Rob Malley
Subject: Forget the Two State Solution
Bio: Former Editor in Chief for The Jerusalem Post, Author of While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East
Forget the Two State Solution
What Happens Next in 6 Minutes - 10.19.2025
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Forget the Two State Solution.
Our speaker is Robert Malley who is a Senior Fellow at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and previously has worked in the Clinton, Obama, and Biden Administrations. He is also the co-author of a new book entitled Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine.
Rob, are you surprised by the two-sided acceptance of Trump’s 20 Point plan?
Robert Malley:
It has to do with one thing, the raw exercise of power by President Trump who decided that he wanted this deal done. If this deal brings home the hostages, humanitarian assistance into Gaza, leads to a partial withdrawal, and ends the slaughter, then applaud it.
It has everything to do with the desire of the President of the United States and the help of Turkey and Qatar to pressure Hamas and provide the guarantees to Hamas that they needed to take the step. There’s no morality in it. If it achieves that basic goal and forget about the future, does it ever lead to a full Israeli withdrawal? Does it lead to new government? I have no clue if it achieves the bare minimum. For now, it’s good enough.
Larry Bernstein:
Let’s start with Qatar. A few weeks ago, the Israelis bombed a building where Hamas officials were meeting. Was that attack in some way related to the timing of this change in their policy?
Robert Malley:
Speculation is that this led the Qataris to put their foot down and tell the Americans that they would have to react to an infringement on their sovereignty. At the time, the Hamas leadership was meeting supposedly to consider a previous peace plan that the U.S. had put on the table. To repair this, Trump had Netanyahu in the White House call and apologize to the Prime Minister of Qatar. It apparently is what gave the impetus to this plan.
When the Americans give guarantees to Hamas, which they may have done in the past, why would Hamas trust it? Iran was in the middle of negotiations with the U.S. and Israel attacks Iran without any warning. But when President Trump gives guarantees to the Turkish president and to the Emir of Qatar that once the hostages are out and the first phases of the deal are implemented, the war will not resume, Hamas feels that it’s not just the president’s word to them, it’s the president’s word to two states about which the president cares.
Larry Bernstein:
You didn’t mention, Egypt and Jordan, why weren’t they more central to this?
Robert Malley:
Egypt was central. Egypt is the neighbor of Gaza. It has a more tenuous relationship with Hamas, so it can’t quite speak for and on their behalf as Qatar and Turkey does. Jordan on this issue is not as central. It’s not a neighbor. It doesn’t have the relationship with Hamas. It doesn’t have the money or influence that those others do. They will be an important player when discussions turn to the West Bank and Jerusalem.
Larry Bernstein:
This ends the war but it doesn’t solve for peace. What happens next?
Robert Malley:
Who knows? Does it just end the slaughter, release the hostage of prisoners, provide human assistance? That’s the most immediate.
What does it do more broadly in terms of Gaza governance? How’s Gaza going to be rebuilt? Who’s going to govern it? What’s going to happen to Hamas? What’s going to happen to this Israeli presence in Gaza? That’s rife with ambiguities, uncertainties, perils.
The next concentric circle is what happens to the Israelis and Palestinians. It’s a topic of the book that I co-wrote, Tomorrow’s Yesterday, and that’s a much bigger kettle of fish. And let’s not forget, there have been countless deals regarding Gaza since the early 2000s. It’s the most horrific war, but it’s not the first war between Hamas and Israel, between Gaza and Israel.
Larry Bernstein:
What did you think of Sharon’s decision to pursue a disengagement plan in 2005?
Robert Malley:
Prime Minister Sharon is no dove. He was a hard liner. But he felt two things. One, Israel needed to take the initiative because it was being pressured by many parties to do something, to take a political step because most people in the international community were saying you could end the war, but without some step to start ending the occupation, this is simply going to recur. And he also felt, and this is a longstanding Israeli perspective, that Gaza was a burden.
Gaza is an extraordinarily dense population, and it’s very hard to govern. It’s where a lot of the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians have taken root. Withdrawing from Gaza was a way to change the equation. A number of his advisors said at the time, to put the whole Israeli/Palestinian peace process in hibernation, don’t bother us now about ending the occupation in the West Bank or about reaching a deal with the Palestinians. Now it’s up to the Palestinians to show that they’re able to govern Gaza peacefully, which of course ended up in a series of wars.
It had one big merit. It changed the landscape between Palestinians and Israelis in the most dramatic way since the Oslo agreement in 1993. It wasn’t the end of the occupation of Gaza, because Israel controlled all exits, all entrances. Under international law, Gaza was still considered occupied. But in terms of a change in the topography between Israelis and Palestinians, it was a major step. Gaza was described by some as an open-air prison before October 7th. That was a major mistake because when you put pressure on Hamas and deprive it of funds, the pressure cooker leads to an explosion.
Hamas as an organization that controlled and governed Gaza, could find ways to circumvent the blockade. They got what they needed, but the population of Gaza didn’t. It created frustration, anger, and violence. If there’s a lesson to learn from this, it is keeping Gaza under an economic siege, under a blockade, depriving it of goods, preventing people from coming in and coming out, that is the recipe for explosion.
Larry Bernstein:
I just did a podcast with Yaakov Katz who wrote a new book entitled While Israel Slept, and what he highlights in that book is after the Sharon’s disengagement with Gaza, there was some assumptions about Hamas’s ability to re-arm and be a dangerous counterpart. And the Israelis allowed a major armament and the potential for 10/7 that they were blinded by. In your book, you mentioned that it was a very poorly thought through Israeli defense for this eventuality, but I think it has influenced the Israeli public’s willingness to fully disengage with Gaza after seeing the tunnels and the risk of an invasion. How do you think about future disengagement after 10/7 and how the Israelis will think about that problem?
Robert Malley:
It’s very hard to imagine Israel disengaging fully from Gaza, even though it’s supposedly part of the plan. The keys will remain in Israeli hands. They will decide when, where, and if they will withdraw. And they will always keep in mind what happened on October 7th, whether the Israeli government is led by Netanyahu or somebody more centrist.
Will Israel ever trust a third party to do the job that it feels it alone can do? Will Hamas truly disarm? Those are all the question marks that remain, but that’s why this is a plan full of pitfalls. My focus is on the immediate and some reprieve to the butchered people of Gaza.
Larry Bernstein:
Sticking with the Israeli public and Israeli politics. The Israeli left, which had been most in favor of various two state solutions. Ironically, it was the left who lived in the kibbutzim on the Gaza border that were killed. How do you think that will influence the peaceniks within Israel and has that wing of the political spectrum changed?
Robert Malley:
What you call the peaceniks have been in dramatic decline for some time. This notion of a two-state solution, which is pushed insistently by outsiders, and often for good faith reasons, found decreasing resonance in society. Israelis were not mobilized for the sake of a two-state solution.
Larry Bernstein:
Your book’s key point is to forget the two-state solution.
Robert Malley:
I don’t have an ethical objection to the two-state solution. If somebody could show me a way to get to two-state solution tomorrow, sign me up, I would take it in a heartbeat. After decades of failing to achieve it, and leading to the outcome that we’ve just experienced since October 7th, the onus is on people who still believe in a two state solution to say, here’s how we’re going to do it.
We mean the two-state solution as it’s been conventionally defined since Oslo, which is the hard partition between two states.
You draw on the map, Israelis on one side, Palestinians on the other side. We divide Jerusalem. There are other forms of statehood which envisage more porous forms of sovereignty where it’s not as hard a division. One of the points we make in the book, which people must grapple with, Israelis have built a wall to separate from the West Bank, they built a fence to separate from Gaza. We’ve had violence in both scenarios. The Palestinian citizens of Israel have unequal status. So, is it always the case that separation leads to peace and mixing up leads to war? No, we must question that premise.
My last comment on this is you need to find an answer to the 700,000 Jewish settlers who live in the West Bank and Jerusalem. You spoke about the withdrawal of Gaza, which was only a few thousand settlers, and that was traumatic. So can you address their presence beyond Israel and the border of the 1967 in a way that is acceptable to Palestinians? And by the same token, what do you do about the millions of Palestinian refugees who still yearn to come back to their land? So is there a way to reconcile the demands of both sides? Reconcile their deep yearnings, which the two state solution, the rigid vision of a two-state solution doesn’t do. It doesn’t address the yearning of the settlers and other Israelis for all Eretz Israel, all the land between the river and the sea. And by the same token, it doesn’t address the yearning of the Palestinians who want to undo the catastrophe of 1948, and who want some degree of rights of the refugees to be respected.
There are alternatives. The most likely alternative is the status quo. But there are alternatives that are more promising that we don’t offer as blueprints because we don’t have it, but that we think it’s the duty and the obligation of the Israeli Palestinians and others to avoid the quick fixes that haven’t fixed anything. And to think more, in a harder, more creative way, different outcomes that could be more promising for both people.
Larry Bernstein:
What I found most provocative about the book was this idea that neither Israel nor the Palestinians want a two-state solution. It’s only the diplomats in Washington and Europe that want this result. And that if you’re trying to solve a problem and you keep pushing something that isn’t wanted by the participants, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
Robert Malley:
You go back to the genesis of the idea, it’s not a Zionist idea and it’s not a Palestinian idea. The Palestinian national movement is born of refugees; it’s born in the fight for 1948. They weren’t fighting for the borders of 1967, since they were fighting between 1948 and 1967 when both the West Bank and Gaza were in Jordanian and Egyptian hands respectively. And the Zionist movement at its core was not clamoring for partition. It was clamoring for what they consider to be their ancestral homeland.
That idea of a two-state solution comes from the Brits, it comes from outsiders, it comes from the UN partition plan. It was tried by Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. It was tried again slightly under President Trump’s first term.
And in each case, it broke down and yielded tears and violence. If it failed under the far more auspicious circumstances, when the number of settlers were a fraction of what they are today, when the level of anger and animosity was not as intense as it is today.
After October 7th, you have no Palestine leadership at all. How can you convince me that under these conditions you could get an outcome that you couldn’t get when the conditions were much riper? That’s a challenge that we would put to those who with very good intentions keep pushing for the same outcome.
Larry Bernstein:
You mentioned 1948 as a starting point. I’d like to go to 1947 with India as a metaphor. India separated and the Muslims went to Pakistan and Bangladesh. We see separation in lots of places. We see it in Turkey versus Greece and in the early 1920s. How should we think about the pros and cons of separation as a method of state building and living arrangements?
Robert Malley:
I always hesitate when I’m asked about historical comparisons. I don’t claim to be an expert on Pakistan on any of the many cases. As you say sometimes the outcome of outright ethnic cleansing or population displacement has led to separation. There’s some Israelis to this day who say, we should displace the Palestinians out of Gaza, maybe out of the West Bank and let them live in one of the many Arab states that are neighbors of Israel. So that idea still exists. If Israel and Palestinians are going to go through what India and Pakistan went through to get separation,
God forbid, right?
Larry Bernstein:
The substantial loss of life,
Robert Malley:
So I don’t know what to take from history. And I certainly am not in favor of forcible displacement of any population, whether it’s the Jews or the Palestinians and Arabs.
I was in the negotiations in 2000 at Camp David with Clinton, Arafat and Barak. We came up with a plan. It failed pathetically. The problem was we Americans didn’t take the issues seriously enough. We thought we could just say, we’ll give you 95% of the land, we’ll give you the rest. We’ll draw a line in Jerusalem. We’ll have military posts here; we’ll say that the refugees have a right of return. We don’t really mean it because they could only return to the State of Palestine, not to their homes in Israel. And that was playing with the issues as if they were gadgets that we could distribute here and there. These are historical issues that mattered deeply to both sides. And they were not about to trade them away in a game-like manner.
One of the Palestinians called the series of negotiations bullshit.
Larry Bernstein:
The word bullshit has significance. Harry Frankfurt, the philosopher at Princeton, wrote a book called On Bullshit. And in the book, he defines three terms: truth, falsehood, and bullshit. Truth is the truth. Falsehood is someone who cares deeply about the truth but doesn’t want to tell the truth. And that makes it a falsehood.
Bullshit is different. It is not true, but it’s articulated by someone that doesn’t care about the truth. It’s just bullshit. In that reference you’re saying when the diplomats in the West talk about a two state solution, they are engaging in bullshit in that Frankfurt sense. They don’t believe what they’re saying, but they don’t care. They don’t care about the truth.
Robert Malley:
Larry, that’s wonderful. I wish I’d spoken to you before we wrote that chapter because it captures exactly the point that we’re trying to make. I’m going to read that book.
Larry Bernstein:
It’s very short, excellent book.
Robert Malley:
Great title. This is a recurring conversation that Hussein, my co-author, he used to badger me because I’ve worked in three administrations: Obama, Clinton, Biden, and he would tell me, “I don’t get it. You guys keep saying things that you know are not true, and you must know that others know are not true and you don’t seem to care.” He said, “you make a religion out of these pronouncements that usually are happy talk. We’re going to get a two-state solution. We’re working tirelessly for a cease fire. Normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia is around the corner. Whatever this pronouncement may be.”
I was writing talking points for President Clinton or President Obama. How could you write this stuff? What goes through the mind of somebody who could write something with that demonstrably false characteristic to it? I think that indifference to the falsehood also the indifference to whether others will believe what you’re saying or not. And so, whether the Palestinian who used the word bullshit meant it in such a sophisticated way, I don’t know. But you have put your finger on exactly what has pervaded the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
It’s even when the United States says that it’s pushing for human rights and democracy in the Middle East which transparently is untrue, and I know it’s untrue, but they keep saying it even though they know it’s untrue. We can think about so many other instances in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere where the bullshit paradigm predominates.
Larry Bernstein:
Let’s go in depth to why the Palestinians oppose a two-state solution.
Robert Malley:
There were times when they would’ve been, okay, this is better than nothing, better than what we have now. You don’t see Palestinians demonstrating on the street, killing or dying in the name of the two-state solution. And why is that? Let’s not forget how the Palestinian movement was born. It’s not born in 1967. It’s not born with a claim for Palestine state. Statehood is not what they want. They want liberation. They want Jews to leave. They don’t want Israel.
They want the return of all the refugees. But statehood only happens much later. Arfat, when he was the historic leader of the Palestinian national movement in the late 1980s, he manages to sell what to most Palestinian ears would’ve been the absolute surrender to accept the state in the borders of 67 was viewed as outright treason because it meant giving up Jerusalem, it meant giving up 78% of the land, because Gaza and the West Bank only encompasses about 22%. It also meant giving up the rights of the refugees. The Palestinians fought between 1948 and 1967 in vain for cause that they were prepared to give up. So, their actions were stupid.
They were not fighting for Palestine in the borders of 67. That’s not the genesis, the heart, the origins of the Palestinian national struggle. One of the reasons why the two-state solution failed is that it was not the answer to the problems that the parties defined.
Larry Bernstein:
Away from Israel-Palestine, there are other battles over land, and I’ll use an example. Alsace and Lorraine between France and Germany has been a constant struggle over the centuries. In 1870, Germany took it back, and then in 1918, French will take it back. In 1870, there were population exchanges. But today that is no longer a hot spot.
How do you think about land and people as being so intertwined that these matters can’t be resolved? We are 111 years since the beginning of World War I, where Palestine 1948, 77 years ago. How does time come into play?
Robert Malley:
It’s not that Israelis and Palestinians are destined to hate each other, to fight each other, to kill each other. I don’t believe that. History is long and as I say, people are more creative. Now, memory is long too, Jews didn’t forget the land of Israel 2000 years.
I don’t think the Palestinians are going to forget their land after a century. So, I don’t know that time is going to erase the attachment to land.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to reference again the podcast I had with Yaakov Katz. I asked him about peaceful coexistence. The Israeli government in the last few years prior to October 7th, had been allowing workers from Gaza into Israel, and that the Israeli intelligence in their evaluation of the failures of 10/7 became aware that Hamas knew a tremendous amount of information about the kibbutzim. They knew their names, how many children, they had the name of their pets, and that it had been obvious that workers from Gaza had given information to Hamas.
There is a commonly held belief in Israel and that there is no desire to rebuild a worker program with Gaza in the post 10/7 environment. What does peaceful coexistence mean?
Robert Malley:
They were not living in peaceful coexistence, Gaza felt they were under siege, that they were not allowed to live normally. Israel was still the predominant supreme power, certainly in the West Bank, but also in Gaza. It was an extraordinary abnormal situation even before October 7th.
From an Israeli perspective, they say we agreed in Oslo to turn over territory to the Palestinians. Not only did they not disarm, we were subject of terrorist attacks.
Prime Minister Barak makes unprecedented concessions at Camp David, and we are rewarded with the Second Intifada with pizzerias and buses blown up through suicide bombs. We withdraw from South Lebanon. Hezbollah rewards us with rockets and missiles. We withdrew from Gaza; we’re rewarded with rockets. And then October 7th, why the hell would we do it again? Every time we make a concession, every time we make a step, international community tells us it’s not enough.
They ask for more. And then when we are the victims of the bombs, they say the answer to that is more concessions. So, I got that. Israelis wouldn’t trust the Palestinians with the sling. They’re not going to give them a state.
We must take all that into account, but then what is the next step and the step after that? What could peaceful coexistence between the two sides look like? And we spoke about the trauma of the Israeli side, and I get it.
What are the Palestinians? How are they going to trust the Israelis after what they’ve lived through, one of the most brutal wars with civilian casualties which is abominable. So right now, we’re living in a world where neither side shares anything in common, not an interpretation of the past, not an assessment of the present, and certainly not a sense of where to go in the future.
Larry Bernstein:
In one of my previous podcasts, John Bolton said that when the Americans beat the Japanese and the Germans, they demilitarized, deradicalized, and joined the West and adopted our values. And he said, there is a chance that the Palestinians having lost could demilitarize, deradicalize and join in peaceful coexistence?
Robert Malley:
Part of the problem is if we view it through one prism, Israel was attacked. Israel deserves to see the Palestinians deradicalized, reformed, prove themselves worthy human beings. But put yourself in Palestinian shoes. They’re fighting an occupation; they are fighting colonialism.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast on a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about as it relates to ending the war in Gaza?
Robert Malley:
We are now at a stage where there’s a fair chance that the war is ending, detainees on both sides are released and that Gazans are going to resume a normal life. It’s going to be a nightmare, but it’s going to be a nightmare that’s better than the hell that they’ve been living through.
The Palestinians are going to have to come to terms with the fact that they do not have a national leadership. Israel, for all its enormous military prowess, which is unrivaled in its history, is more isolated, more ostracized than ever before. On the American side, my current profession is I teach university students. Their introduction to America’s role in the world will have been through America’s role in Gaza. And for a lot of them, this has been a moment of moral reckoning.
This generation will be in positions of power will have a different perspective on the U.S. role in the region.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Rob for joining us.
If you missed the last podcast, the topic was Israel’s 10/7 Failure. Our speaker was Yaakov Katz who is the former editor in chief for the Jerusalem Post and the author of the new book entitled While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East. We heard how the Israelis screwed up, and what Hamas was thinking making that surprise attack.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Israel’s 10/7 Failure, here.
