Tomorrow Is Yesterday

A Best Book of 2025
The New Yorker • Foreign Affairs • NPR • Foreign Policy • Responsible Statecraft

In Tomorrow Is Yesterday, Hussein Agha and Robert Malley offer an up-close and bracing perspective on how the hopes of the peace process became the horrors of the present. Drawing on their experience as advisors to the Palestinian leadership and US presidents, Agha and Malley present portraits of leading figures and expose the delusions and lies of Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans alike. They stress that the two-state solution became a global goal only after it was no longer viable; that US officials preferred fussing over technical schemes to a reckoning with actualities; that Hamas’s October 7 onslaught and Israel’s subsequent war of destruction were not one-offs but reenactments; and that the gaps separating Israelis and Palestinians have less to do with territorial allocation than with history and emotions.

With incisive prose, Agha and Malley lay bare the inner workings of a peace industry that failed to achieve its goals. Instead, it created and came to inhabit an inauthentic reality that was substituted for what truly moved Israelis and Palestinians. Amid today’s fraught events, there is no better guide to what lies in store tomorrow than what happened yesterday.