As Monday dawned in Doha, where negotiators were set to meet and discuss the beginnings of a peace agreement to end the war in Gaza, prospects for ending a bloody conflict that upended regional stability and threatened to engulf the entire Middle East in war seemed closer than ever.
Back in Washington, Donald Trump similarly looks closer than ever to achieving the peacemaker label he’s long sought and often falsely claimed for himself by running around the world and claiming credit for ending multiple wars — the current count stands (allegedly) at seven.
And news coverage in both America and Israel is making the case that the U.S. president did what his predecessor either could not or would not: he “strong-armed” Benjamin Netanyahu into bringing this conflict to an end.
On the eve of the two-year anniversary of the war’s Oct. 7, 2023, onset, Israeli strikes in Gaza were reportedly reduced significantly but still ongoing. In sporadic strikes around the territory on Saturday, according to Reuters, 36 people died, including children.
Then, Donald Trump — in a Truth Social post, naturally — called for Israel to “immediately” cease attacking the Gaza Strip as negotiations proceed.
And though it seems Benjamin Netanyahu hasn’t fully complied, there’s 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’s neck. To bring an end to the war, from this point, would be a massive blow to Joe Biden’s legacy and evidence that the president’s brash, demanding approach to foreign affairs was more effective than Biden’s “hug Bibi closer” strategy.
Trump himself on Sunday declared that speed was a necessary component of success in peace talks between Israel and Hamas, likely drawing on his experience trying to negotiate the same between Russia and Ukraine. While Hamas hasn’t agreed to the full breadth of the White House 20-point peace plan, the U.S. president is now putting immense pressure — very publicly — on both sides to get both parties to the finish line.
Under Joe Biden’s 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’s 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.
It wasn’t much.
As one former Biden State Department official (who resigned over the Democratic president’s handling of the war) wrote in a piece for the Quincy Institute: “even 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.”
“Instead,” Annelle Rodriguez-Sheline wrote, “The 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.”
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, telling Israeli media: “God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period…We fought for over a year and the [Biden] administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did.”
No such illusions exist around Trump’s style of diplomacy. Israeli correspondent Isabel Kershner wrote for The New York Times after Trump reportedly complained to the Israeli prime minister that he was “always so f***ing negative”: “It was abundantly clear to Israelis, and to Palestinians and others in the region, that the one calling the shots was President Trump.”
One Israeli columnist, cited by the Times and Axios, added that “Trump doesn’t threaten Netanyahu; he orders him.”
It’s a devastating dynamic, overall, for those few remaining Democrats still willing to defend the Biden administration’s 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’s national security adviser, has evolved to the position now where in August he said that he’d 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.
“There are no more serious military objectives to achieve. It’s just bombing the rubble into rubble,” he said on The Bulwark Podcast.
Harris, meanwhile, used the issue as a wedge between her and the former president in her book, 107 Days, 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’s 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.
“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,” 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.”
Few Democrats (and fewer with future, upwardly-mobile ambitions) are now willing to side against the majority of their base over the former administration’s 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.
Progressives are livid with the concept of putting the peace process in Trump’s hands, who they argue is putting Palestinians at rhetorical gunpoint to accept a deal.
“Trump’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 — a potential prelude to the Trump-Netanyahu plan for the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Gaza,” IMEU Policy Project executive director Margaret DeReus told The Independent on Monday.
But, she added, “Both Presidents Biden and Trump have had all the power to end Israel’s 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.”
Harris, meanwhile, remains politically tarred by both the conflict and the age-related downward spiral of the Biden campaign.
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 “party establishment”.
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.
