Middle East Insider To Speak Sunday At The Dreamland

Talk of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resurfaced this week, pulled into the spotlight by European leaders reacting to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

French President Emmanuel Macron said his nation would recognize an independent Palestinian state in September. Britain’s Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, said the UK would do the same if Israel does not agree to a ceasefire with Hamas.

Robert Malley, a veteran U.S. mediator of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, will be on Nantucket Sunday to discuss these developments and much more in the latest installment of Wavemaker Conversations Live at the Dreamland.

Malley was on the U.S. negotiating team in the summer of 2000, when President Bill Clinton brought PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to Camp David with the hope of engineering a deal that would set the two parties on a road to two states, living in peace, side by side.

As the talks were collapsing, Malley and a fellow team member were sent to visit Arafat in his cabin at Camp David “in a last-ditch attempt to get his agreement to the U.S. proposal.”

They left Arafat’s cabin empty-handed. In fact, every effort to pursue a two-state solution has ended with empty hands.

How can the future be different? Where is the hope when, as Malley writes in his upcoming book, “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” both sides “seek refuge in the wish that the other side will vanish.”

Fast-forward to the Hamas massacres in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the Israeli military’s sustained onslaught of Gaza.

Malley had recently been recruited to Yale as a fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and was preparing to teach a class on the subject he knew best.

“I’m well aware of how polarized and even toxic debates around Israel-Palestine can be,” he wrote. “I’m also well aware of the fact that we all have biases and prejudices, myself included. I’m trying to take steps as best I can to address that. (Students) don’t need to conceal or change their own – just to listen and try to understand their peers.”

Among the class assignments: each student would prepare a presentation advocating for the side they disagreed with – to walk in the shoes of another.

Malley’s life’s work has required him to be adept at walking in the shoes of many others.

It has driven him to try, again and again, as a U.S. mediator, to help get Israelis and Palestinians to a “yes” they can both live with.

It led him, while running a conflict-resolution think tank, to meet with Hamas leaders, a move that set back his career but that he defended, citing the need, in his field, to “meet with all sorts of savory and unsavory people and report on what they say.”

During the Obama administration, Malley served as the president’s point person for the campaign against the Islamic State. He served on the team that negotiated the Iran nuclear deal.

And in 2021, he was appointed U.S. special envoy to Iran, to try to revive that deal.

As we enter the first week of August 2025, how does Robert Malley assess the accelerated upheavals in the Middle East, not only in Israel and Gaza, but in Syria, where Bashar Assad has been overthrown; in Lebanon, where Israel’s military has sidelined Iran’s ally, Hezbollah; and in Iran itself following Israel’s attacks against that nation’s military leadership, defense infrastructure and nuclear facilities?

Malley will share his insights – and the experiences that have shaped them – in conversation at the Dreamland Sunday, followed by an audience Q&A, where there will be one non-negotiable: respectful dialogue.

Robert Malley in conversation with Michael Schulder, 5 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 3, Dreamland Theater, 17 South Water St. Tickets at www.nantucketdreamland.org

Michael Schulder is the host of Wavemaker Conversations, a platform he created after 17 years as a senior executive producer at CNN, and five years as a writer for Peter Jennings on ABC World News Tonight.