Tomorrow Is Yesterday by Hussein Agha

Tomorrow Is Yesterday

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

Hussein Agha, Robert Malley

Farrar Straus & Giroux · Print & ebook · September 16, 2025

A Best Book of 2025 The New Yorker • Foreign Affairs • NPR • Foreign Policy • Responsible Statecraft Two insiders explain why the Israeli–Palestinian peace process failed, and anticipate what lies ahead.

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Who it’s for
Veteran negotiators revisit failed hopes and the history beneath a stubborn conflict.
Genres
Middle Eastern Politics, Israel & Palestine History, Peace & Conflict
Published
Farrar Straus & Giroux, September 16, 2025

About this book

A Best Book of 2025 The New Yorker • Foreign Affairs • NPR • Foreign Policy • Responsible Statecraft Two insiders explain why the Israeli–Palestinian peace process failed, and anticipate what lies ahead. On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters killed more than eleven hundred Israelis and took more than two hundred hostages, prompting an Israeli response that has in turn taken tens of thousands of lives and devastated the Gaza Strip.

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Why did this happen, and can anything be done to grant peace and justice to Israelis and Palestinians alike? In Tomorrow Is Yesterday, veteran negotiators Hussein Agha and Robert Malley offer a personal and bracing perspective on how the hopes of the Oslo Peace Process became the horrors of the present. Drawing on their experience advising the Palestinian leadership (Arafat and Abbas) and US presidents (Clinton, Obama, and Biden) and their participation in secret talks over decades, Agha and Malley offer candid portraits of leading figures and an interpretation of the conflict that exposes the delusions of all sides. They stress that the two-state solution became a global goal only when it was no longer viable; that US officials preferred technical schemes to a frank reckoning with the past; that Hamas’s onslaught and Israel’s war of destruction were not historical exceptions but historical reenactments; and that the gaps separating Israelis and Palestinians have less to do with territorial allocation than with history and emotions.

Peace, Reconsidered

Veteran negotiators revisit failed hopes and the history beneath a stubborn conflict.

Come here for

  • An insider’s view of decades of peace talks
  • A candid reading of history, emotion, and political misjudgment

Expect

  • A bracing interpretation that challenges every side
  • Personal perspectives shaped by years near the negotiations

Where it sits

Israel & Palestine History58%
Peace & Conflict44%
Middle Eastern Politics43%

Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.

Publisher categories

  • Israel & Palestine History
  • Middle Eastern Politics
  • Religion & Politics
Authors
Hussein Agha, Robert Malley
Publisher
Farrar Straus & Giroux
Published
September 16, 2025
Format
Print & ebook
Reading lane
Israel & Palestine History