How the “Dangerous Gimmick” of the Two-State Solution Ended in Disaster

Hear and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You ListenSign up for our each day publication to get the perfect of The New Yorker in your inbox.For many years, the USA backed efforts to realize a two-state answer—through which Israel would exist aspect by aspect with the Palestinian state, with each states recognizing one another’s declare to contested territory. The veteran negotiators Hussein Agha, representing Palestine, and Robert Malley, an American diplomat, performed instrumental roles in that lengthy effort, together with the important Camp David summit of 2000. However, of their new ebook, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” they conclude that they had been a part of a charade. There was by no means any method {that a} two-state answer might fulfill both of the events, Agha and Malley inform David Remnick in an interview. “A waste of time is sort of a charitable method to have a look at it,” Malley notes bitterly. “On the finish of that thirty-year-or-so interval, the Israelis and Palestinians are in a worse state of affairs than earlier than the U.S. acquired so closely invested.” The method, interesting to Western leaders and liberals in Israel, was geared to “discover the type of options which have a technical consequence, which are measurable, and that may be portrayed by strains on maps,” Agha says. “It utterly discarded the difficulty of feelings and historical past. You possibly can’t be emotional. You need to be rational. You need to be cool. However rational and funky has nothing to do with the battle.”“What Killed the Two-State Answer?,” an excerpt from Agha and Malley’s new ebook, was printed in The New Yorker.New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop each Tuesday and Friday. Observe the present wherever you get your podcasts.The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.