From this episode
Recommended books
Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine
Author:
Noura Erakat
Justice in the Question of Palestine is often framed as a question of law. Yet none of the Israel-Palestinian conflict's most vexing challenges have been resolved by judicial intervention.
Justice in the Question of Palestine is often framed as a question of law. Yet none of the Israel-Palestinian conflict's most vexing challenges have been resolved by judicial intervention. Occupation law has failed to stem Israel's settlement enterprise. Laws of war have permitted killing and destruction during Israel's military offensives in the Gaza Strip. The Oslo Accord's two-state solution is now dead letter. Justice for Some offers a new approach to understanding the Palestinian struggle for freedom, told through the power and control of international law. Focusing on key junctures―from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to present-day wars in Gaza―Noura Erakat shows how the strategic deployment of law has shaped current conditions. Over the past century, the law has done more to advance Israel's interests than the Palestinians'. But, Erakat argues, this outcome was never inevitable. Law is politics, and its meaning and application depend on the political intervention of states and people alike. Within the law, change is possible. International law can serve the cause of freedom when it is mobilized in support of a political movement. Presenting the promise and risk of international law, Justice for Some calls for renewed action and attention to the Question of Palestine.
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Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine
Authors:
Hussein Agha,
Robert Malley,
Hussein Agha and Robert Malley
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.
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 U.S. 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.
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Episode overview
For decades, most discussions of Israel and Palestine were framed around the eventual creation of a two-state solution. That effort has been dead for years. What has emerged in its place is what the political scientists Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami call the “one-state reality.” Their book on this — edited with Michael Barnett and Nathan Brown — came out before Oct. 7, 2023.
Since Oct. 7, that reality has become further entrenched: There’s been a record pace of settlement construction in the West Bank. Israel now occupies more than half the territory of Gaza. And Israel’s push into Lebanon has displaced more than a million people.
So what does it mean to reckon with Israel’s one-state reality — to see the facts on the ground rather than the frames of the past?
Shibley Telhami is the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland, College Park. Marc Lynch is the director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University. Lynch is the author, most recently, of “America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region.”