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

A review of Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley; 272 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux (September 2025)

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley’s new book about the failures of Israeli–Palestinian peacemaking is many things at once. It is a historical exegesis, a memoir—two memoirs, actually—a work of diplomatic theory, a lament, and a muted, if fervent, call to action. It is ostensibly a work of sober realism, but one that suffers from illusions of its own. It has some predictable villains and a consistent, if accidental, diagnosis of what sustains this conflict and prevents a peaceful outcome, all shot through with two improbable life stories of passion and politics in the shadow of American power and decades of Arab political failure.

Bildungsroman in Three Acts

The personal stories are engrossing and well-told, which is not an easy task for a book by two authors, and each is written as a Bildungsroman in three acts. The orthodox anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism of youth turns into the peace processing in middle age, which wizens into a mature sobriety that reluctantly rejects two states as a feasible solution to the problem of Palestine.

Both men are non-Palestinians who were drawn to the Palestinian cause early in life, and they describe formative moments of ideological ardour in the shadow of fathers and father figures—most notably the maddening individual who personified the Palestinian cause from the 1960s until his death in 2004. Fascination and disappointment with Yasser Arafat loom large in their narrative—he appears as a befuddled fabulist and fantasist, whose frequent liberties with the truth are by turns charming and exasperating.