, yes, they could achieve more, but it wasn’t really going to change anything materially for them. There was a lot of international pressure, isolation of Israel. I think the Prime Minister also didn’t want to go to elections with the hostages still being held by Hamas and the war still ongoing. And I think Hamas itself was under a lot of pressure, mainly from those that they count on, Turkey and Qatar, but also, probably to some extent, from their own people. And then at some point, I think Hamas made the determination that holding onto the hostages was no longer an asset, if it ever was. It became a burden. I mean, clearly holding the hostages, contrary to what I assume was Hamas’s calculation, did not in any way restrain Israel’s military attacks.

So I think all of that was true. The Doha strike by Israel, I think, also energized Gulf countries and the United States, but at the end of the day, I mean you have to give that much credit to President Trump, and I could criticize his approach to Israeli-Palestinian conflict all day long, but he was prepared to do—or was able to achieve—what the Biden administration was not, which is essentially to tell the parties, Hamas through Turkey and Qatar mainly, but also through direct involvement, which is already a break from the past; no American president even dreamt of having a direct discussion with Hamas. We now know the Trump administration did, at very senior levels. And second, to tell Netanyahu at some point, “Enough is enough, you’re isolated. This has got to end.” Again, that came after months of the Trump administration giving basically full latitude to the Israeli government to wage the war and to use famine as an instrument of war. So this is certainly not uncritical praise, but if this cease-fire holds, again, you have to give credit to the unorthodox ways that President Trump has approached policy. And even in the book, it was before we knew much of this, but we said the perception among some Palestinians and many Arabs was, at least with Trump, we know what we’re going to get. It’s going to be crazy sometimes. It’s going to be against our interests, but it’s going to be—it won’t have some of the hypocrisy, duplicity, faux outrage of the Biden administration. It’s going to be real, genuine cynicism, and that might be a breath of fresh air.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You, when you were running the Middle East program at International Crisis Group, a great organization—we run a lot of crisis group authors and love to run their work—met with Hamas. What is your assessment of their own thinking and their strategy at this point? How do they see this picture, and how do they see the path forward to the extent that you can understand it?

ROBERT MALLEY

So first, I mean, I have to—as you say, as part of the International Crisis Group, I think it was a—

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

A long time ago, I realize you had this meeting—

ROBERT MALLEY

Yeah, it was absolutely our mission to talk to all parties in conflict. So I think that was the right thing to do and I still believe in it. But second, I would say I think I was aware of the fact that when, as an American, a Westerner, who had served in relatively high-level positions in U.S. administrations, I know that they were sort of shaping what they were telling me, right? So I’m not going to say that anything they said to me, I took it at face value. But I do think that they had a short- and a long-term view, and the short-term view was, is there some way to reach some kind of quiet stability so that we could govern Gaza and expand our authority in Gaza and challenge Fatah, the other branch of the national movement, for supremacy over the West Bank and Gaza?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

This is going back to 2007, 2008, something like that?

ROBERT MALLEY

Yeah, yeah. But I think it’s always been part of their mind. And then in the longer term, they do have this vision of doing away with the Jewish state. I think where they are now is, if I try to interpret, they feel like clearly they’ve suffered military blows. I suspect that many Palestinians, particularly many Gazans, are going to hold them to account. So I think they felt it was important to bring this to an end at some point, but they’re still standing. And for them, given the might that Israel exercised to try to defeat them, to be able to still stand and to be, at this point still, all things considered, the most powerful Palestinian entity in Gaza by some distance, that’s important for them. So they’ve maintained that brand, they’ve maintained their steadfastness. They could say, “We didn’t surrender, we didn’t buckle.” And for them that’s important.

And we see they’re operating with harsh measures to try to reimpose their authority in Gaza. They understand—I suspect they understand—that something is going to have to change because the movement itself is going to find it very hard to survive in its current shape, both because of domestic and international pressure. But again, in terms of their assessment, I think they might say, “We got some prisoners out, which is important. That was the main objective of October 7. We got prisoners out, and we could say that we stood fast.” I’ll leave it to the Palestinians—they’ll be the ultimate judges of whether that justified October 7, given that, yes, Hamas knew they were going to provoke Israel and they had a plan to provoke Israel, but they had no plan to deal with the inevitable consequence of their provocation.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

How do you assess the prospects of peace at this point?

ROBERT MALLEY

Peace?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If you look at the cease-fire or, let’s say, the cease-fire holding, and at least a situation that is better than where it was a month ago, do you anticipate that will hold, as you see the 20 points of the Trump plan? Do you see prospects for making progress on any of those at this point?

ROBERT MALLEY

There’s so many reasons to be cynical and to be skeptical: the vagueness of the plan, the ambiguities, the fact that there is no arbiter to measure—or neutral arbiter—to measure violations, and no body you could go to that you could count on to redress those violations. We’ve already seen, I mean, in the days following the cease-fire, the president and his senior officials, their rhetoric about how they judge the situation has been really dizzying, right? At one point, when Hamas kills people in Gaza, the president says that that’s justified, or kind of justified, the same way we’d take care of gangs in Chicago. I’m not really quoting him exactly, but to paraphrase. Then he says if they continue down this path, somebody’s going to disarm them, maybe it’d be the United States, maybe somebody else; then saying, well, they’re not in full control, that may be these were rogue elements; and then again, saying if they don’t disarm, they’re going to be eradicated. So who knows with this administration whether they will stick to it, what position they’ll take, and whether they’ll put pressure on both parties, not just on Hamas.

But I think it is conceivable that the cease-fire will hold because I do think that neither Israel nor Hamas right now have an interest in a full-fledged resumption of hostilities. I think it’s going to be a very uneven cease-fire. Again, we’ve already seen it. I think at bottom there still is this incompatibility between Israel’s vision, which is that it can strike at will, any evidence of Hamas’s emergence or assertion of its power, I think, and it feels like that’s something we’ll continue doing. And on Hamas’s part, the vision, as I was saying earlier, that they need to reassert their authority—not their rule, but their authority—over Gaza, and they’re not prepared to give that up.And so then obviously the clash will over the issue of disarming, it will over the issue of whether Israel retains this overall ability to strike. It will whenever it feels like it needs or wants to.

So yes, I think you could have a fragile cease-fire. There are the other elements: the release of hostages, prisoners, the influx of humanitarian assistance. Hopefully, all that happens. I think when you get to the next stage, which is disarming Hamas fully, an introduction of international stabilization force, Israeli withdrawal to the periphery, that’s a much different kettle of fish, which is going to require the United States to be on it and, again, to be prepared to call both sides out if they’re violating the deal. Again, just seeing the first few days after the cease-fire, it is odd that some American officials have said—very senior ones—that they don’t consider that Hamas had violated the deal when there was this incident in southern Gaza, and yet there was no calling out the Israelis for retaliating for what may not have been a violation of the deal.

So they’re going to have to be much more on the case and put pressure again equally on both sides, on Hamas directly or through Qatar and Turkey, and on Israel directly. And then maybe we’ll see some progress on those other elements. If you think of it in concentric circles—first, the ceasefire and the release of hostages and prisoners; next, the longer-term governance of Gaza, the international stabilization force, this governance council, this board of peace, and Israeli withdrawal and disarming of Hamas; and the next one, which is sort of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, I’m not even going to get there—I think the further you get on those concentric circles, the lesser of the likelihood that it’s going to be achieved.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If we’re avoiding the easy cynicism you refer to, do you see formulas for governance in Gaza and Palestinian leadership reform and security in Gaza that you see as viable?

ROBERT MALLEY

I mean viable, yes. Realistic, I don’t know. Again, it’s hard for me to imagine that Hamas is going to agree to be disarmed. Maybe it’s a matter of definition: what weapons they have to give up, who do they give them up to. I mean, maybe there’s ways around that, but for Hamas to no longer be an armed movement, that would be basically going back on everything that they’ve stood for since their founding, and they would become sort of the very kind of movement that they’ve denounced from their origins. So, hard for me to see that, hard for me to see Israel agreeing that there would be a genuine—if it’s an international force that is there as a buffer between Israel and Gaza, hard for me to see Israel agreeing to sort of subcontract what it considers its security requirements to an outside body.

So it’s hard for me to see it. Is it possible that you’d have some version of that, where there’s a greater international role, Arabs and Gulf countries step up, there’s some technocratic government? It’s something that Hamas has said that it would agree to, but Israel continues to treat Gaza the way it treats parts of the West Bank—it could go in at will—and Hamas refuses to disarm? Maybe there’s something there, which, again, is an unstable equilibrium, but it’s something that it could at least contemplate.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s another triumphalist narrative you hear from the Israeli government and supporters of the Israeli government when it comes to activities in the region. In the days and weeks and months after October 7, there was a degree of restraining Israel when it came to going after Hezbollah in the north. There’s been a degree of restraining Israel when it came to going after Iran for some time. The Israelis now say, “Look, we went after Hezbollah and decimated it considerably. We attacked Iran with some American help, whether we’ve massively set back the nuclear program, that’s a separate question. But calamity did not ensue, and the Iranians are still willing to talk and still dealing with the [International Atomic Energy Agency]. It’s not appreciably worse, at least in this moment, than it was previously.” You wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs warning against Middle East triumphalism, so I can imagine you will not fully buy that narrative, but there does seem to be more evidence, more substance to that than the Gaza triumphalism.

ROBERT MALLEY

Yeah, so I’ve thought about this in terms of currency conversion. I think if you think of Israel, the Palestinians, and the United States, all three of them have a problem of currency conversion. Israel today is more powerful regionally, in terms of military power, possibly than it’s ever been. And you just mentioned the theaters in which it can operate at will. And so it is probably more powerful than it has ever been or as powerful as it’s ever been. And yet it is more or as isolated and ostracized in the world as it’s ever been. And so it hasn’t been able to convert its military might into political diplomatic assets.

The Palestinians, in terms of their national cause, international support, again, seldom seen, on the streets of the United States, Rome, Paris, London, throughout the global South, the support for the Palestinian cause is as strong as I could recall it ever being. And yet the Palestinian national movement is about as weak as it’s ever been: leaderless, both Fatah and Hamas are in crisis. They’re divided, but there’s also neither one of them seems to be able to offer their people anything of substance, and the Palestinian people are adrift, and again, as they were, perhaps, as we say in the book, the closest is after the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948. So again, they haven’t been able—they have not found a way to convert their massive international support into any political dividends on the ground.

And the United States has now a U.S. president, President Trump, who has defied the laws of political gravity. He could basically do whatever he wants. The Republicans won’t criticize him, even if he does something completely taboo from and inconsistent, incompatible with Republican orthodoxy. He gets away with anything. He has this sort of ability to defy all laws, real laws, and the laws of political gravity. And yet we’ve rarely seen a U.S. administration that really doesn’t exactly know where it wants to go. I mean, you can listen to them. They speak of peace. They don’t know what it means. They don’t really know what their vision is for Israelis and Palestinians, so they haven’t been able to convert the president’s real assets into a plan on the ground that actually makes sense.

So all three parties have this discrepancy between assets, which they can’t convert into real benefit. And so I think your question had to do with the Israelis, but I think true for all three parties, and it’s a very intriguing and paradoxical situation right now. Can they translate, all of these three, their assets into something that is more tangible, and that they could really exploit on the ground? I mean, that’s really what we’ll have to find out in the coming months and years, but there’s this incapacity at this point to do so.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The Israelis say that, for all of the outpouring of opprobrium during the war in Gaza, from populations in Europe and the United States and the global South and parts of the Arab world, by and large, the relationships with Gulf governments continued, that they have not seen a lot of criticism in private from senior Gulf officials. I’m sure you talked to plenty of those officials. I’ve heard them say, “Look, we’re not so unhappy about what Israel’s doing to Hamas, and we’re grateful for what they’ve done against Hezbollah and Iran and Assad in Syria.” And the Israelis say, “Look, ultimately the anger is going to pass, and we think that those relationships will be solid and in fact grow.” Do you think that’s too sanguine?

ROBERT MALLEY

I don’t know. So I’d make a distinction between public opinion and government opinion. Public opinion, and in the United States in particular, I think there has been a real shift. I don’t know how permanent it is. I don’t know how deep it is, but certainly—and I teach on a campus now—I think it’s clear that the younger generation today sees the world and this part of the world and America’s role in this part of the world so differently from anything I’ve experienced in the past. Certainly from when I was a kid, but even from years past. So I think that’s something that, if I were an Israeli official, I would take seriously and look at some of the boycott movements in Europe, talking about Eurovision or talking about UEFA, the football/soccer cup. These are things that would’ve been unthinkable not long ago. In terms of government, yes, you’re right.

And I think if I were Palestinian, I would say, “What will it take for Arab governments to take real measures against Israel?” Again, from their perspective, a genocide isn’t enough. I mean, so you’re absolutely right that in that sense, Israel could take satisfaction in the fact that governments by and large—although recently some European governments have ordered no more arms transfers, so even that, there’s some cracks. But no, I wouldn’t deny that there’s a gap between government feelings, officials’ feelings here and elsewhere, and public opinion, but public opinion matters. And then it does sometimes slip into antisemitism, which is something that Israelis, but everyone, should worry about.

So I don’t think it’s a comfortable time for Israel right now in terms of its international reputation. I think a question is whether that changes when the war ends, as it seems to be the case, and when you have a different Israeli government. At that point, do people sort of, even public opinion, say, “Okay, now we’re back to an Israel we’re more familiar with?” I’m not so sure. I just don’t know. Again, it’s hard to judge, but the attitudes that I sense among some young people is really calling into question more broadly Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And you could imagine that official policy changing will be a lagging indicator of that change in public opinion that could come later.

ROBERT MALLEY

That’s exactly right.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You had the Iran portfolio for the first couple years of the Biden administration, probably not one you were thrilled to have for many of those months.

ROBERT MALLEY

No, no.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As you look at the Iranian nuclear program now, you’d also worked as the senior White House official on the Middle East in the Obama administration on the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], the Iran deal, originally. As you assess the Iran nuclear problem now, where do you see it? In what ways are we in worse shape? Better shape? What do you worry about when you look at the months and years ahead?

ROBERT MALLEY

I mean, I think it’s undeniable that the Israeli and American strikes have set back Iran’s nuclear program considerably. I mean, I’m not sure how many centrifuges they have left, if any. They do have, apparently, the 400-and-some kilograms of 60-percent-enriched uranium somewhere buried underground. And there’s all the uncertainty of the fact that we don’t know what’s going on because the International Atomic Energy Agency is no longer able to inspect. But it’s a significantly degraded nuclear program, no doubt about it. And I think it’s something that Iran has to reconsider about its entire strategy. It’s also in a position where it’d be very hard for Iran to decide to reconstitute its program, knowing how penetrated they were by Israel. I mean, this is something, again, that they’re going to have to—any meeting between high-level Iranian officials, whoever’s alive, has to wonder why the other person is alive and vice versa. Are they somehow—were they the mole?

Now, just in terms of the pure mathematics of the nuclear program, if you consider that on the eve of the war—and this is sort of from public statements that officials and the intelligence community and experts have been saying—that Iran was about three to nine months away from being able to get a nuclear weapon if they had decided that they wanted to. After all the destruction, Israeli strikes, U.S. strikes on Fordow, et cetera. I think a fair assessment is that Iran is about three to nine months away from a nuclear weapon if they want to get one. Now, the caveat, again, is I think they are so penetrated that they’d be very, very, very reluctant to start. Maybe they think they’re not being with the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, not there they could get away with more.

So the problem hasn’t been resolved. I think the [Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei] keeps saying, “We will decide what we do with our nuclear program. If we want to reconstitute it, we will.” So it hasn’t been resolved, but certainly Iran does not have, to use an expression President Trump likes, doesn’t have the cards it once did. It just doesn’t have that capacity to leverage its nuclear program the way it did before. And that’s why even though I could see the outlines of a potential deal between the United States and Iran—maybe—one of the problems is Iran has very few assets left. The assets it has is the 400 kilograms of 60-percent-enriched uranium and the fact that there is sort of no transparency. Those are the only two things that it really can give up, and so they’re not going to give it up for nothing. They’re not going to tell the world, “Okay, here, take our 60-percent-enriched uranium, come inspect,” because then they have nothing left to bargain with.

From the U.S. perspective, that’s not that much. They’re not going to pay a huge price for just those two things. So there really is a gap between what Iran holds and what it wants to get out of it, and how the United States assesses it, which is why the United States, I think, in any negotiation is going to ask for more. It’s going to ask for something on the missile program or for support for allied militant groups, which I think Iran, particularly because it has felt so vulnerable on the security front, is going to be extremely reluctant to give up. So again, I could see the contours of a deal where Iran could say, for example, “We’re not giving up on a right to enrich, but we’re not going to start tomorrow. Our program has been destroyed. There may be risks because of the radiation, so it’s going to take us time, and in the meantime, we’ll suspend, and we could reach a deal with the United States, and maybe that suspension goes on forever.”

So they save face and the United States doesn’t ask them to give up the right to enrich, and then maybe over years you build some kind of consortium where enrichment resumes or not—international consortium. So you could see that, in exchange for sanctions relief. And even there, I could imagine President Trump would go beyond where President Obama and certainly President Biden were prepared to go and say, “We’re going to lift some of the primary embargo,” because President Trump will say, you know, the nuclear deal that President Obama negotiated—he’d say, “What kind of morons were they? They’d reach a deal where Iran gets benefits, the world gets benefits because they could trade with Iran, and we get none because we’ve maintained our primary embargo.” So then he would say, “No, if we’re going to do a deal now, we’re going to invest and we’re going to trade, which is something that could be attractive to Iran.”

So again, I could imagine that, not like the two-state solution. I could see that outcome. I don’t have the pathway. I think it’s more realistic than a two-state solution. But that, for me, is the challenge. How do you get to that outcome, which I think you could have gotten before the 12-day war? I think it was achievable, maybe harder now in some ways, but I don’t rule it out.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There was an expectation from most outside observers, at the beginning of the Biden administration, when you were going back into government, that the United States and Iran would be back in the nuclear deal, in JCPOA, pretty quickly. I think some of that was associated with you because you’d been part of that negotiation the first time around, so it seemed intuitive that you would be back to it. What happened, as you kind of assess that period? Obviously, there’s an Iranian side to this too, but as you look at U.S. decision-making, why did we end up not getting back in, and was that a mistake?

ROBERT MALLEY

Two people who told me not to take this job were my wife and my mother. I probably should have listened to them. So looking back, I think my headline would be, in order to get a deal, which I maybe didn’t fully realize at the time, you needed at least one of these two people, President Biden and Supreme Leader Khamenei, to really want the deal. Neither one really wanted it for their own reason. I think for President Biden, I think his heart was not really in the JCPOA. I think he felt that it was, why should the United States pay a price for Iran not getting a nuclear weapon? And also, now that—this was a view that he and others of his advisors held— yeah, we didn’t like the sanctions that President Trump imposed, but now that we have them, why not use them to get a better deal, right? So I think he was sort of lukewarm.

I think the supreme leader was extremely lukewarm as well because he felt, “We were betrayed once, it’s sort of like Lucy and the football. How many times are we going to be betrayed by the United States? We reach a deal with President Biden, and then if President Trump is elected, they’re going to tear it up again.” So I think both of them could see—maybe they could live with it, but neither was that eager for one. And so that led, at the beginning of the Biden administration, to a very slow walk by the United States. I was in favor of trying to move more quickly and to tell the Iran were prepared to go back into the JCPOA to lift the sanctions that President Trump reimposed if you go back to the old constraints, and I think we should have moved quickly when [former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani] was still the president, with whom we had reached the first deal, was still in office.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Which is a matter of a few months, right, after Biden—

ROBERT MALLEY

Just a few months. Right, right. The elections were that—I forget—in June or something, and we came into office late January, and we slow-walked it, and we started asking for more—a longer, stronger deal. By the time we took what I would call a more realistic position, the Iranians then—they played hard to get, and they were slow-rolling. Now, what I don’t know, and I want to be very honest here, I don’t know whether if, in fact, they’d followed my advice and moved quickly, whether Iran really would’ve agreed because they raised several questions, one of which was, “What guarantees do we have that your successor’s not going to leave this deal?” And we had to answer—and we did this with the Europeans because the Iranians wouldn’t meet with us directly—we had to answer, “There are no guarantees, right? We can’t guarantee anything.” All we could say is, “During the years the Biden administration will be in office, you will get the benefits of sanctions relief, we’ll get the benefits of your nuclear program being rolled back significantly. Beyond that, we don’t have the constitutional means of binding our successor.” And we never could answer that question.

There were other issues that they kept raising that we couldn’t address either. So I don’t know whether Iran would’ve simply kept asking for more, and the process would’ve gone on. So maybe it was naive to think a deal could have been struck. But again, I think the way we approached it, A, guaranteed that we lost precious time, and B, I think also strengthened the position of those in Iran who were skeptical of the United States, saying, “They’re all the same. They just want to trick us.”

But there was—just one more point. I think there was a time—it was in August 2022—when a deal really was at hand. It was proposed by the European Union, but it was supported not just by the European Union and the three European countries, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, also by Russia and China, and by us. I truly believe at that point that we could do it. And then the Iranians raised extraneous requests at the last minute. And that’s where I sort of wonder, were they ever prepared to cross that line? I think we mishandled it, but I’m not sure that the mishandling was responsible for the lack of a deal.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As you step back and look at the regional picture that is starting to emerge from all of these dynamics, it’s, I mean, quite an interesting place for Middle Eastern order, where you have Gulf governments more interested in rapprochement with Tehran than they were certainly when you were negotiating the nuclear deal the first time around. You have Israeli power in the region, new relationships between Gulf governments and the Israeli government, but also a high degree of suspicion and skepticism. How do you understand the order that’s taking shape, and is there a stable arrangement here? Are there risks that you think are underappreciated? I’m curious how you make sense of this.

ROBERT MALLEY

I mean, we’re really in the middle of a complete rejiggering of the puzzle. I mean, you’ve mentioned a number of the new elements. There’s also some relationships that seem to be completely at loggerheads, between Egypt and Qatar, between Egypt and Turkey, between Saudi Arabia and Turkey and Qatar, and the relationship that seemed to be the strongest. between the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, seems to be the one that is creating the most trouble. As you say, yes, there’s rapprochement with Iran; there’s also the Abraham Accords, which may well expand in the coming months or years. But that’s coupled with what I hear from Gulf countries, which is, “Yes, we were opposed to Iranian hegemony, not because it was Iranian, but because it was hegemonic. But that means that we’re not happy with any hegemon—not an Israeli hegemon either.” And so they also are wondering, how do you make sure that Israel doesn’t go too crazy?

At the same time, we know that they were continuing to cooperate on security matters with Israel after October 7 until very recently, probably still now. So it’s a picture that I think we can’t see clearly yet. But it does mean that a lot of pieces that are up in the air that can land anywhere, and, with adroit diplomacy, may land in the right place. And I don’t want to—again, I could spend a lot of time criticizing the Trump administration, but they do like making deals and they do have a way of—part of the parties they’re dealing with in the Gulf also like to make deals that are based on money and transactions and commerce. And so it is possible that they managed to do things that others were not. I saw today that now their new ambition is to reach peace between Algeria and Morocco, which is something I’ve been interested in for decades. If they could do that, which is for me—I’ve never been able to really see how they reconcile for domestic reasons. That’s a completely different issue. But again, it’s possible that in this case, the unorthodoxy and some of what is most, I don’t know about repellent, but distasteful about the administration, which is the combination of private finance, money, corruption, diplomacy, that it may work. Now, to those deals, are they sustainable or not? Who knows? But they may work, at least in the short term, to expand commercial relations between states, and that, again, would just be a new element of this emerging puzzle.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And so that you have the Gulf balancing between Iran and Israel, with the United States kind of occasionally stepping in to shore things up. Is that the kind of optimistic picture here?

ROBERT MALLEY

Yeah, but also, again, as I said, and it’s interesting how much President Trump talks about Iran, has been speaking about Iran recently. It’s clearly on his mind, whether he has this image of Iran as a country that is important enough that he needs to strike a deal with it, or for his Nobel Peace Prize ambitions, whatever it is, he speaks about it almost impervious to the pronouncements by Iranians, which are often extremely dismissive of him. So again, if the United States reaches a deal with Iran that also fundamentally changes the picture in ways that could, then—who knows where that leads, right? So at this point, I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic or pessimistic. I’m just curious about where this goes because it is a different form of diplomacy, if that’s the word, where taboos are shattered almost daily.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And you could see Israeli-Saudi normalization as part of that? It’s not off the table, to your mind?

ROBERT MALLEY

It’s not off the table. No, I think it’s in some ways a matter of timing. I think for Mohammed bin Salman, I think this is something that the Biden administration took too long to appreciate, if they did appreciate it. Yes, he was telling the Americans, “I’m still interested.” Why wouldn’t he say that, right? I mean, he wants to keep them hungry and want to keep catering to his demands. But the thought that somebody who has the ambition of being the head of the Arab Muslim world—take the leadership position—that, at a time when most of his and the region and the Muslim world’s public opinion sees what Israel is doing as a genocide, or even right in the wake of it, that now he would normalize?

So I think it’s a card that he’s going to keep saying that he’s being prepared to play. At some point, he will play it because I don’t think that he feels—it’s not an ideological issue for him, right? I mean, people who’ve heard him speak about the Palestinian cause wouldn’t say that he’s the reincarnation of Yasir Arafat; he has a very jaundiced view of the Palestinians, but I think he has come to the position where he does have that ambition. Saudi Arabia can play that role because it doesn’t really have too many competitors right now. But it does mean that it has to be careful not to jump the gun and normalize with a country that is reviled by so much of Arab and Muslim public opinion.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And he has domestic politics. I mean, there are real population—

ROBERT MALLEY

He has domestic politics. He knows how to deal with it in ways that are not always the prettiest. But I think it goes beyond that. It’s just public opinion writ large. And I think he does now have this ambition. Iran is not as much of a threat. Who else is there in the region? Maybe Turkey, who could aspire to that role. But Turkey has its own disadvantages, not being an Arab country. So I suspect that he is playing the long game, and the long game means certainly not immediate normalization.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to close by going back to the subject at the heart of your book and your recent Foreign Affairs pieces, which is, of course, the U.S. approach to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. There was a piece that we published over the summer by Mira Rapp-Hooper and Rebecca Lissner arguing that we needed a zero-based review of all American foreign policies. And I wonder how you would approach a zero-based review of U.S. policy toward Israel. If we look at what our real interests here are, how we should think about them? How would you define those interests, and how would you craft a new policy to reflect them?

ROBERT MALLEY

So I mean, I like the instinct that says we need to rethink all our policies. That certainly was the instinct that drove what we wrote in the book. Listen, I mean, there’s all kinds of interests that one could identify in our relationship with Israel. I would say at bottom, we need to think about what serves the United States in the region, and more broadly, what serves the United States in terms of the reputational cost that it has when it aligns itself with policies—and again, I’m thinking of the war on Gaza, in particular—that are viewed as unacceptable by so many, by large swaths of the world, and it just makes it more difficult for the United States to argue about anything, Ukraine in particular, when it seems to have such a double standard. It’s not a matter of breaking with Israel, but understanding that Israel, like any other country, has its own interests, and we should have ours.

And that means that when Israel is pursuing policies that we think are going to hurt our interests, whether it’s vis-a-vis the Palestinians, vis-a-vis Iran, vis-a-vis Lebanon, Syria, whatever, that we need to make clear that our support has its limits, which doesn’t mean abandoning Israel, but it means treating it more normally as we treat other countries. Maybe there’s a history and a special relationship that, for now, with Israel is not going to be challenged. But the bottom line should be, is this something that is harmful to U.S. interest? And that has not always been the criteria that’s been selected.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you worry about the coming debate in the Democratic Party about this issue? Do you see risks? Do you see prospects for a new paradigm that you would find more productive?

ROBERT MALLEY

Certainly, there’s been an evolution. I mean, when you see people who traditionally have been viewed as very, very supportive of Israel, openly considering, contemplating withholding weapons, conditioning weapon sales, that’s something new. And we see this happening increasingly, with increasing frequency, and I think some of them, it’s conviction. For others, it’s just they could sense where the party or the base of the party is going. I think the real question for the Democratic Party is going to be what I was raising earlier. What happens to this "reassessment" when the war is over and you have an Israeli government, which is either led by Netanyahu, but without [Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich] and [Israeli National Security Minister Ben-Gvir], the most right-wing elements of his government, or that is led by somebody else, like Naftali Bennett or someone who is not viewed as—however you want to call it—as the current government. What happens then?

Does the bulk of the Democratic Party decide again, “We’re relieved?” Do they feel relief, and do they say, “We can now go back to business as usual,” which means you tap Israel a little bit on the wrist when settlement construction continues, but you don’t really make it a key issue. You criticize softly, but you embrace publicly, or is this something that is deeper? And I don’t have an answer to that. I really don’t know. It’s what you were saying earlier. I think there’ll be some of the Democratic base that’s going to be in favor of a more thorough rethink of the relationship. But others will say, the problem we had was with Netanyahu or with this version of Netanyahu, sort of the Chuck Schumer speech, which is all directed at Netanyahu, which I think was misguided. This war was not Netanyahu’s war, as we explained in the book.

But I don’t know where that ends, and also what the politics will give. I think it’s going to be a real debate in the Democratic Party. And the question is, does it become a litmus test almost in the same order as one’s position on the Iraq War was? Is this a dividing line for the primary in 2028? And all that I think is still unknown. Democratic voters are going to vote on a whole host of issues. For some, this is going to be one of the top three issues. For others, it’s going to be number ten or 20. They’re going to think about health care, they’re going to think about democracy, they’re going to think about whatever else.

And so even though they feel strongly about this, they’re not going to vote for a candidate based on his or her position on this issue. For others, as I say, it will be, and I think the debate—I’m all in favor of debate, so it’s not that I worry about it. I think that the Democratic Party needs to have a debate. I think the margins of that debate are going to be much broader than they have been in the past, and that’s a healthy thing, and let it rip.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Rob, thank you so much for doing this today. Both the essay drawn from the book and the book itself are a very rare combination of trenchant policy analysis and quite lyrical, evocative writing. So I recommend that people read the Foreign Affairs essay first and then go into the book from there, but thank you so much for doing this.

ROBERT MALLEY

Whatever order they want. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me.