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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Secretary of State Marco Rubio is heading to Israel today, following on the heels of Vice President JD Vance’s visit. Vance was in Israel to discuss the future of Gaza and implementing the next steps of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire.
During Vance’s visit, Israel’s Knesset advanced legislation to annex the occupied West Bank. Earlier today, Vance said he was, quote, “personally insulted” by the annexation vote.
VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: It was a very stupid political stunt, and I personally take some insult to it. The West Bank is not going to be annexed by Israel. The policy of the Trump administration is that the West Bank will not be annexed by Israel. That will continue to be our policy. And if people want to take symbolic votes, they can do that, but we certainly weren’t happy about it.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Robert Malley, former U.S. senior Middle East official under Presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden, co-author of the new book, Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine. He wrote the book with Hussein Agha, who has been a negotiator on behalf of the Palestinians. Robert Malley is a lecturer at Yale University, the former president of the International Crisis Group.
Thanks so much for being with us. Can you start off by just assessing where this ceasefire is now? What is the first stage? We just are seeing a parade of U.S. officials. Vance was there, following up on Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. And now you have, of course, Rubio arriving in Israel.
ROBERT MALLEY: Yeah, I think some in the Israeli press are calling this “Bibi-sitting.”
So, listen, there’s parts of this plan that are, you know, terrible. And I could spend hours trying to eviscerate the plan in terms of its sort of neocolonial aspects of deciding everything for Palestinians, without Palestinians having a voice, and allowing Israel to remain in Gaza and to decide when and how it will withdraw. So, again, there’s so much to be said against it.
That said, so far, it appears to have ended the slaughter, much of the slaughter, most of the slaughter, and allowed, as we just heard, some humanitarian assistance to come in, and the hostages and Palestinian captives were released. So, that’s something that President Trump’s predecessor had not been able to achieve.
The next phase is, you know, we’ll see. There’s many reasons to be skeptical, to be pessimistic. The plan is vague, ambiguous. Again, it gives a lot of the keys to Israel to decide what and if it will do anything. But one step at a time. I think it’s at least good to see that the guns have fallen mostly quiet for now.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, the U.S. officials who’ve been there this week, and Rubio en route now, are ostensibly there to discuss the implementation of the second phase of Trump’s 20-point ceasefire plan. So, if you could talk about, so, prospects for the second phase, which include establishing a transitional government in Gaza, deploying an international stabilization force, the disarmament of Hamas and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza? There have been no dates set yet for any of this, but now these discussions will be underway. Is that correct?
ROBERT MALLEY: I mean, that’s the American plan. And again, it seemed to — that’s what they want to do. They want to — and they seem — you know, the Trump administration seems to be extremely focused. We mentioned how many of the senior officials are there.
But each of these phases that you mentioned are full of obstacles. I mean, is Hamas really going to disarm? Why would they disarm, when, obviously, they still face — they believe they face security threats, and they also want to continue to be the de facto authority in Gaza? Is Israel really going to withdraw? Are they going to be prepared to have an international stabilization force? Neither side really wants that. Hamas doesn’t want to have a force that is going to be there maybe to disarm it. Israel doesn’t particularly like having a third party that’s going to be interposed between it and the Palestinians, because it wants to be free to do whatever it wants in Gaza.
So, I think we’re going to see obstacle after obstacle. It doesn’t sound like they have a concrete plan and know how to implement it. But again, I would take it one step at a time. And if all that is achieved is the end to the worst of the bloodshed, I’d give credit to the Trump administration to have done that. The rest of the plan is not just vague and ambiguous. There’s a lot not to like about it.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the battle over the corpses. Israel has just returned dozens of corpses of Palestinian prisoners — the Gaza Health Ministry says there are signs of them being tortured and mutilated — and then Hamas handing over corpses of Israeli hostages. They’re saying they need the kind of equipment —
ROBERT MALLEY: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: — that they can’t get right now to get the rest. And, of course, they don’t have the DNA testing equipment.
ROBERT MALLEY: Yeah, and, of course, I’m not there. I don’t know. Even U.S. officials seem to have said, “Yes, we have to understand this is going to take time.” I mean, look at the pictures from Gaza. It is — it’s almost unwatchable, unthinkable, unspeakable. So, to think that they — you know, they know exactly where everyone is? But again, I just don’t know. U.S. officials seem to say that Hamas, so far, has not violated the deal. So, you know, if the Trump administration says that, I think that tells you something.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, if we could just go back to what you mentioned earlier, first of all, the U.S. officials who are there now negotiating the second phase, as you’ve mentioned, what the Trump administration did, which no previous administration did, is speak directly to Hamas. So, do you know if American officials who are there now — are they just speaking to Israel, or are they also planning to negotiate directly with Hamas again?
ROBERT MALLEY: I mean, they won’t, not on this trip, because they’re not — they won’t meet them in Israel, and they’re not going to go to Gaza. I think the question is whether — you know, when they’re in Turkey or in Qatar, will they meet with Hamas again? I suspect there are still contacts ongoing, texts or whatever, however they communicate.
And again, this is one of the taboos. I could spend hours denouncing what President Trump does here and abroad, but the fact that he broke, shattered this taboo — which is a taboo that never made any sense. How do you negotiate between two belligerents if you’re going to keep one belligerent at arm’s length and say we’re never going to talk to them? So, that’s good, and I think it helped put — bring Hamas over the finish line on this deal. So, again, something to — something to applaud, perhaps.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And the international stabilization force, I mean, as you mentioned, it’s opposed both, effectively, by Israel and by Hamas. If you could talk about what the international stabilization force — who will make up this force, and nationalities from everywhere or only Muslim countries?
AMY GOODMAN: And Vance just said today that there would not be any U.S. soldiers there.
ROBERT MALLEY: There will be no American — so, I think one of the big disputes is whether Turkey would be part of it. I don’t think — I think you may have, must have heard it is something that some Americans have thought of. Netanyahu is very clear, not an idea he likes. Who knows? I mean, and I think part of the question will be: Under what conditions are they prepared to go? Would Arab or Muslim or any troops be prepared to be there, if Israel is continuing to shoot on Gazans it suspects of being members or, you know, officials of Hamas?
So, there’s going to be a lot of back-and-forth over who’s going to be in this force and what its mandate is going to be and what it does if it sees something that either Israelis or Palestinians are doing that it doesn’t like. Is it really going to be prepared to try to forcibly disarm Hamas? Again, these are huge questions that it’s going to take time to resolve.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the lack of Palestinian participation in these negotiations?
ROBERT MALLEY: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: And what they mean when they say Palestinian technocrats will run the administration?
ROBERT MALLEY: I mean, it’s not just that. But if you look at what’s happening in Gaza, this has been an Israeli — the title of our book is Tomorrow Is Yesterday, because so much of what we’re seeing today we’ve seen in the past: trying to fragment and morsel, you know, territory in the West Bank and now Gaza; parts of Gaza occupied by Israel, parts not; trying maybe to establish in the parts that are occupied by Israel different forms of governance. This is really a recipe for greater fragmentation of the Palestinian national movement. And to your point, yes, the Palestinians don’t seem to have had a major, if any, voice in the elaboration of the plan.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, I mean, another point that you make — and this is your book, Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine. You make the argument, against what most have suggested or argued, that neither the October 7th Hamas attack nor Israel’s response are, as you say, neither, quote, “new, anomalous, or aberrant.” Explain why you think that’s the case.
ROBERT MALLEY: And this is partly why we wrote the book, is that after October 7th and after the slaughter that Israel has been conducting, people were saying it’s just a matter of getting rid of Netanyahu and his right wing, you know, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, it’s a matter of disarming Hamas and bringing — reforming the Palestinian Authority, as if Netanyahu and Hamas came from another planet and that it had nothing to do with the conflict and nothing to do with their respective societies.
You know, the October 7th, people may not like hearing it, but it was applauded and welcomed by large swaths of Palestinian society, because they felt, finally — and this is something they’d been trying to do in decades past: take Israeli captives as a way of getting Palestinian detainees out, try to “invade,” quote, unquote, Israeli territory as retribution for Israeli occupation and dispossession of Palestinian land, trying to make Israelis fear as much as they have feared. So, you didn’t hear denunciations of October 7th by Palestinians across the board after the attack.
The Israeli response, which an increasing number of experts have called a genocide, did you see large groups of Israelis denouncing it? No, it was also not Bibi’s war; it was Israel’s war.
So, the point of the book is to say, if, after decades of peacemaking, so-called, by the U.S., this is where we are, where both societies are prepared to identify with some of the worst expressions of violence and anger and hostility towards the other, something went terribly wrong. And we try to tell the story of what that is.
AMY GOODMAN: You weren’t there. You were no longer working for Biden October 7th.
ROBERT MALLEY: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: But the rage that many feel that this could have happened two years ago, this ceasefire.
ROBERT MALLEY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And if you can talk about what Biden did then? Many feel that Trump wouldn’t be in power, if he had done something two years ago, Biden, not to mention the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Palestinians who have died.
ROBERT MALLEY: Yes, I mean, I focus on the latter. I don’t know about the political equation. I think the latter, being sort of morally complicit, more than morally complicit in what happened, I think that’s a stain that is going to be very hard for the Biden administration to every erase.
The explanation, I think it’s partly — you know, partly the president himself and his whole history, his emotional makeup, his political makeup, his very strong empathy, which he never hides, with Israel and the Jewish people, and lack of a similar empathy, which his own vice president has now said, towards the Palestinians. I think there were other reasons, sort of the habits of American foreign policy. You side with Israel, and it’s sort of for strategic, historical, emotional and political reasons.
As you say, the politics may be changing, and I suspect the Biden administration was too slow in realizing — very slow — perhaps they didn’t even realize it until even at the end — that the usual political equation, which is you always gain by siding with Israel, and you always lose by criticizing Israel, that had begun to shift. I think they were late in coming to that realization. And yes, it is something that — it’s a very sad fact that President Trump could get the ceasefire that President Biden was unable to do.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, I mean, if you could explain? Because, of course, it’s not just the Biden administration, as you said. It was kind of a — there was continuity, bipartisan continuity, for decades, and this was the logic, that you have to side with Israel. And you worked, of course, with three successive Democratic administrations: Clinton, Obama and Biden. You yourself have said that under all three administrations, Israeli settler expansion in the West Bank accelerated, even as the U.S. was talking about moving toward a two-state solution. So, you were on the inside. If you could explain: What were the conversations that justified what is so plainly paradoxical?
ROBERT MALLEY: Very hard question to answer. I mean, again, part of it is just I think there’s a sort of a political DNA and the habits of what some have called the blob, to sort of replicate over and over again the same — the same policy.
I think, on a question like the settlements, which is really an interesting one, it’s almost the same contradiction of saying, “We are working endlessly for ceasefire, but we’re going to continue to give the weapons that are ensuring that the fire won’t cease,” saying, “Well, we want a two-state solution. We want a Palestinian contiguous, viable state,” and yet saying nothing when settlements expand, or not doing anything to stop it, turning a blind eye. There, the argument that I would hear and that was said publicly is, “Yeah, the settlements are not — they’re an obstacle to peace. They’re inconsistent with peace. But once we reach a peace settlement, they’ll all go away. Or the ones that are going to be annexed by Israel will be annexed by Israel. The ones that are going to be part of a Palestinian state will be part of a Palestinian state. So why pick a fight with Israel over something that will be overcome by a peace deal?”
So, in the name of — this is why we say that the peace process and the search for a two-state solution became a gimmick. In the name of this pursuit, the U.S. allowed all kinds of things that were inconsistent with the end goal. And, of course, when it came to the Palestinians, if they did anything that was, quote-unquote, “unilateral” or inconsistent with a goal — going to the U.N., promoting boycotts, civil disobedience, whatever — the U.S. was quick to say, “Oh no, that, you can’t do, and we’ll sanction you if you do it, because that’s inconsistent with the pursuit — the peace process.”
So, really a double standard, which, as we say in the book, if Israel’s — if October 7th was a microcosm in heightened, intensified form of the Palestinian feelings, and if Israel’s response was a microcosm in heightened ways of Israeli feelings, what happened after October 7th was a microcosm in an exacerbated way of American policy of turning a blind eye to one, to the actions of one, and denouncing the actions of the other.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, let’s go to one of the major questions about, and a very urgent question about, the rebuilding of Gaza. Who will be responsible? You’ve said that the rate that rebuilding has occurred after other wars in the past, it would take up to the 22nd century for Gaza to be rebuilt.
ROBERT MALLEY: Listen, I mean, when you just look at the — not just Israel/Palestine, but in general, wherever there are pledges to rebuild, how much of that money comes up? I just heard Steve Witkoff say he thought raising the money is going to be the easiest part. That’s a scary statement, because raising the money is going to be a very difficult part. Who’s going to want to rebuild? How many times do you have to rebuild Gaza, and then Israel destroys it again? So, you know, I think we have to be very, very skeptical about how quickly it’s going to be rebuilt, under what conditions. If the condition is that there’s no Hamas presence, who’s going to be the judge of that? You know, what we have — what I’ve written elsewhere with —
AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t Kushner just say that reconstructive aid would only go to areas controlled —
ROBERT MALLEY: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: —by the Israeli military?
ROBERT MALLEY: And it’s the point that I was making earlier, which is another divide — divide Palestinians. I mean, this is a — the Palestinian people are now divided. Within Gaza, it’s fragmented — Gaza and in the West Bank. Within Gaza, it’s fragmented. The division with East Jerusalem, the division with the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the division with the millions of refugees. How are the Palestinians going to rebuild a movement that could represent the entirety of their people, when they’re being fragmented in this way every day?
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being with us, Robert Malley, co-author with Hussein Agha of the new book, Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine, former U.S. senior Middle East official under Presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden, now a lecturer at Yale University and former president of the International Crisis Group.
Next up, we look at the New York mayoral race, as Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo sparred in the final debate before voting begins on Saturday. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “John Walker’s Blues” by Steve Earle, performing in our Democracy Now! studio.
