It Was Bibi All Along
Trump forces Netanyahu to agree to the same deal he rejected under Biden
The headline in Israel’s leading liberal newspaper could not be more clear: “Trump’s Mideast Envoy Forced Netanyahu to Accept a Gaza Plan He Repeatedly Rejected.” The Ha’aretz story provides fascinating details to what other journalists confirm. The reason Israel’s security cabinet approved a ceasefire and prisoner exchange that could end the 15-month war on Gaza is that Trump wanted it done. It rebuts claims, repeated for months, that Hamas was holding up a ceasefire deal.
It was Bibi all along.
This is not to credit Hamas with anything remotely like good intentions. Hamas is lead by thugs and criminals who masterminded the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. They are fully capable of delaying a ceasefire and continuing the suffering of the Palestinian people for their own perceived benefit. Attacks by elements in the movement may well derail the deal their leaders have struck.
But it is now clear that that Israel has accepted a nearly identical deal to the one the Biden administration drafted in May of last year. It has been Netanyahu, not Hamas, who has been the primary obstacle to ending the war. Thousands of innocents died over those nine months, including Israeli hostages.
It is also true that Hamas has suffered serious setbacks over those nine months - including the death of hundreds of its fighters, the collapse of its allies, Hezbollah and Syrian President Bashar Assad, and the weakening of its backer, Iran. But for nine months, Biden officials shuttled around Middle Eastern capitals trying to convince Netanyahu to stop the war. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spent hours pleading with Netanyahu to no avail.
Trump’s envoy got it done in one afternoon last week.
The details are telling. According to Ha’aratz reporter Chaim Levinson, last Friday evening, Steven Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East enjoy, called from Qatar to tell Netanyahu’s aides that he was coming to Israel the next afternoon to see him. The aides said that was not possible as it was the Sabbath and Bibi could not meet until Saturday night.
Witkoff, a Jewish real estate developer and confidant of Trump’s, told them to get Bibi to the office. “He explained to them in salty English that Shabbat was of no interest to him. His message was loud and clear,” reports Levinson. Bibi backed down and met Witkoff Saturday afternoon. Shortly after, Witkoff flew back to Qatar to seal the deal.
Stop and think about this for a minute. Can you imagine the reaction if Blinken or any other Democrat had tried this? The right-wing media would be ringing with charges of anti-semitism, bullying, betrayal. But Bibi had no choice. Trump made clear that he wanted this war to end. While publicly threatening Hamas that “all hell would break loose” if they didn’t release the hostages by his inauguration day, Trump understood that the real obstacle was in Jerusalem not Gaza or Qatar.
Biden himself kept the charade going for months. Even when he announced the deal earlier this week, he repeated the claim that Hamas had held up the deal. Only months of bombing had forced them to relent.
“It is the result not only of the extreme pressure that Hamas has been under and the changed regional equation after a ceasefire in Lebanon and weakening of Iran,” Biden said January 15, announcing the deal, “but also of dogged and painstaking American diplomacy.” No mention of Bibi’s refusal to agree for nine months. No mention of Blinken’s revelation that Hamas has now recruited as many new fighters as Israel has killed in the war. “Each time Israel completes its military operations and pulls back, Hamas militants regroup and reemerge because there’s nothing else to fill the void,” said Blinken January 14, “Indeed, we assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost.”
Trump’s pressure succeeded where Biden’s reasoned arguments failed. “Witkoff has forced Israel to accept a plan that Netanyahu had repeatedly rejected over the past half year,” says Levinson. “Hamas has not budged from its position that the hostages' freedom must be conditioned on the release of Palestinian prisoners (the easy part) and a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza (the hard one).”
Netanyahu would not agree to the Biden deal because he feared his ruling coalition would collapse and he’d lose power. Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir opposed any deal and threatened to leave the government. They embrace a vision of a Greater Israel that includes annexing the West Bank, clearing part or all of Gaza for occupation by Jewish settlers, and new settlements in parts of Lebanon and Syria.
These extremist elements still oppose the deal. But, as hard-line journalist and Netanyahu ally Yinon Magal told the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14, when asked why the government couldn’t simply wait until after Trump became president and would presumably unleash hell on Hamas, “It’s because Trump is pressing to do it! That’s what’s happening!”
Meanwhile, the addition of a few more moderate Knesset members to Netanyahu’s coalition means that Bibi can afford to have Ben-Gvir leave his government and still survive. As of this writing, it’s unclear if either Ben-Gvir or Smotrich will give up their powerful positions, even while voting against the deal in the Friday Security Council meeting.
Haaretz journalist Amos Herel reports:
“The main consideration driving Netanyahu for quite some time is his political survival. His arrogance and focus on his legal woes contributed to the terrible surprise on the day of the massacre, and his performance did not improve substantially throughout the war. Had Netanyahu bothered to agree to discuss diplomatic solutions for the post-Hamas era, the military may not have had to be needlessly mired in Gaza over the last few months.”
A promising presidency that notched many notable accomplishments may well be remembered primarily for the two glaring national security failures that bookended Biden’s term: the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and the destruction of Gaza.
How do we know that it was Bibi who blocked an end to this war months ago? Because Ben-Gvir brags about it. “In the last year, using our political power, we managed to prevent this deal from going ahead, time after time,” he said on Twitter.
“During the months in which he rejected the plan, which had already been proposed last May by the Biden administration, Netanyahu was mainly worried about his radical right-wing allies Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who threatened to dismantle his coalition,” Harel confirms. “It now appears that Trump left him with no other choice. For years, people have been saying that Netanyahu is the sum of all his fears; it turns out that Trump scares him even more, perhaps justifiably so.”
The kind way to interpret all of this is to say that the deal shows the power of bi-partisanship. Biden crafted the deal, worked for months to get it approved and Trump and his envoy put their shoulders to the wheel to push it over the finish line.
The unkind way is to say that Biden’s strategy of unconditional support for Isreal failed. “The bear hug—along with the near total refusal to hold Netanyahu accountable that went with it—allowed the Israeli prime minister to walk over Biden, time and again,” concludes Noah Lanard for Mother Jones.
Even as they exit, Biden and his aides claim that pressuring Bibi by denying Israel the weapons it used to bomb Palestinians would have threatened Israel’s survival. “We were not going to leave Israel defenseless,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told PBS reporter Nick Schifrin this week.
Instead, the war went on. At least sixty-five thousand Palestinians, mostly women, children and the elderly, have died, according to a new study in the peer-review medical journal Lancet, along with over 400 Israeli solders. (Israeli raids in just the two days since the deal was announced have killed at least 115 more Palestinians, again, mostly women, children and the elderly.)
It is likely that Biden’s support for Bibi’s war cost Kamala Harris the election, as distraught Democratic voters stayed home or voted for alternative candidates. A new poll shows that a full 29 percent of those who voted for Biden in 2020 but did not support Harris in 2024 cited the slaughter in Gaza as the top reason, above the economy at 24 percent and immigration at 11 percent. Across the six battleground states that flipped from Biden to Trump, 20 percent of these voters said “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” was their top issue in deciding not to vote for Harris, the second-most cited reason behind only the economy (33 percent).
A promising presidency that notched many notable accomplishments may well be remembered primarily for two glaring national security failures that bookended Biden’s term: the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and the destruction of Gaza.
It didn’t have to be this way. If only Biden had understood what Trump seems to have grasped intuitively. To end the war, the key was Bibi all along.
Joe- I have been saying this for months…Bibi played Biden like a fiddle. Biden didn’t have the backbone to really force Bibi’s hand. He didn’t even have to withhold arms..a simple refusal to veto. Security Council resolutions would have done the trick.
Biden sacrificed his legacy, his presidency and thousands of Palestinian lives to support Bibi and got bupkis in return.
Tom
Interesting take. I believe, however, that Netanyahu wasn't so much afraid of Trump, but wants to make him look good in the hope that Trump will support him fully in the upcoming years. So while I agree that Bibi was the problem, I do disagree with the reason for the change.