Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your foreign policy and national (in)security edition.

If you haven’t yet listened, this morning we dropped the very last installment of my podcast about Vladimir Putin’s childhood, About a Boy. The episode is called “All the World’s a Dvor,” and it’s about how the lessons of the urban courtyard, the dvor, have shaped the kind of leader Putin is on the world stage—and what this might mean for the war in Ukraine.

In tonight’s edition, more on the unfurling disaster in Gaza. But first, your daily update from Abby Livingston on Capitol Hill…

But the brevity of Johnson’s honeymoon period will surely rival the swiftness of his ascent. After all, he will be learning on the job while facing a crush of intractable problems. Here’s what’s ahead. Good luck, Mike!:

• His clean slate won’t last long: Johnson’s anonymity is what probably got him the gavel. He had not held a previous leadership position or chairmanship, which means he’s had few opportunities to alienate colleagues. But now he will be tasked with negotiating and whipping support for bills that will inevitably disappoint his colleagues. Remember, a divided government can’t function without compromise, which means Johnson will be between a rock and a hard spot when it comes to things like government shutdowns and cutting deals with Democrats in the Senate and White House—exactly the sort of dilemma that led his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, to be deposed.

• The cloud of Jan. 6 looms: Johnson, a former constitutional lawyer, was a central player in promoting legal arguments to throw out the 2020 election result. While he condemned the violence of Jan. 6, Democrats I spoke with on Wednesday afternoon were not reassured with his conciliatory tone. Pete Aguilar, who delivered the nominating speech for Hakeem Jeffries, pointed to that episode in his remarks, referencing Johnson’s support for “overturning a free and fair election.” The wounds and distrust, dating back to the insurrection, will not fade easily.

• Conciliatory but not inclusive: Johnson delivered a traditional conservative speech in his remarks ahead of accepting the gavel. (As a devout evangelical, Johnson also made overt religious references to a legislative body that is theoretically secular.) But his remarks were also strikingly conciliatory in tone, given the rage that has torn through the chamber over the last month. To the House G.O.P. conference, he promised a decentralized speakership—something the right wing has long craved. Of course, it’s not a new promise for a new speaker. The question is whether he can live up to it amid the inevitable tight votes ahead.

• It’s already campaign season: Johnson has raised money in the past with the N.R.C.C., which not all members do. This demonstrates an interest in campaigns and an understanding of the big picture when it comes to holding onto the gavel. But the sums he’s previously raised are a drop in the bucket compared to the money tree he’ll need to shake as his party’s leader. Moreover, House Democrats are eager to link his hardline conservatism to vulnerable Republican members in the next election. D.C.C.C. Chairwoman Suzan DelBene immediately released a statement promising to tie those incumbents to his “extreme agenda to pass a national abortion ban, defund law enforcement, and slash Social Security and Medicare.”

• The Ukraine drain: Among the biggest obstacles for Johnson is the issue that most divides the House G.O.P. conference: Ukraine. (Keep an eye on House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul on this front.) But the most immediate problem before the House is what to do ahead of the Nov. 17 government shutdown deadline. Members and staff are exhausted—they’ve been in session since early September and it’s been an exceptionally brutal stretch with scrambled schedules and short tempers. Or, as a House Democratic chief of staff texted me, “Now we are in session for 3 fucking weeks to push thru 8 approps bills. I’m going to scream.”

I came of age, on the other hand, in the 1990s, when the two-state solution seemed not like a pipe dream, but something that was on the very verge of happening. There were constant peace negotiations, constant signings of understandings and frameworks; there was a peace process. And America, which is now either vilified as Israel’s chief enabler, sending billions in bombs and guns, or lauded as Israel’s staunchest ally, was, back then, the chief convener of this peace process. With the Cold War over and its political capital sky-high, it was the only country that seemed able to get the two sides to sit down, negotiate, and have a signing ceremony.

Even where I was, in Jewish day schools with a strong Zionist core, there was a constant sense of hope and optimism that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as it was then called, would be resolved not just within our lifetimes, but within the next couple of years. Yitzhak Rabin was our hero and the whole school mourned when he was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli who had hoped to derail the peace process. We feared, deeply, that his plan might succeed.

But that was a long, long time ago.

For me, what happened on October 7, and what has been happening since, has its origins not just in 1967 or 1947 or 1917 or even the year 70 A.D., but in the year 2000. That’s when Bill Clinton decided he wanted to go out on a triumphal note as he wrapped up his second term, marred as it was by an impeachment. He would be the president that resolved this thing once and for all. Clinton brought the Israelis and Palestinians together in the summer of 2000 at Camp David to try to hammer out a deal that would make a two-state solution a reality, finally.

The Israelis were led by Ehud Barak (who had just defeated a much younger Bibi Netanyahu) and the Palestinians by Yasser Arafat, head of the P.L.O., who had signed the Oslo Accords with Rabin. After intense negotiations that summer, the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September, and a final Hail-Mary negotiation in December, the talks, however imperfect, collapsed. Israel spiraled into violence as the Second Intifada metastasized. Suicide bombers from Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups started blowing up buses, cafés, and night clubs. As the Israeli death toll grew, Israelis who had once been enthusiastic supporters of a Palestinian state grew furious and distrustful. They felt they had offered so much—far more than they were comfortable with—and this was what they had gotten for it. So instead of a peace process, they opted for security, first and foremost.

It’s how we got the wall separating the West Bank from Israel, the Gaza border fence and blockade, Bibi’s defiance of political gravity, and an increasingly harsh regime of checkpoints, violence, dispossessions, and daily humiliations of Palestinians in the occupied territories. And, with the rise of the evangelical right and Christian Zionism in the U.S., and with the administrations of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, America slowly but surely gave up its role as a trusted and trustworthy broker.

This is also how we got to October 6, 2023. After the collapse of the 2000 peace talks, Israelis believed that the problem with their Palestinian neighbors couldn’t be solved, only managed and contained—and, on a good day, ignored. October 7 exploded that fiction.

Because so many people don’t remember this more recent history, I decided to call Ambassador Dennis Ross, who was Clinton’s Middle East envoy and the chief U.S. negotiator in the 2000 talks. I asked him to relive what happened at Camp David in those last, tense months of the last millennium, why it all fell apart, and how it got us to the present day.

Because we talked for an hour and because this is a gnarly and complex issue, the interview, though we have edited it for length and clarity, is still a long read. Still, I hope you found it as interesting as I did.

Dennis Ross: There was a huge appetite for it. I can tell you that the best indication of this is after Camp David. I was in Israel a month afterwards, and I had dinner with some friends who were Likud members. And they were completely resigned because the Israeli press was putting out all sorts of leaks about what Israel had conceded at Camp David. And by the way, it was way beyond what they had actually conceded at Camp David. Completely untrue. And yet, as my friends from Likud were telling me, this was drawing no reaction from the Israeli public. Because they were ready for it. And what changed everything is the Second Intifada.

Before we get to that, why do you think the Israeli public was, as you say, so ready for it?

First of all, I think they felt that Bibi’s time as prime minister, the first go-round, had demonstrated that he wasn’t capable of doing much. And you have to recall, this was a time when when Israelis would go to the West Bank, they’d go to Ramallah. There were jazz clubs in Ramallah. They would go to eat in Ramallah. There was a complete openness. There were at least 120,000 Palestinians a day working in Israel at the time. There really wasn’t terror taking place. And the sense was, okay, we have a government that’s ready to do it. The public read Bibi as not capable of taking advantage of the moment—which is why he lost so decisively to Barak—and there was a sense that there was a moment, so the public was sort of ready for this.

How do you think the broader Palestinian public saw the 2000 negotiations? Do you think they were as ready for a deal as the Israelis?

I can’t know for sure, but I think the answer is probably yes. And also, look, if Arafat had come out and done it—look at the reaction among the Palestinian public when he did Oslo, it was euphoric. It was very popular among Palestinians. It wasn’t popular among Hamas and other rejectionists, but the bulk of the population was for it.

What were the starting positions of the two sides at Camp David? And did they get any closer to each other?

We didn’t hear any concessions in 15 days from Arafat directly. Zero. In fact, he introduced a new fiction that the Temple wasn’t in Jerusalem. So not only is he delegitimizing the historic Israeli connection to Jerusalem—Zionism, after all, is about Jerusalem, Zion, right?—it’s even more than that. It’s like he’s questioning the core of the Jewish faith, which is so fundamental. So we never heard anything directly from him. His negotiators did make some moves, but we never heard it from him.

The Israeli position was to start [with a percentage of occupied territory they’d be willing to give up] in the high eighties, and then be prepared to go up, and not to be prepared to concede on anything on Jerusalem. In the end, they were prepared to concede. You have to understand that after 1967, Israel expanded the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem essentially into the West Bank. Initially, there was some readiness on the Israeli side to say, Okay, maybe these outer villages, they could have sovereignty, but nothing beyond that. And they ended up moving to the point where they were prepared to accept that all the outer neighborhoods—and even some of the inner neighborhoods, like Sheikh Jarrah—would have sovereignty. They were ready to think the Muslim quarter in the old city could have some sovereignty. We never heard it from Arafat, but the Palestinian negotiators moved on that the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem would be part of Israel and the Arab neighborhoods would be Palestinian.

You have to understand that Camp David is far less than what we offered in the Clinton Parameters in December, and that’s what Arafat turns down.

What were the Clinton Parameters?

The essence of them was the following: First, Jerusalem. What we did with respect to Jerusalem was what was Arab would be Palestinian, what was Jewish would be Israeli. The old city, which is only one square kilometer and has about 40,000 people, the Christian and Muslim quarters would be Palestinian. The Jewish and about a third of the Armenian quarter would be Israeli. And the rest of the remaining quarter would also be Palestinian. But you’d have a special regime because the place is so small that if you spring a leak in one quarter, you have to turn off the water in another one.

When it comes to the holy sites, we said the Western Wall and the Holy of Holies to which it’s connected would be sovereign Israel. And the surface of the Haram al-Sharif, meaning where the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque are, would be Palestinian sovereign. For any excavation, there’d be an international committee that the two sides would be on, and we would be on, and you have different Muslim countries on it, and any excavation would have to be approved.

Interesting.

So that was Jerusalem. For refugees, there would be no right of return to Israel for Palestinian refugees. There would be a right of return to the Palestinian state [that would be created by this agreement]. There would be a right of return to the territories that were currently part of Israel but were going to be part of a swap to the Palestinian state, and we promised to help develop those areas that would become Palestinian. We would create a $20 billion fund for refugees for those who chose compensation. The fund would also go to those countries that were absorbing Palestinians, like Jordan. And there would be third countries who would accept Palestinians, including us. We talked about accepting maybe 1,000 to 1,500 a year, but there would be other countries that they could go to.

On the issue of borders, 100 percent of Gaza would go back to what would become the Palestinian state. About 97 percent of the West Bank would become Palestinian. And the principle here in shaping this was that the area that Israel would annex [in exchange for a land swap] would be shaped by minimizing the number of Palestinians in these areas and the 97 percent, by definition, was going to be almost all [Palestinian]. Also, the shape of it geographically so you maximize contiguity for the Palestinians was also a criteria. [Israeli settlements in those areas would be evacuated.]

On the issue of security, you have to understand we were writing about security in the context of the year 2000; it was a totally different security landscape than it is today. But basically, the Israelis would withdraw after six years and there would be a multinational presence that would take its place, and its role was to ensure that all the obligations were fulfilled. Israel would have a right to go back in [to the West Bank] in the event of a national emergency. They would retain early warning sites in the West Bank. And they would also be able to retain certain access points to facilitate their reentry in the event that they had to go back.

And, under this agreement, would this new Palestinian state have had its own army?

It was going to be a non-militarized state. It would have security capabilities to deal with internal threats and the presumption was that if it came to external threats, Israel would obviously assume responsibility but so would neighboring states like Jordan or Egypt.

I can see a few points that would have made him do so, but why did Arafat balk?

I think because, ultimately, one thing about Arafat was he never foreclosed an option. And one thing he was being asked to do, the one thing that was critical here, in three words, was: end the conflict. For Yasser Arafat, that meant end the struggle, end the grievances, end the claims. Arafat could live with more limited agreements, but he couldn’t live with something that basically said, okay, it’s over. I mean, this is a guy who wore his keffiyeh in the shape of Palestine. The conflict defined him, the struggle defined him. We were asking him to end that and he couldn’t make that leap.

To what extent do you think it was personal for him, in the sense that the conflict defined him, and to what extent was it that it was just not a satisfactory deal? Like, why give up so much if you believe historical Palestine includes all of Israel, and not just the West Bank and Gaza?

My guess is if we had, let’s say, given him 100 percent of the territory, then he would have insisted on something else. He would have insisted on some right of return for the refugees. He would have put a poison pill in. He needed to somehow keep the grievance alive. That’s just who he was.

Palestinians would have had a state, they would have had freedom, and the limitations on their sovereignty were really relatively minor. Look, even on the issue of controlling air space, which would be inconceivable today, we suggested that the air space would be sovereign Palestinian air space, but there would be an understanding that the Israelis could train it. Now, if we were doing this today, they would not. The Israelis would dominate the airspace given the size. I remember [Palestinian negotiator] Saeb Erekat saying to me, “We realize if we can’t do a deal when we have an Israeli government with Amnon Shahak and Shlomo Ben-Ami, then we can’t do a deal.” And, you know, this was before the Second Intifada that changed the Israeli perception of the Palestinians.

I vividly remember the Second Intifada, which started in September 2000. But how do you think it changed Israeli perceptions of whether peace was possible, whether a two state solution was possible?

The second Intifada killed the peace camp in Israel for a couple of reasons. The violence was terrible. About a thousand Israelis died. But it’s also that this is done after you’ve had the most forthcoming government in Israel’s history be prepared to make far-reaching concessions. So not only were these far reaching concessions that were rejected, but violence was the answer. Suicide bombings. It killed the peace camp. It convinced most Israelis that this was an unalterable hostility.

How did it actually unfold, the collapse of the deal?

Maybe the most telling point is when I saw Arafat on December 11 in Morocco, and I said to him, “Look, there’s only five weeks left of the Clinton administration. I’m not going to fool you. You’re not going to fool me. I need to know, is there a deal here?” And he says, “Yeah, there’s a deal here.” And I say, “Why?”

And this is after I had suggested a backchannel between the two sides and they had acted on it, and the violence [of the Second Intifada] had gone down. Arafat said, “Because they’re serious and I’m serious.” So we went back and forth, and I said, “Tell you what. I’ll outline to you what I think the Israelis can do on each of the issues, on border security, refugees and Jerusalem.” I outlined it for him and I said, “Can you accept that? That’s what I think the Israelis in the end can do. Can you accept it?” And he says, “Yes.”

We brought the two sides to Bolling Air Force Base and, after three and a half days, they came to me and said, “Look, we can’t bridge the differences. We need an American proposal.” So that’s what led to the American proposal, the Clinton Parameters. We presented it on Saturday, December 23. And the night before, around midnight, I got a message that Mohammed Dahlan wants to see me. So he comes to my place, it’s after midnight, and he says, “What are you going to make us swallow in the morning?” Meaning, what is going to be hard for us to deal with? And I said, “I’m going to tell you what’s going to be hard for you but I’m not going to tell you the whole thing.”

So I go through and I explain some of what’s being asked on security and on refugees, and he says, “Can’t you ease it further?” I said, “No, because you can tell by what I’m not saying what’s going to be hard for the Israelis.” And I said, “But I’ll tell you what, I don’t want the last thing that President Clinton does to fail. So if you think it’s too much and you guys can’t accept it, I’ll tell the president not to present it tomorrow morning.”

So literally for, I would say, five minutes, he doesn’t say a word. I learned a long time ago in negotiations that, when someone isn’t talking, don’t fill the space. Let them work through it. So I just sat there and it was complete silence for five minutes. And finally, he says, “Go ahead.” He thought he could deliver this but it proved wrong.

We gave each side five days and we told them, “There is no discussion about the parameters. If you come back with something that’s within the parameters, that’s fine. But if you come back and you’re questioning the parameters themselves, that’s a rejection.” And we said, “These ideas leave when Clinton leaves office. Because this is not binding to the next administration.” The Barak government said yes with reservations, and Arafat just said no.

I’ve heard you tell a story about one of the Palestinian negotiators telling you, many, many years later, that you were actually much closer to getting a deal than you thought.

A couple years ago, I had dinner with one of the Palestinian negotiators from that time in this amazing town in the West Bank, not far from Ramallah. And he says to me, out of the blue, he says, “You know, you realize that all of us agreed we had to do this, that we made the recommendation [to accept the deal] and then Arafat just accused us of all being traitors when we walked in, and that that was the end of it.” And then he said to me, “Can you imagine where we would be today if we’d said yes?”

I have to say that it was kind of obvious on one level, but on another level, at an emotional level, when you hear it, you just sink.

Bush knew he couldn’t immerse himself in the details and commit to this kind of involvement the way Clinton had, and that if that didn’t work for Clinton, he wasn’t going to touch it. At the time, I was briefing [incoming Secretary of State] Colin Powell, and he was saying to me, “I really hope you can succeed, because I don’t see us doing anything on this if you don’t.”

The proximate cause of the Second Intifada was Ariel Sharon’s Temple Mount visit. But what was the larger, deeper cause of the second Intifada?

The worst meeting I ever had with Arafat was in May 2000, right after the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. He’s the guy who never swore and this time, every other word was a swear word. He said, “Look how this makes me look! Hezbollah is putting out that I get thrown crumbs. They get everything.” I think his notion was that he would do something similar. He would show that he wouldn’t give up negotiations, but he would start to put pressure on the Israelis through violence.

But I think he lost control of it. As I said, he never foreclosed an option. So he allowed the Tanzim to be armed. He didn’t do a lot to stop Hamas from being armed—he thought he might need them. I think he wanted to show that, like Hezbollah, he could create responsiveness from the Israelis by using violence and it obviously did the opposite. I also don’t think he realized that this would take on a life of its own in the way that it did.

To what extent did this lead to where we were on October 6 in Israel?

On the one hand, Hamas doing what it did on October 7 is qualitatively different in terms of the size of it. But it’s very similar to what they did every time they thought that we were really making progress in the 1990s, when there would be bombings. The most profound bombings were the ones three months after the assassination of Rabin. That was also a time when the Israeli public was amazed by the Palestinian sense of mourning over the assassination of Rabin. It created the sense that they really had a common future after all.

I had people on the Israeli right telling me that Shimon Peres could achieve with Rabin’s death what would not have been possible if he were alive. And then there’s four bombs in nine days. And the people who were ready, who saw this as a real possibility, were now saying, This is the kind of peace you’re going to deliver? This was Hamas. And this was Hamas again, because it looked like there was a real possibility of a Saudi normalization with Israel. The impulse is the same.

With all that said, I do believe there will be a debate in Israel when all this is over. First, I think there will be a political reckoning because this was the darkest day in Israel’s history. I think there’ll also be a debate over how you deal with the Palestinians.

One side of that debate will be the people who say that this just proves you can’t have a Palestinian state, because look who could take it over and look at the threats we could face. But the other side of the debate is going to be: look, we’ve just removed Hamas as a threat—for now. But if you think that we can freeze forever the reality with the Palestinians on our terms, even if you have basically removed Hamas as a threat, we’re going to get their successors. This is going to be the crux of the debate. It’s going to take place. And honestly, the key to remember is since the Second Intifada, there’s been no debate, none, on the Israeli side.

What do you think it looks like from the Palestinian side?

I think for Palestinians, I think the sense is they lost any sense of hope or sense of possibility. Actually, on both sides, there’s a common loss of hope and possibility. If you do a poll on two states now, it’s negative on both sides. But that’s because both sides don’t think it’s possible.

There are some on the progressive left who have said that the answer is you have one state that’s called Israel-Palestine, where everybody has the same right to vote, has the same rights, etc. Do you think that’s realistic?

No. Because their separate national identities are not going to disappear. Look at the rest of the region. Every place where you have more than one national identity, sectarian identity or tribal identity, that’s a state that’s either at war with itself or completely paralyzed. If you want the Israelis and Palestinians to look like Lebanon or Syria or Libya or Yemen or Iraq, then yes, let’s have one state. This is a fantasy to think that the separate Palestinian identity is going to disappear or that the separate Israeli identity is going to disappear. It’s not. This is going to be much more likely to be a divorce than a marriage.

Do you think that, when this is over, there also has to be a reckoning on the Palestinian side?

I think there has to be a basic reform on the Palestinian side, the level of corruption in the P.A. and frankly, the level of corruption with Hamas—if you had a free and fair election in Gaza, without intimidation, Hamas would lose. But Fatah would likely lose in the West Bank if there were free and fair elections, and they would probably lose to Hamas. There’s complete frustration with the leadership on each side, whether it’s in the West Bank or Gaza.

What’s needed, ultimately, coming out of this is Hamas can’t be in a position where it still controls Gaza and can prevent what I call demilitarization for reconstruction. But the P.A. needs to be reformed as well. You know, you had a five year period when Salam Fayyad cleaned things up in the West Bank dramatically, but eventually he was removed.

To what extent do you think the occupation prevents that kind of reform from happening? Because everything’s pointed outwards, at Israel, instead of internally, right?

Well, the interesting thing is it didn’t prevent it in 2007. You had it from 2007 to 2012. Fayyad wanted to build the institutions of the state to the P.A, to the point where no one could deny it was a state. Essentially his model was what the Zionists did. Does the occupation complicate things? Of course, but we’ve seen an example that it was working before.

Okay, last question. How do you think this current war ends?

I have to say I hope as opposed to I know. I think it has to end with Hamas’s military infrastructure being almost entirely destroyed. I think that it has to end with Hamas not being able to block an interim administration of Palestinian technocrats operating under some kind of international umbrella. I think Arab and non-Arab states need to play a role. There needs to be a civil administration. There needs to be a kind of police force that can help provide security and that needs, I think, to come from the Moroccans, the Egyptians, the U.A.E., Bahrain. And I think there needs to be massive reconstruction, but based on some kind of transparent mechanism to ensure the materials go for what they’re intended for.

That’s what I hope will be the result. And I think anything short of that and we’re going to just see a replay. It’ll only be a matter of time before Hamas would rebuild itself again, just like it’s done after every previous conflict.

Julia