Yesterday Was Worse

Trump's "peace plan" isn't perfect. It might not even be great. But at least the killing will have stopped.

It was always a mistake — of the sort of wishful kind to which Americans are prone — to think that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was primarily about land. It isn’t. If it were, it probably would have been resolved by now. The land-for-peace formula was as alluring as it was simplistic. All the two sides had to do was compromise on something measurable: territory. And once they could bring themselves to accept less than they hoped, then the weight of history could be transcended. It was the liberal technocrat’s dream. A solution instead of a reckoning.

The conflict was, is, and will be about something else: history, dignity, and the prospect of things lost regained. But perhaps most of all, at least for Palestinians, the conflict is about memory.

In their new book Tomorrow Is Yesterday — easily one of the best books I’ve read on Israel-Palestine, right up there with Nathan Thrall’s The Only Language They Understand, Seth Anziska’s Preventing Palestine, and Khaled Elgindy’s Blind Spot — former Obama senior advisor Robert Malley and his co-author Hussein Agha write, “For many of the conflict’s protagonists, tomorrow does not lie in the future. It is yesterday.” A bit cryptic, yes.

Reading Malley’s book made me think of Edward Said’s now-mostly forgotten essay, “On Lost Causes,” as beautiful and ambitious a piece of writing as I’ve read in recent years. And, sadly, more relevant than ever. Said introduces the futility but also the promise of losing. A lost cause, he writes, is “something you support or believe in that can no longer be believed in except as something without hope of achievement.”

The essay includes some of the more evocative descriptions of Palestinian suffering. Here’s Said on the “living death” that members of his parents’ generation experienced after the dispossession of 1948.

To have lived as a member of a society (admittedly controlled by Britain) where it was possible to own property, maintain a profession or job, raise a family, go to school, pray, farm, and even die as a citizen, one day, and then suddenly on another day not to be able to do that, was for most people I knew a living death.

Not being Palestinian myself, I think it’s quite hard to grasp the nature of the tragedy Palestinians experienced. Said captures some of that feeling of being forsaken in this passage:

To live through your own extinction, not permitted even the word “Palestine,” while a successor state and people thrived with the world’s attention focused on them as pioneers, an island of democracy, miracle state, and so forth, had the programmatic effect of blanking out hope.

These accounts will be taken by some as yet more evidence of Palestinians’ self-victimization, their dogged inability to move beyond the past. To the extent that they’re taken this way, I suspect it has to do with the discomfort that many “anti-woke” Americans have towards the very idea of victimhood. This is a blindspot. You don’t have to like it, but I think you have to understand it.

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Yesterday, the day Trump announced his “peace plan” at a summit of world leaders in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, wasn’t necessarily a great day as much as it was a better day.

It’s not really a peace plan. It’s about an end to the war. Those are two different things. An end to the war is good! But we shouldn’t confuse that with something more genuine and long-lasting. Palestinians don’t have a partner for peace. Benjamin Netanyahu and the overwhelming majority of Israel’s political elite do not favor a Palestinian state. But even that’s putting it mildly. They oppose it.

Benny Gantz, supposedly one of Israel’s liberals and a vocal Netanyahu critic, took to the pages of The New York Times recently to, somewhat chillingly, say the following:

The nation’s core security interests are not partisan property. Today more than ever, they are anchored by a national consensus that is rooted in the hard realities of our region. Opposition to the recognition of Palestinian statehood stands at the heart of that consensus.

In other words, this isn’t really about Netanyahu, as if simply removing him from power would open up the path towards peace. It won’t.

There’s a reason that the celebrations are more muted on the Palestinian side. They’re returning to homes that have been destroyed and neighborhoods built of rubble. And the two-state solution is dead, as Robert Malley told us on the most recent episode of the podcast (which you should really listen to, if you haven’t). It might be possible to revive the two-state solution — stranger things have happened, after all — but there’s nothing in Trump’s peace plan that gets us closer to that.

Another weakness of the peace plan is that there are no mechanisms of accountability for Israel. Palestinians are called to “de-radicalize” but without any equivalent call for Israelis to de-radicalize, despite the fact that multiple polls have shown that the Israeli public — and not just the Right — has been extremely hawkish, with a majority of Israeli Jews supporting the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.

Credit where credit is due, though. It’s hard to imagine the Biden administration ever putting enough pressure on Netanyahu to stop the war, which they could’ve done a year ago along similar lines. Trump was willing to put the kind of sustained pressure on Israel that was necessary.

In my new book The Case for American Power (please consider pre-ordering, I would be forever grateful), I try my best to reckon with the tragedy of Gaza and whether it means we should give up hope in America and its global role. My answer is a no. American power isn’t intrinsically bad. It can be used for good, too. That part is up to us.

Even with a president who’s as amoral and indifferent to human rights as Donald Trump, the Gaza ceasefire is an example of how U.S. power is still often the only way to stop the killing of innocents. Trump put pressure on Netanyahu in a way that Biden never could. No other country but America could have played this role.

At the same time, I can’t escape the reality that Trump adopted the role of both arsonist and firefighter in Gaza. For months, Trump enabled Israel’s brutality and mass starvation of Palestinians. He’s now ended the war that he himself was facilitating. Put like that, it seems much less like a victory. But it’s better than nothing. Is better than nothing worth celebrating? Probably not (particularly as Israel looks intent on violating the ceasefire already). But I’ll take whatever I can get at this point. For now, there is relief for hundreds of thousands of Gazans. They are returning to homes that they will find no longer exist. But at least they have a future that, while still bleak, isn’t as bleak as it was just a week ago.

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