Ro Khanna, a sitting U.S. congressman, spent ninety minutes barred from leaving a road in the West Bank by armed settlers. No state held him, no recognized army processed him, just men with guns who decided he would wait. There is something almost comic about the scene: an American politician, the kind who once got chauffeured to a photo op with a friendly head of state, stuck on a dusty road while the people who actually run that ground worked out what to do with him. The image is small. What it points to is large. For decades American leaders flew in to perform solidarity and broker deals. Khanna flew in and got a firsthand lesson in who holds power on that road in 2026, and it was not the diplomats or the treaties. The vocabulary of the peace process met the physical facts, and the facts won.
The easy read says this was a fluke, a bad afternoon with a few zealots on a back road. Treat it that way and you miss what the episode documents. Most coverage assumes the old framework still exists, that a peace process waits somewhere in the background, dormant maybe but intact, ready for the right leader to switch it back on. That assumption does quiet work. It lets you picture the present as the 1990s with uglier headlines. The Khanna incident says otherwise. The words people still reach for, two-state solution, mediation, confidence-building, describe a world that has been steadily swapped out for a different one. To understand the swap you need someone who sat in the room when the old language got written, and who watched it stop matching what was outside the window.
That is the vantage Hussein Agha and Robert Malley bring to Tomorrow Is Yesterday. Both spent years in those rooms. Agha advised Palestinian leaders including Arafat and Abbas; Malley worked for Clinton, Obama, and Biden; together they ran quiet back-channel talks across decades. They did not write from the archive. They helped draft the hopeful documents and then watched them curdle. Their argument is that the gap Khanna stumbled into on that road opened long ago, by design as much as by accident. The Oslo process, they contend, promised a future it could not structurally deliver, and the daily machinery of occupation kept expanding while everyone waited for a final deal that receded each year.
Talk of imminent peace became a way of not looking at the ground, which hardened while the talking went on. October 7, 2023 sits at the center of the book, and the authors do not soften the numbers. Hamas fighters killed more than eleven hundred Israelis and took more than two hundred hostages. The Israeli response has since killed tens of thousands and left Gaza in ruins. Agha and Malley ask the plain question underneath the catastrophe: why did the process built to prevent exactly this help produce the conditions for it? Neither author spares his own side.
Malley writes as someone who served three American presidents and can account for what U.S. mediation actually accomplished, which was often less than the participants believed at the time. Agha turns the same cold eye on Palestinian leadership. The result reads like two people who have run out of patience with the stories both sides tell themselves. Here is my real quarrel with the book. It is bracing on diagnosis and thin on what comes next, and the pessimism sometimes hardens into a pose rather than a finding. When your whole thesis is that the old vocabulary is dead, you inherit the harder job of proposing new words, and Agha and Malley are far more persuasive about what has failed than about what might work.
They have watched too many confident answers collapse to fake one now, and that restraint is fair. Even so, you may close the book wanting the chapter they never wrote, the one where they risk a prediction instead of a warning.
Khanna will presumably keep visiting the region, and the visits will keep producing scenes like the one on that road. If you would rather understand why than react to the next clip, Tomorrow Is Yesterday is a clear-eyed place to sit with the question. It will not comfort you, and it does not pretend to. Two people who spent their careers inside the process tell you, without flattery, how it came apart. That is worth ninety minutes of your own.