And though it seems Benjamin Netanyahu hasn\u2019t fully complied, there\u2019s no doubt in the minds of experts on the Israeli and American relationship that Donald Trump has successfully tugged a leash around the prime minister\u2019s neck. To bring an end to the war, from this point, would be a massive blow to Joe Biden\u2019s legacy and evidence that the president\u2019s brash, demanding approach to foreign affairs was more effective than Biden\u2019s \u201chug Bibi closer\u201d strategy.<\/p>\n
Trump himself on Sunday\u00a0declared that speed was a necessary component of success\u00a0in peace talks between Israel and Hamas, likely drawing on his experience trying to negotiate the same between Russia and Ukraine. While Hamas hasn\u2019t agreed to the full breadth of the White House 20-point peace plan, the U.S. president is now putting immense pressure \u2014 very publicly \u2014 on both sides to get both parties to the finish line.<\/p>\n
Under Joe Biden\u2019s presidency, U.S. officials repeatedly stressed that the president and his top deputies, including Vice President Kamala Harris, were working tirelessly to reach a peace agreement. And while it\u2019s a certain truth that political dynamics around the war are starkly different now than from what they were in January-November of 2024, enough reporting exists to get a picture of the kind of pressure and leverage that the Biden administration (at the direction of the president) was willing to put on Israel.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t much.<\/p>\n
As one former Biden State Department official (who resigned over the Democratic president\u2019s handling of the war)\u00a0wrote in a piece for the Quincy Institute:\u00a0\u201ceven the Israeli military expected the United States to allow them to carry out the indiscriminate bombing campaign only for a matter of weeks, before reining in the scale of destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cInstead,\u201d Annelle Rodriguez-Sheline wrote, \u201cThe Biden administration violated American laws and bypassed Congress to rush an additional $17.9 billion in weapons and security assistance to Israel, all while lying to the American public about tirelessly working for a ceasefire.\u201d<\/p>\n
Former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Michael Herzog, had a similar view of the amount of pressure Biden was willing to put on Netanyahu,\u00a0telling Israeli media:\u00a0\u201cGod did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period\u2026We fought for over a year and the [Biden] administration never came to us and said, \u2018ceasefire now.\u2019 It never did.\u201d<\/p>\n No such illusions exist around Trump\u2019s style of diplomacy. Israeli correspondent Isabel Kershner wrote for\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0after Trump\u00a0reportedly complained to the Israeli prime minister that he was \u201calways so f***ing negative\u201d: \u201cIt was abundantly clear to Israelis, and to Palestinians and others in the region, that the one calling the shots was President Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n One Israeli columnist, cited by the Times and Axios, added that \u201cTrump doesn\u2019t threaten Netanyahu; he orders him.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a devastating dynamic, overall, for those few remaining Democrats still willing to defend the Biden administration\u2019s handling of the war through late 2023 and the totality of 2024. And there are just a few of them left: even Jake Sullivan, the president\u2019s national security adviser, has evolved to the position now where in August he said that he\u2019d reached out to Democratic electeds on the Hill to let them know he thought supporting an arms embargo of Israel was an appropriate position. More Democrats voted for such an embargo against Israel this summer than they did at any point during the Biden administration.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are no more serious military objectives to achieve. It\u2019s just bombing the rubble into rubble,\u201d he said on\u00a0The Bulwark Podcast<\/em>.<\/p>\n Harris, meanwhile, used the issue as a wedge between her and the former president in her book,\u00a0107 Days<\/em>, which released in September. Enraging many progressives who complained that she should have done so when it mattered, the former vice president explained that there was, despite her campaign\u2019s denials, daylight between her and Biden on the issue of Gaza, particularly on the issue of showing empathy and remorse for Palestinian civilians killed in the conflict.<\/p>\n “I had pleaded with Joe, when he spoke publicly on this issue, to extend the same empathy he showed to the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of innocent Gazan civilians,\u201d Harris wrote. “But he couldn’t do it: While he could passionately state, ‘I am a Zionist,’ his remarks about innocent Palestinians came off as inadequate and forced.”<\/p>\n Few Democrats (and fewer with future, upwardly-mobile ambitions) are now willing to side against the majority of their base over the former administration\u2019s stance of unconditional support for Israel. Biden, by virtue of age and lack of future interest in politics, will quite possibly never face tough questions about the issue from a journalist or a critic ever again.<\/p>\n Progressives are livid with the concept of putting the peace process in Trump\u2019s hands, who they argue is putting Palestinians at rhetorical gunpoint to accept a deal.<\/p>\n \u201cTrump’s plan is a recipe for Israel’s permanent military presence within Gaza and for denying Palestinians the right to self-determination by having Gaza run by foreigners, not by Palestinians. And Trump has given Israel the green light to ‘finish the job’ if Palestinians don’t accept this diktat \u2014 a potential prelude to the Trump-Netanyahu plan for the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Gaza,\u201d IMEU Policy Project executive director Margaret DeReus told\u00a0The Independent<\/em>\u00a0on Monday.<\/p>\n But, she added, \u201cBoth Presidents Biden and Trump have had all the power to end Israel\u2019s genocide of Palestinians from Day One. Instead, both chose to send Israel billions of dollars in weapons, paid for by our tax dollars. The devastation in Gaza and the unimaginable loss of Palestinian life are a result of their failure to put real pressure on Israel for two years.\u201d<\/p>\n Harris, meanwhile, remains politically tarred by both the conflict and the age-related downward spiral of the Biden campaign.<\/p>\n The prospect of Trump engineering a permanent peace deal would only drive that knife in further for anyone tangibly connected to the 2024 iteration of the \u201cparty establishment\u201d.<\/p>\n Before it picks a nominee in 2028, leading Democrats will still have to answer questions from a very upset base of supporters about why they circled the wagons around this unpopular strategy until it was too late.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As Monday dawned in Doha, where negotiators were set to meet and discuss the\u00a0beginnings of a peace agreement\u00a0to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1996,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,7,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaza","category-news","category-us"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1995"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1997,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1995\/revisions\/1997"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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