Book Talk: Robert Malley on Israel, Palestine, US Complicity, and War with Iran
In Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine, Robert Malley and co-author Hussein Agha draw on decades of intimate experience with official and unofficial negotiations to explain why the Israeli-Palestinian peace process repeatedly faltered why the historic assumptions of Oslo never matched lived realities on the ground, and how successive US administrations helped perpetuate the status quo under the guise of ending it. Malley discussed these themes, unpacked the US role, and explained why it is time to think outside of the two-state framework. We also discussed the US-Israel war with Iran.
Robert Malley spoke with Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, and Khaled Elgindy, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute.
Panelists
Robert Malley
Robert Malley is a lecturer and Senior Fellow at the Yale Jackson School and the author, with Hussein Agha, of Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine. He served as Special Envoy for Iran from January 2021 to April 2023. Prior to that, he was president and CEO of the International Crisis Group. Under President Barack Obama, he served as Special Assistant to the President, Senior Advisor to the President for the Counter-ISIL campaign, and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and Gulf Region in 2015-2016 and, before that, as Senior Director for the Gulf Region and Syria.
Khaled Elgindy
Khaled Elgindy is a senior research fellow in the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and adjunct instructor at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. He is the author of Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump (Brookings Institution Press, 2019). Elgindy previously held positions at the Middle East Institute (2020-25) and the Brookings Institution (2010-18). From 2004 to 2009, he served as an adviser to the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah on permanent status negotiations with Israel, and was a key participant in the Annapolis negotiations of 2007-08.
Trita Parsi
Trita Parsi is co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute. He is an award-winning author and the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. He is an expert on US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign policy, and the geopolitics of the Middle East. He has authored four books on US foreign policy in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Iran and Israel. He has been named by the Washingtonian Magazine as one of the 25 most influential voices on foreign policy in Washington DC for five years in a row since 2021, and preeminent public intellectual Noam Chomsky calls Parsi “one of the most distinguished scholars on Iran.”