Israel/Palestine: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace

A former senior US diplomat and President and CEO of the International Crisis Group, Robert Malley draws on decades of experience advising US presidents and working closely with Palestinian leaders. The discussion offers a clear-eyed reassessment of why the two-state solution became a global objective only once it was no longer politically viable; why US officials favoured technical schemes over a frank reckoning with the past; why Hamas’s onslaught and Israel’s war of destruction are not historical exceptions but historical reenactments; and why the gaps separating Israelis and Palestinians have less to do with territorial allocation than with history and emotion.

The conversation asks whether international diplomacy can move beyond managing violence and humanitarian fallout, and confront the deeper political, historical and moral questions that have long been deferred.

Robert Malley is a Senior Fellow and Lecturer at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. He is the co-author, with Hussein Agha, of Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine. A former U.S. diplomat, he served in the Biden, Obama, and Clinton administrations and was previously President and CEO of the International Crisis Group. He is a graduate of Yale University, Harvard Law School and Oxford University, England, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is also the author of The Call from Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution and the Turn to Islam.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher On Front Line