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From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine
280 pages, Hardcover
Published September 30, 2025
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January 13, 2026Two important books about the search for peace in Israel-Palestine came out last September.
Hussein Agha and Robert Malley focus on why everything went so wrong since the Oslo Accords, and why a settlement seems farther away than ever. The authors of "Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine" are unsparing in their criticism of the delusions and mistakes that doomed the process, criticism that they direct partly at themselves as insiders, Malley as a senior US diplomat, Agha as a negotiator for the Palestinians. They hope that the lessons learned will inform any future peace initiative but are too chastened to propose one of their own, calling the prospect at present “wholly academic, detached from reality.”
The co-authors of the second book, "From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine," were not participants in the failed negotiation process and are constrained by no such humility. Sarah Leah Whitson and Michael Schaeffer Omer-man have their own take on what went wrong until now and propose a very concrete way forward: a detailed blueprint for a three-year transitional period that culminates in all adult residents of the land between the river and the sea (“the territory”) exercising their equal rights to democratically decide the political future of that territory.
All heady stuff, which I hope will come to pass. But there’s a catch: the absence of political will. The blueprint’s starting point is not the present moment but rather a moment in the future when Jewish Israelis have decided that the status quo is no longer sustainable and that it’s time to dismantle the Jewish state, at least the Jewish state as an entity that practices apartheid and Jewish supremacy over Palestinians.
The authors recognize not only that such a moment is distant, but that Israel might end up heading in the opposite direction, toward the expulsion or extermination of Palestinians. But they list factors that could prompt Jewish Israelis to radically change their calculus, as whites in South Africa did when they decided to dismantle their apartheid in the early 1990s: international sanctions, diplomatic, public and legal pressure, the prospect of paraiah-dom, and painful intractable violence.
Whitson and Omer-man argue that having a viable roadmap, even if it is missing the route from the present mess to its starting point, will shake policy-makers out of their acquiescence in the status quo. Having a viable end-game will prod them to apply pressure on the principal parties (primarily Israel), they say.
Whitson (a former boss of mine, a friend, and perennial outside-the-box thinker) has decades of experience in human rights NGOs, and Omer-Man is an accomplished Israeli-American journalist. They currently both work at Democracy in the Arab World Now (DAWN), a Washington-based NGO.
The blueprint contains both the guiding principles and the mechanics for navigating this tricky transition, informed by the authors’ conversations with experts on transitions in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere. It provides a vision of what a reformed security apparatus of the caretaker government will look like, how the courts will operate, which repressive laws must be abrogated, how freedom of movement will be restored, and how militant groups are to be disarmed. The authors recommend safeguards, such as consociational institutions, to promote collaboration and compromise and prevent any single group from dominating the political landscape. The discredited Palestinian Authority is to be dissolved, and all factions and tendencies on both sides will be encouraged to participate, so long as they support democracy and reject violence.
Whitson and Omer-man argue that their plan corrects the fatal flaw of prior peace-seeking, which treated Israelis and Palestinians as two monolithic groups who must negotiate a political solution to their competing claims, despite their vastly unequal power, based on dividing the land and the terms of statehood. This approach treated a political resolution as a precondition to ending the “lesser” problems of human rights violations, including apartheid. It made human rights that should be non-derogable subject to negotiation. The authors argue that it should be the other way around: ending the repression, including the crimes of apartheid and genocide, is a precondition for reaching a permanent resolution, a practical necessity in addition to being an ethical necessity and a legal obligation.
The logic is that if Palestinians attain citizenship, basic rights, and equality, they will feel invested in the success of the process, spoilers will be marginalized, and the outcome will enjoy legitimacy.
Though I agree that ending the repression of Palestinians now is an ethical necessity and legal obligation, I’m not convinced that doing so in the comprehensive fashion advocated here provides the best chance of a political breakthrough. If only Jewish Israelis agreed to grant all Palestinians all the rights that they themselves enjoy, the battle would already be more than half-won.
An alternative way forward would be be to recognize the power imbalance and adopt a more gradualist approach more likely to get buy-in from Jewish Israelis, one that eased the repression more gradually and whose end-game did not look to them like a leap into the void. Such an approach falls short of what is just but may have a better chance of being implemented, even though it too demands that Israelis decide the status quo is untenable. A more incremental plan would also need Palestinian buy-in, and for that the improvement in conditions on the ground would have to be tangible for them.
The authors would probably reply that a gradualist approach is doomed because it accepts the huge power imbalance, carries too much risk of getting derailed by violence (think Oslo), and allows for the continued, unacceptable violation of Palestinian rights, even if at a reduced level. Thus the need for putting this on an accelerated and firm timetable.
The book’s strength is its focus on the transitional arrangements and how to keep the process on track. It dwells neither on how we get to the starting point, as I’ve mentioned, nor on what happens after the transitional phase. The authors say their blueprint leaves the future political configuration up to voters; while it would be “one-state” during the transitional phase, the electorate could choose one state, two states, a federation or a confederation as the permanent arrangement.
I’m all for democratic self-determination through universal suffrage, but what happens if 90 percent of the 7 million Palestinians in the territory vote to create one unitary state in Palestine and 90 percent of the 7 million Israeli Jews vote for separate two states? An alternative to winner-take-all is needed.
If and when Israelis re-consider the status quo, they will weigh not only the costs of maintaining it but what the alternatives look like. Does the road-map that this book lays out coax them toward dismantling their state or clinging to the status quo? They may note favorably that the blueprint eschews the maximalist Palestinian position of allowing Palestinian refugees to exercise their right of return en masse and immediately; it recommends leaving decisions on refugee and immigration policies, except for exceptional cases, to the democratically elected government that replaces the caretaker one. The book also treats all residents of the territories as equal citizens, including Jews who arrived recently.
The Malley-Agha and Whitson-Omer-man books provide different, though not clashing, takes on why the peace process has failed to date. They both despair that the present moment is not propitious for any kind of breakthrough. But if "Tomorrow is Yesterday," the title that Malley and Agha chose, affirms that the Israeli-Palestinian problem has reverted to its historic origins, Whitson and Omer-man could have entitled their book "Today is Tomorrow": by jumping ahead to a positive, implementable vision of the future, they hope to hasten the path out of the dark place we currently are in.
I’ve noted my doubts but give Whitson and Omer-Man credit for resisting despair. “We seek[] to inject energy and creativity into what we believe can be a renewed, vibrant debate about what should happen,” they write. In that important sense, they have succeeded.
Hussein Agha and Robert Malley focus on why everything went so wrong since the Oslo Accords, and why a settlement seems farther away than ever. The authors of "Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine" are unsparing in their criticism of the delusions and mistakes that doomed the process, criticism that they direct partly at themselves as insiders, Malley as a senior US diplomat, Agha as a negotiator for the Palestinians. They hope that the lessons learned will inform any future peace initiative but are too chastened to propose one of their own, calling the prospect at present “wholly academic, detached from reality.”
The co-authors of the second book, "From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine," were not participants in the failed negotiation process and are constrained by no such humility. Sarah Leah Whitson and Michael Schaeffer Omer-man have their own take on what went wrong until now and propose a very concrete way forward: a detailed blueprint for a three-year transitional period that culminates in all adult residents of the land between the river and the sea (“the territory”) exercising their equal rights to democratically decide the political future of that territory.
All heady stuff, which I hope will come to pass. But there’s a catch: the absence of political will. The blueprint’s starting point is not the present moment but rather a moment in the future when Jewish Israelis have decided that the status quo is no longer sustainable and that it’s time to dismantle the Jewish state, at least the Jewish state as an entity that practices apartheid and Jewish supremacy over Palestinians.
The authors recognize not only that such a moment is distant, but that Israel might end up heading in the opposite direction, toward the expulsion or extermination of Palestinians. But they list factors that could prompt Jewish Israelis to radically change their calculus, as whites in South Africa did when they decided to dismantle their apartheid in the early 1990s: international sanctions, diplomatic, public and legal pressure, the prospect of paraiah-dom, and painful intractable violence.
Whitson and Omer-man argue that having a viable roadmap, even if it is missing the route from the present mess to its starting point, will shake policy-makers out of their acquiescence in the status quo. Having a viable end-game will prod them to apply pressure on the principal parties (primarily Israel), they say.
Whitson (a former boss of mine, a friend, and perennial outside-the-box thinker) has decades of experience in human rights NGOs, and Omer-Man is an accomplished Israeli-American journalist. They currently both work at Democracy in the Arab World Now (DAWN), a Washington-based NGO.
The blueprint contains both the guiding principles and the mechanics for navigating this tricky transition, informed by the authors’ conversations with experts on transitions in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere. It provides a vision of what a reformed security apparatus of the caretaker government will look like, how the courts will operate, which repressive laws must be abrogated, how freedom of movement will be restored, and how militant groups are to be disarmed. The authors recommend safeguards, such as consociational institutions, to promote collaboration and compromise and prevent any single group from dominating the political landscape. The discredited Palestinian Authority is to be dissolved, and all factions and tendencies on both sides will be encouraged to participate, so long as they support democracy and reject violence.
Whitson and Omer-man argue that their plan corrects the fatal flaw of prior peace-seeking, which treated Israelis and Palestinians as two monolithic groups who must negotiate a political solution to their competing claims, despite their vastly unequal power, based on dividing the land and the terms of statehood. This approach treated a political resolution as a precondition to ending the “lesser” problems of human rights violations, including apartheid. It made human rights that should be non-derogable subject to negotiation. The authors argue that it should be the other way around: ending the repression, including the crimes of apartheid and genocide, is a precondition for reaching a permanent resolution, a practical necessity in addition to being an ethical necessity and a legal obligation.
The logic is that if Palestinians attain citizenship, basic rights, and equality, they will feel invested in the success of the process, spoilers will be marginalized, and the outcome will enjoy legitimacy.
Though I agree that ending the repression of Palestinians now is an ethical necessity and legal obligation, I’m not convinced that doing so in the comprehensive fashion advocated here provides the best chance of a political breakthrough. If only Jewish Israelis agreed to grant all Palestinians all the rights that they themselves enjoy, the battle would already be more than half-won.
An alternative way forward would be be to recognize the power imbalance and adopt a more gradualist approach more likely to get buy-in from Jewish Israelis, one that eased the repression more gradually and whose end-game did not look to them like a leap into the void. Such an approach falls short of what is just but may have a better chance of being implemented, even though it too demands that Israelis decide the status quo is untenable. A more incremental plan would also need Palestinian buy-in, and for that the improvement in conditions on the ground would have to be tangible for them.
The authors would probably reply that a gradualist approach is doomed because it accepts the huge power imbalance, carries too much risk of getting derailed by violence (think Oslo), and allows for the continued, unacceptable violation of Palestinian rights, even if at a reduced level. Thus the need for putting this on an accelerated and firm timetable.
The book’s strength is its focus on the transitional arrangements and how to keep the process on track. It dwells neither on how we get to the starting point, as I’ve mentioned, nor on what happens after the transitional phase. The authors say their blueprint leaves the future political configuration up to voters; while it would be “one-state” during the transitional phase, the electorate could choose one state, two states, a federation or a confederation as the permanent arrangement.
I’m all for democratic self-determination through universal suffrage, but what happens if 90 percent of the 7 million Palestinians in the territory vote to create one unitary state in Palestine and 90 percent of the 7 million Israeli Jews vote for separate two states? An alternative to winner-take-all is needed.
If and when Israelis re-consider the status quo, they will weigh not only the costs of maintaining it but what the alternatives look like. Does the road-map that this book lays out coax them toward dismantling their state or clinging to the status quo? They may note favorably that the blueprint eschews the maximalist Palestinian position of allowing Palestinian refugees to exercise their right of return en masse and immediately; it recommends leaving decisions on refugee and immigration policies, except for exceptional cases, to the democratically elected government that replaces the caretaker one. The book also treats all residents of the territories as equal citizens, including Jews who arrived recently.
The Malley-Agha and Whitson-Omer-man books provide different, though not clashing, takes on why the peace process has failed to date. They both despair that the present moment is not propitious for any kind of breakthrough. But if "Tomorrow is Yesterday," the title that Malley and Agha chose, affirms that the Israeli-Palestinian problem has reverted to its historic origins, Whitson and Omer-man could have entitled their book "Today is Tomorrow": by jumping ahead to a positive, implementable vision of the future, they hope to hasten the path out of the dark place we currently are in.
I’ve noted my doubts but give Whitson and Omer-Man credit for resisting despair. “We seek[] to inject energy and creativity into what we believe can be a renewed, vibrant debate about what should happen,” they write. In that important sense, they have succeeded.
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