Part II of 'From Oslo to Gaza': Mideast Peace Negotiator Robert Malley on the Errors of the Past
Send us Fan MailThis is Understanding Israel Palestine. I'm Margot Patterson, the producer of this week's episode. ’ll be talking to Robert Malley again, Mideast peace negotiator and author of the recent book Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine after news briefs.A yearlong Al Jazeera investigation found that as many as 51 countries armed Israel during its war on Gaza — including many that publicly condemned Israel, announced embargoes on weapons sales to the country, and demanded a ceasefire.These weapon transfers took place after the International Court of Justice warned on Jan. 26, 2024 that there was a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and reminded states of of their obligations to act to prevent genocide under the Geneva Convention. All of the 51 states arming Israel were signatory to the convention, yet arms shipments to Israel actually increased after the warning. The Al Jazeera report was based primarily on an analysis of Israeli Tax Authority import data between 2022 and 2025. The 5 largest suppliers of military goods to Israel were the United States, India, Romania, Taiwan and the Czech Republic.A French activist shared on live TV what she experienced in Israeli detention after Israeli forces abducted members of the Global Summed Flottilla seeking to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. The 428 activists on 54 boats were intercepted May 19th in international waters and taken to Israel where their mistreatment in Israeli custody stirred international outcry after National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir posted a video showing him taunting blindfolded, bound activists. On French TVMay 23, Merriam Hadjal said she was slapped, beaten, kneed in the ribs and repeatedly groped and sexually assaulted by multiple Israeli soldiers. Hadjal is one of numerous flotilla activists who have come forward alleging sexual violence in Israeli custody, including claims of sexual assault and rape by Israeli soldiers. Flotilla organizers say at least 15 of the detained activists reported sexual assault.Israel conducted more than 120 air strikes on southern and eastern Lebanon on May 26, after IPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel will escalete its war on the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah.The entire city of Tyre, and at least 10 southern villages in Lebanon have been ordered to evacuate. The expanding war violates a nominal April 16 ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel and threatens to complicate negotiations between Iran and the U.S. IIran has said any agreement to end the war should end hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon. Since March 2, at least 32oo have been killed in Lebanon and 9700 wounded. More than 1 million people in Lebanonhave been displaced.My guest today is Robert Malley, a Middle East expert and specialist in conflict negotiation.. He served as Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs from 1998-2001 and was among the peace negotiators at the Camp David Summit of 2000. He was a member of the National Security Council during the the Obama administration and was lead negotiator of the Iran nuclear deal. He was President Biden’s envoy to Iran and is now at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. His book, Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine, was co-authored with Hussein Agha and looks at how the Oslo Accords deteriorated into an endless peace process that became a joke and then a fraud. This is the second of a two-part conversation. The first part aired May 15. You can find it on our program page on the KKFI website at www. kkfi.org or listen to it on our podcast available on most streaming platforms. Robert Malley, thanks for coming on the program again. When we spoke earlier, you talked about how the two-state solution has always been more popular with the international community than with either Israelis or Palestinians. That made it a heavy lift from the get-go. Not impossible, but difficult.In your book, you paint a very honest, nuanced picture of Yasser Arafat, who succeeded in convincing Palestinians that a Palestinian state on 22% of historic Palestine was not a betrayal of their rights and aspirations but a worthy goal. Could you talk more about Arafat and how the very traits that enabled him to unify and lead the Palestinian people made him suspect in Israeli and American eyes? Malley: It's a great question because he is the target of such contradictory perceptions and images in the West. The fact that he never left his military garb, that he, sometimes insisted on carrying a gun, spoke in very militant terms, particularly when he spoke to his own audience, particularly when he spoke in Arabic. All of that convinced many Americans, and certainly a majority of Israelis, that he was somebody with whom ultimately a peace couldn't be made because he could never give up on the aspirations of being a fighter, a militant in their eyes, often a terrorist. Now, Palestinian eyes, those are the traits that made it possible for him to sell some compromises which otherwise would have been even more difficult to swallow. You just mentioned the principal one, which is that even though the fight that the Palestinians have waged from, 1948 onwards was not a fight for a state on 22% of historic Palestine, it was a fight for liberation of all the land. It was a fight for the return of the refugees. And so his efforts, which were to make the Palestinians view that compromise not as a defeat but as a triumph, not as surrender but as conquest, was in part due to the fact that he retained, in their eyes, precisely the image that the West and Israel found repugnant, which is the image of somebody who would not drop his gun, who would not trade in his military garb for a diplomatic outfit, who would not only speak in the diplomatic language, but in the language of a rebel, of a militant, of a revolutionary. In some ways, what made it possible for him to sell the compromise to his own people made it very difficult and sometimes impossible for other audiences, Israeli or Western, to believe a word he said. Q.: You note that Americans were very deferential to the political constraints facing different Israeli leaders, but ignored those affecting Palestinian leaders. That was true for Arafat, but also for Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat's successor and the man who has led the Palestinian Authority for umpteen years now. Abbas believed that nonviolence was the only way forward for the Palestinian cause and has lived that credo, but his efforts to advance statehood have gone nowhere. How did the United States unwittingly sabotage him? How do you think they failed him, and why haven't his efforts been able to go anyplace?Malley: A word on your first point. The U.S. identifies much more closely with Israel; they are more familiar with its political system. We could debate how much a democracy it is, since today the majority of the people living under Israeli governance, half of the people, don't have the same rights as others and a large percentage, the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, have no political rights at all when it comes to Israel's political system. So you could debate how democratic Israel, is, but certainly from an American perspective, it's a system that runs through parliamentary elections an election system that we can understand with regular polling and regular elections. The Palestinian system is a very different one, and I think in the eyes of many Americans, and this doesn't just apply to the Palestinians, it applies to many other countries, and particularly many Arab countries, they view it as more of a one-man show, in the past, the one-man show of Arafat, then the one-man show of Abbas, in which they believe that even though sometimes there are the accoutrements of democracy, the elections don't mean all that much. The system can be run in a more autocratic way by the supreme leader, in this case the head of the PLO, Palestine Liberation Organization, head of Fatah, the main party, the head of the Palestinian Authority. They believe that Palestinian politics don't matter, that ultimately because they project this image of a system that is run by a single person or by a small group of people, that they can impose whatever they want on their own population. Public opinion doesn't really matter. You hear that when people speak about Saudi Arabia, when they speak about Egypt, when they speak about many of these countries that either are not democratic or don't have a form of democracy that the U.S .is accustomed to. Whereas in fact, it doesn't work that way at all. Precisely because the Palestinian leadership doesn't have, and Arafat didn't have, those regular mechanisms in which his authority could be validated at the polls, in which you had democratic institutions that would legitimize his rule, he was very dependent on a popular form of consensus for his decision-making, and he couldn't afford to stray too far away from that core center of gravity, that consensus, because then he would have no legitimacy at all. And that's been true of one Palestinian leader after another. I think there is this misperception that because Israel is more, quote-unquote, "democratic," we need to pay attention and sometimes excessive attention. I can't tell you how many times I heard American officials for whom I was working saying, "We can't do X or Y or Z because it will imperil the coalition in power because of the democratic institutions and processes that Israel has to go through." I never heard that when it came to the Palestinians. It was, if Arafat wants it, Arafat could get it. If the next leadership would want it, it could get it. If the next leadership would
