October 7 Was “A Reenactment,” Not a Rupture | Robert Malley

[00:00:00] America and much of the West seems to have a really hard time implementing any useful foreign policy in the Middle East. Of course, the war with Iran is the latest example, but the genocide in Gaza is coming up on three years now with no sign of abatement. And we have made no meaningful progress in the peace process between Israel and Palestine for decades now. Why can't we seem to crack this nut? Well, welcome to the At the Water's Edge podcast, where we look for insights beyond the headlines and take a practitioner's view on national security and geopolitics.

[00:00:29] It's the 14th of September, 2026. Let's get started. Today, we're talking to Robert Malley, who led the team who negotiated the original nuclear deal with Iran under the Obama administration and has been involved with the peace process between Israel and Palestine, going all the way back to the Oslo Accords. He's got a book out, Tomorrow is Yesterday, Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel-Palestine. Link to it will be in the show notes. Go check it out. Be sure to like, subscribe, all that good stuff.

[00:00:55] And with that, super excited to get a chance to talk to Rob. Let's get to it. Rob, good morning. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, man? Okay. Thanks for having me. It is an absolute pleasure. You have been involved in stuff involving the Middle East for decades at this point, but for folks who aren't familiar with your work, can you introduce yourself in your own words to the audience? Okay. It depends how much time you have, but I come from a family background that's related to the Middle East

[00:01:23] because my father was an Egyptian Jew, but also, I mean, so he was Jewish, but he was anti-Zionist, and he was Egyptian, and moved to the U.S. and was a very active journalist for Arab causes. Arab causes, North African causes, Palestinian causes. But I put that as background, not because my views necessarily line up with his, but that's the milieu in which I grew up, both in the U.S. and in France.

[00:01:52] I joined the Clinton administration and worked on a number of issues, but then focused very much on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By dint of circumstance, I joined the administration just at the time when the peace process was in full bloom, or appeared to be in full bloom. A year after I joined the Middle East team, the Camp David summit between then PLO, Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat, and the then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, took place,

[00:02:21] which was one of the last serious attempts to reach a two-state solution. There have been others, but that was the only time that you had a concentrated summit with American President Clinton, Yasser Arafat, and Hudbarak, sort of an enclosed space for two weeks trying to resolve and failing to resolve the conflict. I then spent a lot of time at a non-profit conflict resolution organization called the International Crisis Group,

[00:02:46] focused on trying to find ways of mitigating, resolving, or preventing deadly conflict. And I created and led the Middle East program, heavy emphasis on Israel-Palestine, but also on other issues. Joined the Obama administration, and then my focus was really on Iran and on the negotiation and conclusion of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal that was achieved in 2015, and then President Trump tore up in 2018,

[00:03:13] and we're still living with the consequences of that decision. And then finally, I rejoined the International Crisis Group, and then I went back, I went to the Biden administration as a special envoy for Iran, where we tried to revive the nuclear deal, and for a host of reasons, we may or may not get into failed, and I left the administration under somewhat odd circumstances in April 2023.

[00:03:43] So it was not there at the time of October 7th and everything that ensued. So that's in a nutshell. A couple of fun threads to pull there. You know, at a broad level, because you've spent so much time working with Palestinian organizations and also the Iranian government, there's a lot of misconceptions in American media, American discourse about who these actors are and how they think and operate.

[00:04:10] A lot of times they're portrayed as, you know, irrational terrorist organizations or religious zealots. What's your sense of what people misunderstand the most about either the Palestinians when we're negotiating with them or the Iranians when we're negotiating with them? Do they fit the caricature? I mean, it's a very broad question, because obviously there's so many different kinds of Palestinians, as there may be different kinds of Iranians. So I'm not sure I'm going to answer the question fully. And I also don't know what, you know,

[00:04:40] what misconceptions other people may have. I'll give you my principle in life, which is a principle I apply to negotiations, to my work as an analyst, to my job in government is without endorsing, justifying, necessarily embracing the views of any other party. I try to put myself in their shoes and try to figure out how they're going to react to certain circumstances, given their experience, worldview, background, whatever it may be. And that's true of the Palestinians. It's true of the Iranians.

[00:05:09] It's true of any other of a number of organizations, entities or governments that I've dealt with, Israelis in particular. So I think if you, that's for me a bedrock principle that, you know, these are not, it doesn't mean that they view the world the way we do, but they're not aliens. They're not from outer space. And you could put, try to understand the way they see the world, understand the world will react to certain things. And I'll just give one example, which I think is very contemporary, which is Iran. I think there's been two caricatures,

[00:05:40] which have been costly of how the Iranian regime acts and things. One is that they're fully irrational. They're zealots who have no, you know, who don't in any way react in the way that quote unquote, normal Americans or Westerners would react. And they're, as I say, just zealots who have this theological view of the world that is impervious to rational understanding. That's one view. The other caricature is that all they,

[00:06:08] all you need to do is to pressure them. And if you don't pressure them enough to pressure them more, to strangle them economically, and they ultimately will be prepared to give in, even on their most fundamental conceptions. Ironically with president Trump, both caricatures are coexisting at the same time. They are both depicted as irrational zealots who are impervious to reason. And as a kind of people who, if you just strangle them a little bit more or going to rationally understand that a

[00:06:36] better alternative to sticking to their convictions is to capitulate and to surrender. Both can't be true at the same time. And I would argue that neither one is accurate and that we should avoid these extreme depictions. I'm not claiming again, that the Iranian leadership is like the U S government, although there are some ways in which nowadays they resemble them, each other more than they have in the past. But, but, but I am saying that if you get put yourself in their shoes, if you try to put yourself in their shoes,

[00:07:05] you could understand without endorsing accepting or justifying the way they act. And right now, the notion, which is you can't do a deal with them, or you could do a deal with them in which they're going to surrender what they hold most critical, most dear. If you just pressure them more, I asked my American colleagues, I say, put yourself in their position. Would we be prepared to surrender because we were asphyxiated, economically surrender again, as,

[00:07:35] as you know, people as a leadership in the case of Iran, as the leadership, would they be prepared to surrender what they believe is critical for their survival as a leadership for the sake of avoiding more pressure, more military strikes or more economic, um, uh, uh, sanctions. And the answer is no, which is why we are on the mess we're in today. I think that you could see the same thing on the Palestinian side. There's often been this notion of either they are, and when he's talking about, we could talk about Hamas,

[00:08:02] but so I don't know which Palestinians we want to talk about that. Either they are so militant, irrational, that the only language they will understand is, you know, the language of force, destruction, and, uh, and, and, and death, or that, you know what? Palestinians may say that they care about their national cause. They may say that they believe in self-determination, but ultimately if you put enough pressure on them and you offer material, material compensation,

[00:08:32] that they'll agree to give up on their political demands. And again, both, you see both of those sometimes coexisting nowadays. Uh, but notably this notion that, you know, the Palestinians, what they just want is a normal life and they're going to be prepared to give up on their aspiration for state or their aspiration for self-determination or their aspiration for, uh, justice for the refugees. If you just give them, you make them suffer enough on the one hand and offer them the prospect of a slightly materially, uh,

[00:09:01] more comfortable life. And I think we've bumped our heads. We, the Americans, but others as well, but it's really, it's bumped their head, their heads, our heads against the wall, always assuming that the Palestinians will react that way when their reactions reflect a history, a history of, um, of beliefs about their national cause, the beliefs about dignity, the, about justice, which my colleague, Hussein, again, I just wrote about in a book, um, that we might get to called, uh, tomorrow's yesterday, life,

[00:09:30] death and the pursuit of peace in Israel, Palestine, in which we try to understand both the Israelis and Palestine position and understand why all the efforts to try to reach a resolution have been based on misconceptions of what their fight, their aspirations, their fears were about. Yeah, I definitely want to get to the book and now's as good as time as anything. So you have this critique that you and your colleague put out of the supposed peace process that America and other states have been pursuing with the Palestinians. Um, for a lot of folks,

[00:09:57] they woke up on October 7th and saw a horrendous attack and then Israel doing a tremendous counterattack, which has turned into a genocide and their living memory is just that. Um, but what, what is going on with the peace process supposedly? let me just, you know, pick up on where, what you were saying. And, and it's a logic sent away. He was saying, I chose to, to write the book, you know, after October 7th and after, um, Israel's, uh, response, you've heard sort of two things. One,

[00:10:28] this was a Hamas Islamist, uh, messianic attack, uh, that is a product of an Islamist way of looking at the world and looking at Israel and looking at their theological concept. And that Yachiyah Sinwar, the head of Hamas now killed, now dead, uh, was a, uh, sort of a zealous messianical, um, character. And the other side is the response by Israel, which, as you said, a number of organizations have now, uh, characterized as, as a genocide,

[00:10:58] that it was a byproduct of prime minister Netanyahu and his small coterie of right-wing, uh, zealots as well, which is, whether it's, uh, Ben Gavir or Smoltrich, two of two members of this coalition, right-wing members of this coalition. Um, and both views miss the whole history of the conflict. I mean, what happened on October 7th in terms of its magnitude, in terms of the destruction it caused is unique in the annals of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But in terms of what the Palestinians were trying to do,

[00:11:27] which is, you know, inflict on Israelis what they believe had been inflected on them, terror, death, destruction, territorial, uh, invasion, um, holding of prisoners, call them prisoners, hostages, whatnot. But from a Palestinian perspective, that's everything that they've lived since 1948 or before, which is the land was taken. They've been terrorized. They've been dispossessed. And you have tens of thousands of Palestinians, uh, in, uh, in over time in, in,

[00:11:57] in Israeli jails, often without any legal, legal process. And so this was from a Palestinian tradition, going back to the 1950s, 60s, 70s, you see a whole series of attempts, not by Islamists. The Islamists were latecomers to this, to this particular practice, but by non-Islamist organizations, secular, whatever you want to call them, who have tried over time to take over Israeli land, schools, buses, take prisoners, take hostages in order to,

[00:12:27] again, inflict on Israelis what they felt had been inflicted on them, and use the hostages as a means of getting their, what they consider Palestinian hostages out of prison. So there's nothing new. October 7th was not Islamist. It was Palestinian through and through, which is why so many Palestinians, after it occurred, welcomed it very, you know, some quietly, some publicly, but you heard very few dissenting voices initially among Palestinians saying, this is morally wrong. This is not the right thing to do,

[00:12:55] because it was in line with a long tradition of how Palestinians felt they needed to respond to Israel. On the Israeli side, likewise, the response by Netanyahu, Ben Gavir, Smotrich, this was not sort of a response that came from outer space by some fringe of the right wing. This was a very consensual position, so much so that many members of the opposition, if anything, fought to the government for not going far and hard enough. Why didn't they attack Lebanon right away? Why do they, you know,

[00:13:24] they were, sort of the notion was, no pity, any Palestinians in Gaza are all guilty. And this came from, quote unquote, centrists, as well as from the right. And it also, it is part and parcel of a long tradition of how Israeli Zionists have dealt with Palestinians. Just as I said, Palestinians have dealt with Israelis. It's a long history, the 40s, 50s, 60s, of massacres, of destructions of villages, of trying to depopulate, displace Palestinians,

[00:13:54] and negate any sign of Palestinian existence on, you know, where they are. So, our view was, what October 7th was, was not an anomaly. It wasn't a rupture from the past. It is a revival, a reemergence, a reenactment of the past. And it's very much not, you can't sort of say it's in contradiction with the peace process. It is very much a byproduct of a peace process that misdiagnosed the problem, and therefore was never able to resolve it,

[00:14:23] and only further exacerbated tension between the two sides. So, that's what led us to want to write this book, which is, let's go back to the fundamentals of this conflict, and understand why Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting, and not sort of pretend that October 7th and what happened thereafter are anomalies. And we now have to go back to where we were before October 7th, because where we were before October 7th is what produced October 7th, and what produced Israel's massacres following that. Yeah,

[00:14:52] there's a brutal irony in the idea that a peace process is ending up in a genocide, or I mean, some people describe it, you know, October 7th didn't trigger an Israel genocide in Gaza, it just accelerated an ongoing genocidal process, I guess, depending on how you want to look at the history. But, you mentioned right there a misdiagnosis in the peace process. What did this peace process misdiagnose about how to resolve this conflict? And this is, I mean, it's a difficult question, but, again, if you take how myself, Hussein,

[00:15:22] others looked at the conflicts from the 1990s onwards, or even earlier, try to resolve it by, through the territorial partition, two ethnic national states, the Jewish state of Israel, Arab state of Palestine, draw a line on the map, most of the West Bank, Gaza would be part of the Palestinian state, the rest would be Israel, and you'd find some technical solution, which would not be a real solution to the question of the refugees, the, you know,

[00:15:49] hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were forced to flee their land in 1948, and now, you know, generations later, are in the millions, and that, you know, the answer to their plight would be to find some, some answer, you know, some technical answer, but nothing that Palestinians would consider to be an acknowledgement of the injustice they suffered, and some form of accountability, and justice for, for the descendants of, of the refugees.

[00:16:20] And so, all these were viewed as technical issues, we'd find, they'd be with something that we'd call a state, although it wouldn't have full sovereignty, we'd find some solution for the refugees, although it wouldn't be justice, and we would split the land, the land, the issues that emerged from 1967, Israel's occupation of the West back in Gaza. I think for, you know, most of the history, over a long time, the history between Israelis and Palestinians, the issue was not the occupation, it was not solely the occupation that began in 1967,

[00:16:50] and for so many on both sides, the conflict started far earlier. It started at a minimum in 1948, with the creation of the State of Israel, the Arab and Palestinian rejection, military response, and then Israel's expulsion of the Palestinians, from, you know, 78% of mandatory Palestine. You know, the, sorry, not, so, so the, the,

[00:17:18] the conflict for so many starts then, some it starts earlier, I mean, you know, many would say it started with Jewish immigration to Palestine, Jews fleeing persecution in Europe, Palestinians feeling that they were being, that the mandatory British power was the one that was deciding who would come and viewed it as a migration invasion. And so, you know, you, you could date the, the conflict in 1967 and say, therefore, what you need to resolve is simply this territorial spat. Or,

[00:17:47] if you understand that this is really a struggle between two national movements whose origins go back decades, and just two, two data points, which I think our listeners will get them to understand the point we're trying to make. Um, the, the struggle between, you know, the Palestinian struggle against Israel didn't start in 1967. As I said earlier, you've had, you know,

[00:18:10] attacks by Palestinians from 1948 to 1967 during a period of time where neither the West Bank nor Gaza were under Israeli control. So if the conflict was only about 1967, how do you explain the years between 1948 and 1967 when Palestinians were fighting and when Arab countries were fighting Israel? Because they felt that the injustice had, was dated 1948. You know, the flip side, if you ask many Israeli Jews,

[00:18:39] what matters more to them? Tel Aviv, you know, most important city perhaps in, in Israel proper, or Hebron, which is in occupied West Bank. Which one has more religious resonance? Which one has more ancestral belonging? They'd say Hebron. Hebron matters more to them. And their fight of the Zionist movement was not simply to have a state over, over part of, of the land of Israel. It was, you know, for many of them, it was to return to what they considered to be their,

[00:19:09] their ancestral homeland. And also, from an Israeli perspective, what they wanted was not just a deal that would divide the territory, but genuine acceptance of their right to live there as a Jewish state. And that is not something that was going to be resolved by simply drawing a line on the map. So, Palestinians' claims for justice and redemption were not going to be resolved by simply saying, okay,

[00:19:34] you could have a pocket of the West Bank and Gaza under a semi-sovereignty and no real rights for the refugees, any more than the Israeli aspirations for return, Israeli aspirations for real recognition, and genuine acceptance were going to be resolved from it either. And so, what we describe in the book is a series of attempts. We could discuss how effective the attempts were, which is, which complicates the equation, but a series of attempts to find solutions. You know, starting Camp David,

[00:20:03] I mentioned in 2000, then you have the efforts by the first, by the second Bush administration to try and negotiation, serious negotiations, it appears, between the Israeli and Palestinian leader at the time. Then you have the efforts by President Obama, and when he, particularly during his second term under Secretary John Kerry, all of those attempts, all focused on, can we define the parameters of a two-state solution of sorts? Each time they seem to get close to the outcome, and then they collapse,

[00:20:32] and they don't succeed. And we, and I, and Hussein spent many of our years trying to figure out why it failed, what could have been different, did you need a different Israeli leadership, a different Palestinian leadership, a different American leadership? What, how could you sort of figure out the pieces of the puzzle? At some point, when it's been three decades, when you've had a whole panoply of American leaders, a whole, you know, you've had different kinds of Palestinian leaders. You've had the more, quote unquote, hardline, and the more, quote unquote, pragmatic.

[00:21:01] You've had different Israeli leaders too, mainly Prime Minister Netanyahu, but you've had others, some who are more identified with the center, and the center left. And yet, regardless of the configuration, regardless of circumstances, regardless of style, each time you ended up with a presentation of a potential deal, which one or both sides rejects. And today, let's be honest, you know, the vast majority of Israelis reject the concept of a Palestinian state. So that whole notion seems to be,

[00:21:32] at least detached from Israeli-Palestine realities. The situation on the ground is far worse today than it was at the time when all these attempts were made and failed. And again, that's why Hussein and I decided to ask the question, beyond the day-to-day tactics and politics of what was wrong, and why, you know, one party or the other, you know, acted in a way that was inimical towards reaching a solution,

[00:22:01] was there something ultimately that was misdiagnosed about the problem, that it's not simply a territorial spat that began in 67, but a much deeper historical, psychological, emotional conflict that's going to have to be dealt with on those terms, if you really want to, quote unquote, resolve the conflict. So there's been this notion that, and again, I was guilty of it as much as anyone, history is an encumbrance. Emotions are an encumbrance. The deep feelings, fears,

[00:22:31] and yearnings of both sides are just going to complicate the process. We need to find a quick, fixed solution, and then maybe later we'll deal with all those issues. But of course, the problem is those issues are the conflict. The conflict is about history. It's deep-seated, and anyone who spends time among Israelis and Palestinians know this. For them, tomorrow is yesterday because history is what matters, and history is what their fight is about, and emotions are what their fight is about,

[00:22:59] and overcoming their fears and satisfying their aspirations is what the conflict is about. So you can't say, we're going to define the conflict the way we want to define it, and then resolve it, and that's going to resolve their conflict. You have to accept the conflict as they define it, as they live it, as they experience it, which makes it harder. And we don't pretend that we have an answer. What we can't claim with some assurance is that every answer that's been given so far has failed, and so to go back to the drawing board and say,

[00:23:28] we're going to try it again, just by tinkering with some of the parameters, that's almost guaranteed to lead to failure one more time. Yeah, I think something that Americans consistently find ourselves trapped in is this idea that we can solve any problem, and we can always out-innovate away from a tight spot. Because our country is so young, because it's been so dynamic, it's been shifting constantly with immigration since it was founded. Our territorial geography has changed a lot.

[00:23:57] And I remember the first time I actually got to go to the Middle East, and I was doing a semester abroad in Turkey, got to backpack through Syria and Egypt and all these cool places, Israel. But you look over there, and you see the citadel in Aleppo, and it's been there for how many hundreds of years at this point? And you start to understand that when an American president has a slip of the tongue and says something like, we're going on a crusade. Well, for us, that's an abstract turn of phrase. It's a rhetorical device. But if you're living in a country where the crusades happened and you still see the castles,

[00:24:26] that history is not gone. It's old, but it's not forgotten. And I've had a hard time... There's something that brings to mind, and if you're jumping to Iran for a second, because I do think, as you say, this goes beyond Israel-Palestine. It is a certain way American... More American than Western, although Western to some degree. I mean, America doesn't have as long a tradition and certainly not as long a tradition in the Middle East. But I came across,

[00:24:54] and this is during the hostage crisis under President Carter between Iran and the US. President Carter was told, well, don't you think that the fact that the US played a role in toppling the democratically elected government of Mossadegh back in 1953, that that still has... That's something that some Iranians still think of, and that's the prism through which they view the United States for the role that it played in that.

[00:25:24] And his answer was, that's ancient history. How long are we going to have to deal with that, basically? Think about how long we have continued to deal with the issue of our hostages in Iran. And to this day, President Trump raises it. Others, not just President Trump, others across the political spectrum say, this is a regime that is defined by sort of the original sin of the hostage taking and the terrorist attacks in Lebanon and elsewhere. So, you know, this is... History matters not just to us. It matters to others. And we do...

[00:25:53] This is not an American trait. I think it's a pretty universal trait to downplay the role of history in others and to respect it in our case. As you say, in the case of Israelis and Palestinians in particular, but the region, that history is so important to their identity and to how they view the world. So, as you say, if we say crusade, we may think as a slip of the tongue, they view it as a reenactment of a past,

[00:26:18] which is not that far away in their experience. And by validating the fact that what we may inadvertently have said was a crusade, but is experienced as a crusade, we just further reignite those historical memories. Why do you think we seem uniquely stuck across parties, across administrations, with the noticeable exception of the Obama administration,

[00:26:49] the JCPOA, as a standout, but pretty consistently through American politics, we are so hung up on Iran being this evil empire state. When you think about the first Trump administration, he comes in and he cuts a deal with the Taliban. We have a former al-Qaeda fighter, president of Syria right now, brings him to the White House. We seem to be very willing to move past prior conflicts in certain instances, but Iran appears to be in a category all its own.

[00:27:19] That's a great question, and there's probably so many layers that I'm going to forget to mention. I mean, as you say, yes, there is a history. The history is with others. This is a direct history. Yes, Taliban and the role they played at least indirectly in 9-11, but there's a direct history with Iran. I mentioned the hostage crisis. There's the attacks against, which are blamed on Iran because of their support for Lebanese militia in Lebanon, which killed hundreds of Americans. The attack in Saudi Arabia

[00:27:49] against Khobar Towers. So there's a long history and, you know, the war in Iraq, where we invaded Iraq, but from, and I've heard this directly from a number of U.S. military officers who say, yes, Iran played a direct role by providing explosive devices to their allies in Iraq, which maimed and killed a large number of Americans. So it's a vivid, it's a very violent, vivid,

[00:28:17] and not that ancient history. And I think, so I think there's part of that. I think there's also the fact that it has been a convenient political, you know, the United States likes to have its preferred enemies, whether it's Saddam Hussein yesterday or Osama bin Laden, and you build them up into perhaps even a greater threat. Well, not perhaps a greater threat than they are. And Iran has always, has been a convenient political

[00:28:48] punching ball in that respect, and partly because of their actions. So there's enough there to say they are dangerous. And then you play it up, and they become, and it becomes sort of a, a very productive political tool to denounce Iran, to say you're going to be tougher on Iran than anyone else. There's no cost saying you're going to be tough on Iran, and there's a lot of benefit because you appear to be the person who's most likely to, to protect, protect Americans. So it's been a self-reinforcing. And by the way, on the Iranian side too, there's political benefit

[00:29:17] to denouncing the United States. And the United States also has a long trail of misdeeds vis-à-vis Iran, from downing a civilian airline, to supporting Iraq during, and Iraq's use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, to the sanctions, which have obviously immiserated countless Iranians. So on both sides, there is a political benefit to demonizing the other. And when you demonize the other, it makes it much more difficult politically to reach a deal. As you said,

[00:29:46] Obama was able to overcome it to a large extent, but not entirely. I mean, he too felt constrained. I don't know, I don't want to speak for him, but I think there are things we could have done to go farther in trying to build on the relation with Iran, but which were politically very difficult to do. I argue the same on the Iranian side. I think there are a lot of things Iranians could have done to capitalize on the period of the Obama administration, but they too were, for ideological and political reasons, were not interested

[00:30:15] in going down that road. So I think it's, you know, it's partly because there was a mirror imaging in this case. And also, I just think Iran became politically, if anything, more fraught, certainly than the Syrian, you know, current Syrian leadership, the former jihadists where they never had that kind of image in the US. Taliban is a bit more complicated, but let's not forget that it took, you know, took a pretty a long and brutal war to get to that point.

[00:30:46] Maybe this war with Iran and a colleague of mine, Stephen Wertheim, and I wrote a piece in which we said maybe one of the inadvertent gifts of this terrible war and, you know, illegal, unlawful, unjustified, unnecessary, but maybe one of the unintended gifts is going to cure some Americans of the notion that the way to deal with Iran is through military means that we're going to have to find some kind of understanding. We're not there yet, but, you know, if the Trump administration fails,

[00:31:15] as it is, all indications are that it will, I think there should be a reckoning, not just among, well, among all Americans, but, and we should be asking very tough questions of those who've been advocating military strikes or military efforts against Iran for decades. We've tried it. We've tried it under a president who seems to be prepared to go to ignore the walls of war, to ignore any constraint and look where we are. So, maybe this is, I'm trying to put an optimistic hat here, maybe this in the long run

[00:31:45] or in hindsight will be looked as a turning point. Again, we're not there yet and I don't see an indication that we'll be there, but, you know, there should be one lesson to be learned from our experience with Iran and we've had three experiences, if you will. The diplomatic one that you mentioned, the JCPOA, I'm not going to say it was the, you know, ideal, perfect, but I think it did its job in terms of constraining Iran's nuclear program and putting us in a position where perhaps we could have negotiated other issues. We tried

[00:32:15] sanctions, maximum pressure on the President Trump first and second administration trying to really deprive Iran the regime, but by necessity its people of basic resources. It has not quote-unquote moderated the regime, it's not led it to surrender, it's not led it to, it didn't lead it to give up its nuclear program or to let up on its regional activities. And now we've tried the military, sort of the last on this list, which is an attempt to topple the regime or to weaken it militarily

[00:32:44] and where we are today is certainly nowhere better than we were before. So if you just look at those three, the only one that offered the glimmer of hope or possibility of turning, going to, of improving the situation was the diplomatic one. So hopefully that's the lesson that's going to be learned from this. Again, lessons are often mislearned rather than learned correctly. But I think that goes a little bit to your question. We've always lived A, with this image of Iran

[00:33:14] as being sort of an existential threat. When you define something as an existential threat, it's very difficult to reach a deal with it. I don't think that Syrian Islamist opposition was ever viewed as an existential threat. Again, the Taliban, it was more Al-Qaeda. The Taliban itself is sort of a different matter. Iran has been depicted by both parties. I mean, this is a bipartisan pastime to depict Iran as an existential threat to which we always have to be prepared to attack the military.

[00:33:44] Again, another piece that Stephen Luertham and I wrote in which we say, the road to this war was paved by many, and not just Republicans. Many administrations, Democrats included, have depicted Iran as such an existential threat and they always added a threat that we need to be prepared to deal with with force, even if there was no international or domestic legal justification for the use of force. Once you normalize force in that way, once you normalize the notion that existential threat

[00:34:14] to which the most extreme measures are justified to deal with it, then again, you shouldn't be surprised, not that it was inevitable, but you shouldn't be surprised when a president like Trump comes along and says, I'm the one who's going to deal with it in the way that you never were brave enough to deal with, which is, you say it's essential, you see that we haven't been able to handle it correctly, the only way now is through military force. So I think Iran sort of stands apart. I didn't mention obviously the

[00:34:44] Israeli angle, which I think plays a lot in our politics, plays a lot not just in our politics, but even in the way our leadership thinks and Israel has defined Iran as an existential threat before and even more intensely ever has. They are obviously closer, they live the consequences more, but I think that that has infected our way of looking at it and made it more difficult to have a, what I would call a more level-headed conversation about our relationship with Iran.

[00:35:14] Yeah, definitely want to talk about Israel, but in your answer right there too, choice brought up legality and warfare, and I'm wondering if the, what we've seen happen in Gaza and what we're seeing going on with Iran, are we seeing us reach a point where the concept of international humanitarian law is just irrevocably broken? Because it appears to neither constrain the acts of powerful nation states in the international system

[00:35:43] or protect the rights of civilians who can't stand up for themselves. Is there any utility left in even contemplating international humanitarian law as a legitimate body of work that governs the international system or are we past the point of that mattering? I mean, so I don't want to, I don't want to contradict or disagree with what you're saying, but I do think you could look at a phenomenon like that and say it happened slowly and then

[00:36:13] abruptly. In other words, the erosion of norms, I put my cards on the table, I don't really believe that we ever had an international legal, liberal order and that people were respecting it was often respected in the breach more than in any other way and the US in particular, but not only was guilty of whether it's in Vietnam, whether it's in Iraq or in the war on terror of violating the norms that it would extol when it

[00:36:43] came to the behavior of others or used as a chastise others when they didn't respect them. So I don't want to sit here and say everything was rosy until Gaza or until the war with Iran. But I think that in phenomena like this, again, it was never perfect to begin with. It was always violated in particular by the powers that held greater power. But I think there are accelerants.

[00:37:12] There have been several accelerants in terms of the erosion of that notion. I think from a U.S. perspective, obviously the Russians have violated it, other countries have violated it, but from a U.S. perspective, the U.S. plays a central role in this if only because it has presented itself and often been viewed by others as the holder of the pen of what international law is and what international norms are. So for the U.S. to violate it as blatantly as it has, has greater impact than

[00:37:42] almost any other country. So if you look at the war on terror where that was the number of and having served in the Obama administration during the time when the war on terror was being waged, I think we could all look back very critically at some of the steps that were taken in the name of fighting terrorism but which hurt innocent civilians and which twisted and stretched international legal norms in ways that I think we are still paying the price.

[00:38:13] And then of course the war in Gaza which exploded sort of everything and in which we are complicit, we were complicit, the U.S. - was complicit because of the support it provided Israel materially but also because of the cover that it provided it legally by never coming out clearly and stating that Israel's actions were a clear violation of international law. So now does it still serve a purpose? This is a debate I should have said I now, part of

[00:38:41] my job now is teaching and I teach a class on human rights and on where notions of war and peace are going and we always have this debate, do these norms serve a purpose at least as a means of criticizing those who don't abide by them? And if you didn't have any norms then what are you judging it against? So I could see that, so I'm not saying that we should give up, I think there needs to be an effort to try to hold the U.S. Israel accountable, Russia accountable, anyone who is violating the laws of war,

[00:39:11] humanitarian law, the laws of armed conflict. So again, you need the norms at a minimum to be able to hold those who are violating them accountable. But today, and again, I don't want to put all the burden on the U.S. because other countries have been extremely lax in their respects for the laws of war, but the U.S., because of its weight on the international scene, its weight in international legal discourse,

[00:39:39] its blatant violation, and some of it, I didn't mention Iran, obviously in Iran too, where you go to war without a justification, without any legal justification, or I would say even any real justification, any genuine reason, and then you have the president saying things like, we will destroy their civilization, we're going to take down their bridges, we're going to do, you know, it's just words, but words matter, and words matter because again, they normalize the reality and they make it more palatable for

[00:40:09] others to think the same way. So, yeah, I think it's an extraordinarily deep crisis for anyone who still had a belief in the international liberal order, but more than that, I think it's a moment where people need to think about how do you try to revive a sense of normative discipline when nobody seems to be, and again, the country that has

[00:40:38] claimed to be at the forefront of the drafting and the respect for those norms is now among its most blatant violators. Yeah, that's a good segue into Israel, which in a weird way, it's a linchpin of both the conversation with Gaza and in many ways, this war that we find ourselves with Iran and keeping that front and center in American politics for so long, but what is it about the Israeli state that allows them to have such a durable impact on American

[00:41:08] politics? Because we've seen the American public, it's something like 80% of Americans think what's going on in Gaza is a genocide or at least it's something we shouldn't be involved in, but support amongst decision makers and stakeholders in Washington, D.C. still appears to be incredibly durable despite a lack of public support here in America. Yeah, I think I'm usually, I've become more of a cynic than I was at what was your age? Come to the dark side, come to the dark side. Yeah. The cynicism runs deep.

[00:41:37] But I'd say I have more hopeful now about changes in our political system than I've been probably ever. Again, I've been disappointed in the past, but I think you're seeing a shift in discourse and a shift in the political equation. I mean, again, if you'd asked me five years ago whether a U.S. politician would have to weigh the consequences of being viewed as overly supportive of Israel, as opposed to being overly supportive of the Palestinians, I would have said, yeah, in some other planet, some other galaxy, some other

[00:42:07] era. You're seeing that now. People are running away from AIPAC. They are figuring out, do they call it a genocide? Do they say Israel is an apartheid state? Those are the kinds of things that I think reflect, again, the money is still disproportionately in one direction, and we'll have to see where the next, assuming the next administration is a democratic administration, where it goes. I don't want to oversell it, but I think there's really a change in what is viewed as acceptable discourse and what is not, and that happened

[00:42:37] very quickly compared to where we were in 2022, 2023. So, again, I don't want to dispute the premise of your question, which is, why have it, even if it's changing now, why did it take so long? And I think this is a long conversation that has to do with, there's a strategic reason, there's a political reason, and I always, again, I tell my students, don't underestimate the strategic reason. The close relationship with Israel, the partnership with Israel, the often alignment of

[00:43:06] policies from a U.S. from a U.S. perspective, from the mid to late 1960s on, was viewed as a very good deal. I mean, the U.S. maintained its privileged position in the Middle East. Arab countries needed American support both to remain in power, their leadership, their regimes, but also because the U.S. was the only country that they felt could have any relationship

[00:43:37] with Israel. U.S. had a privileged relationship with Israel, which there was benefits for both sides. Israel's shared intelligence sometimes could do things on the ground that the U.S. wanted to do but didn't feel like it could do, this technological economic benefits, etc. So I think from a strategic perspective, if you go from the Nixon administration up to now, I mean, let's say up until

[00:44:05] October 7th, I think the view would be, yeah, it's costing us in terms of public opinion in the Arab world, but you know what? In what bank are you going to capitalize on public opinion? How many divisions do that public opinion have to paraphrase Stalin? Regimes are on our side. The U.S. has managed to exercise a monopoly basically of influence in the Middle East. This goes also with the peace process. I mean, the U.S. and others kind of acquiesced in the

[00:44:35] fact that the U.S. the only country that had that influence relationship with Israel. And the U.S. is the country that we need to be on our side, both again for our own domestic survival purposes, but also because they could help us deal with Israel.

[00:44:57] So strategically, I think for a number of successive American administrations, it was kind of a no-brainer to maintain the close ties with Israel. Now, when you add to that the politics, and the politics over time evolved in a way where it seemed to be, again, a no-brainer to be more supportive of Israel. I mean, what was the cost of supporting Israel? Yeah, there was maybe a fringe of some parts of public opinion that were upset, but it certainly didn't seem to determine their vote.

[00:45:25] Whereas there was a lot of vote and money that was associated with taking on a position that was more favorable to Israel. I'm not even criticizing here the quote-unquote Israel lobby. I think lobbies often do their job effectively. They try to influence. There was no counterpart to it. There was no sort of lobby for the Palestinians. But this is, so I'm not, you know, I tend to criticize Israel and influence groups less than I would criticize U.S. leadership,

[00:45:54] because I think U.S. leadership led us astray, could have ignored the influence, could have said, sorry, Israel, we simply don't agree with you and gone their own way, as some presidents episodically have done. And there could have been this sort of mobilization in the U.S. on political grounds. It would have tried to counterbalance the influence of certain influence groups. But I think when you add those two, the strategic calculus and the political calculus, it became very hard to argue for an alternative.

[00:46:24] I mean, you could argue for an alternative. Maybe sometimes it could give you slight benefit in the region, but then you have to contend with the political cost. And the political cost was always viewed, perhaps exaggeratedly so. I mean, to this day, people say sometimes that President Bush, the first President Bush, lost the election to Clinton because he alienated Jewish constituencies when he took a hard line on Jewish settlements, on Israeli settlements.

[00:46:51] I think experts would say that's very questionable, but it's sort of built in political lore that that was the case. I mean, there's other examples like that. So I think the politics and the strategic calculus go hand in hand if there's too much of a disconnect between the two. And in some cases, like, you know, this goes back in the past, but in particular,

[00:47:16] arms sells to Saudi Arabia that Israel was strongly against AWAC's system to Saudi Arabia. But the U.S. leadership at the time, the administration felt we needed to do it. It's strategically important so they were prepared to overcome Israeli objections. When President Obama signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, he did it against very, very strong, almost unprecedented Israeli opposition to the point that I'm sure you and our listeners know,

[00:47:44] Prime Minister Netanyahu was invited, blindsided the administration. That was unprecedented. It was invited by the Speaker of the House, a Republican, to give a speech to Congress opposing President Obama's priority signature policy initiative at the time, which is trying to reach a deal with Iran. But because the president felt that the strategic stakes were so great that if he didn't reach a deal with Iran, he'd be forced, in his mind—I'm not saying that this was necessarily the case,

[00:48:12] but in his mind, to either acquiesce in an Iranian bomb or have to bomb Iran to prevent them from acquiring or bomb—that he decided, I will overcome the politics and the political constraints because the strategic benefit was so great, and the strategic cost on the other side was also too weighty. So that's why I say if there's a basic alignment of strategic calculus and political calculus,

[00:48:40] it almost goes without saying that's where an American political leader is going to end up, thinking about today and thinking about their re-election tomorrow. I say today things are changing because the politics are changing. We could debate the strategy. I do think that there's a greater realization of the cost that the U.S. is paying and has paid for its identification with Israeli policies that are rejected by many in the region and throughout the world.

[00:49:08] But the politics, to me, are more, if anything, more important today, that you have a constituency that appears prepared to vote based on this issue. So it's not enough to have Americans who care about Palestinians, but who may put it on number seven on their list of priorities. And so if there's a candidate who checks the box on the first three, why would they get to number seven? Today it seems—and again, I don't want to sound overly convinced that this would be the case—

[00:49:36] but it seems that there's a growing number, particularly of young Americans, for whom this is a top-tier issue. And we've seen that play out in primaries, a number of primaries. We may see it play out in general elections. And of course, the choice of the next presidential candidate on the Democratic side is going to be very interesting to see how much this issue and the position that various candidates take on this issue will play a part.

[00:50:05] Gotcha. Well, now that you've given us a modicum of hope, let's transfer to something very, very depressing. And I know we're getting close on time. You'll have to run soon. But, you know, going back to Gaza, we already talked about the breakdown of norms and how international law might not actually be effective in any meaningful sense. But is there any version of events that's realistic where Israel doesn't go through with clearing out the Gaza Strip? Is this expulsion of Palestinians at this point a fait accompli?

[00:50:35] Is there any utility in trying to imagine an off-ramp? No, well, I'm not going to be optimistic on this, unfortunately, but I'm not going to maybe be as pessimistic as that. I don't think ethnic cleansing, I mean, the depopulation of Gaza is a fait accompli. I think there's enough there on the strategic front, there's enough pushback from Egypt in particular that it becomes harder for the administration. You may recall the Biden administration at one point contemplated, well, maybe we should open the borders with Egypt, let the Gazans live there to escape the horrors of Gaza.

[00:51:04] There was a lot of pushback and the Biden administration didn't go down that road any more than the Trump administration has. But if our threshold is victory, if Gazans can continue to live as dispossessed, immiserated, under tragic conditions in Gaza, which barely qualify as living any kind of life, if that's viewed as success as long as they're not forced to flee Gaza, then that's a very low bar.

[00:51:30] I think what we're seeing in Gaza, and I think is a more likely outcome, is basically what I just said, turning Gaza into a long-term refugee, or probably displaced people, a humanitarian issue, not a political issue. And it sort of goes to the theme that I was talking about earlier, which is this notion that if you squeeze and hit the Palestinians enough, you will depoliticize the question. It's no longer, and just listen to the discourse on Gaza,

[00:52:00] it's no longer can Palestinians have their political rights, can they have self-determination, can they be connected to Palestinians in the West Bank, let alone the question of refugees or anything else. It's purely a question of how do we improve their humanitarian situation. That is, you know, again, I'm not against improving their humanitarian situation. It needs to be a priority. But if that becomes a ceiling and we forget the politics, A, it certainly is not going to do justice to the Palestinians.

[00:52:27] But I also don't think it's going to be anywhere near resolving the conflict, and it's going to continue to resurge and continue to come up. And again, one of the things that we say in our book, which is why we call it Tomorrow's Yesterday, one of the reasons, there have been other barriers in the past when people thought the Palestinian question has been quote-unquote dealt with as a humanitarian question. It's a question of where the refugees can live, you know, finding a better life for the Palestinians. The Israelis sometimes had this idea of, you know,

[00:52:55] we'll just gild the golden cage and beautify the occupation, and Palestinians will be content with that. And for a while, that may work. If you hit a population hard enough, then yes, their preoccupation, their immediate preoccupation is going to be survival for themselves, for their kids, for their parents, for the elderly. That's going to be their preoccupation. But it doesn't mean that their political aspirations disappears. It means that they come back at a different form, a more angry form perhaps, and the notion right now,

[00:53:24] given what the Palestinians in Gaza, also many in the West Bank, but particularly in Gaza, have lived, the notion that you don't have this reservoir of anger, of people for whom their only horizon is revenge. And again, we've seen that in the past, and we've seen how individual acts of violence then become something bigger. And that's a fear that I think we need to contend with, which is there is a huge reservoir of anger,

[00:53:52] of just fury on the part of people who've lost so much, who've lost everything, basically. That's true of Gaza. It's true for some in the West Bank. It's true for some in Lebanon. And yeah, for now, maybe you force them into quiescence, but that doesn't last forever. And as I tell, again, people who, when I question it, I say, put yourself in their shoes if you were them. And Israel had to kid your mother, your father, your son, your daughter, your uncle, your nephew, and you had nothing left.

[00:54:22] Wouldn't you be yearning for revenge? And so if something is not done to address those political aspirations, it's hard to see how at some point it doesn't manifest itself in a pretty violent way. So that's my concern about Gaza, is that I understand the focus on the humanitarian side. But if the goal, and it does appear to be the goal, if you look at the 20-point plan

[00:54:49] and you read what some of the administration officials are talking about, it really does look like we're going to depoliticize and Palestinians will live under this, Palestinians in Gaza would live under this, you know, they'll be continuously surveyed by Israel and maybe by the US. They won't be able to move. They won't be able to interact politically. And, you know, there probably would be all these rules events, no gathering of more than X number of people. You know, we're hearing more and more about the role of AI and interception of phone conversations and the waging of the war.

[00:55:19] Think about how you could apply all those in the management of the quote-unquote peace where everyone is simply under a constant surveillance that's the kind of future right now that seems to be being drawn up for the Palestinians. So we might avoid what you described. I'm not saying it's out of the question, which is a form of complete displacement, which could also occur in the West Bank and for some Israelis. And this goes back again to the central theme of our book,

[00:55:49] and I hope your listeners will take a look, is that this is just as there's been this long-standing Palestinian view about how to use violence against Israelis. And I think it would be naive to deny that. There's a long-standing Israeli view deep down of the way to deal with the Palestinian problem is by removing them. I mean, removing them or completely subjecting them to our control.

[00:56:19] And again, right now I'm teaching a class in Israel, Palestine, and the piece we read for our class yesterday was the Iron Wall by Jabotinsky, a Zionist revisionist in some ways, a forefather. Certainly a person of a huge influence, I wear, to Netanyahu's father, but in some ways is in the tradition of many Israelis today. Anyway, it's a remarkable piece because of how honest it is

[00:56:44] in saying the hope that we're going to buy off the Palestinians, that we could reach a deal in which we tell them you can have a little bit, you know, you'll live with us, but you won't have your, there'll be a Jewish state. He says that's illusory, right? Any people, whether it's us, the Palestinians, I mean, he has, the way he describes the Palestinians is sometimes quite patronizing, demeaning, but he does say they're going to fight back

[00:57:12] because no people, no indigenous people is going to accept that another people come and try to take their place. And so that conflict, that core of the conflict that Hussein and I tried to describe, what is existential, what is deeply rooted, historical, emotional, Jabotinsky describes it as well as anyone. And he says, ultimately, we need to prove to them that we are the stronger party. We're going to subjugate them. And then their political aspirations will be gone. But as long as they retain their political aspirations,

[00:57:42] they're going to be a threat. And that's a, you know, it's an extreme version of what I think, or extreme way of putting what I think many Israelis deep down probably feel. Just as I said, many Palestinians feel like October 7th, Israelis got what they deserved. And if we, that's an ugly thought in a way, and people tend to shy away from ugly thoughts. They don't want to think of it in that way. But it doesn't serve anyone's purpose to try to paint the conflict in a way that it is not,

[00:58:10] and then to hope that people are going to resolve it based on that flawed picture. There's a conflict between two national movements and with a long history and long ways of inflicting a lot of harm. That one side has inflicted more harm because it's much stronger, and that it has had at its disposal much more effective means of inflicting the pain that is inflicted.

[00:58:39] Well, on that sharing note, we are at time. But Rob, thank you so much for joining us today. Really enjoyed the conversation. We'll grab a link to your book and throw it in the show notes if people want to go check it out. Highly encouraged it. Trita Parsi recommended it so you know it has to be good. Thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you. Appreciate it. Take care. Take care.