Could Joe Biden have gotten the hostages out of Gaza thirteen months ago? Or more accurately, the politburo running the Biden White House?
Color me skeptical — not about the opportunity, but the execution it would have required. The Times of London reports today, though, that the Biden Regency got offered the exact same deal in September 2024 that Donald Trump proposed in September 2025. While the Times wants to spin this as an Israeli decision to reject the plan, the White House refused to consider it first, according to their source (via Ann Althouse):
Gershon Baskin, the architect of the negotiations that freed the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011, revealed on Thursday that Hamas had agreed the exact same terms of the deal in September 2024, in the last months of the Biden administration, but that Biden officials had disregarded it while Binyamin Netanyahu had refused point blank. …
Baskin said he got his plan on to Biden’s desk but was unable to get a hearing from his chief negotiator. “Brett McGurk refused to sway from the bad deal that he was negotiating,” he said.
Baskin said members of the American negotiating team “were as frustrated as I was in their inability to convince Biden and Biden’s people to look seriously at the deal on the table”. In Doha, the Qataris said they could do nothing more “without the American adoption of the plan, nothing could be done, because the obstacle was Israel”.
I suspect the issue was “Biden’s people” more than Biden himself. Why? Biden was a zombie at that point, barely able to function in the previous couple of years of his presidency. In October 2023, Biden couldn’t even hold a coherent conversation with special counsel Robert Hur, failing to recollect even the years he had served as Vice President and the timing of the death of his son, as recordings released this year demonstrated. He was in no condition to juggle the complexities of lunch, let alone a hostage deal.
By September 2024, the Biden Politburo was preparing to run matters for Kamala Harris, not Joe Biden. Even if they were inclined to take this deal, they would have wanted it postponed until January or February 2025, when Harris could take credit for it. However, it seems very doubtful that Biden or his politburo would have taken this deal at all. This deal would not have been punitive enough toward Israel and Netanyahu, and it would have enraged the pro-Hamas wing of the Democrat Party. The Biden Regency wanted a deal that would humble Netanyahu, provide another lease on life for Hamas, and curry favor in Tehran in order to get them to agree to allow the US to allow Iran to build nuclear weapons. That was the purpose of the JCPOA, after all — a way to contain Israel under the thumb of the Iranian mullahs, and to disengage the US from the region.
What about the other part of the equation? Why did Netanyahu reject the deal last year but embrace it now? Largely because of the above. Netanyahu knew that Biden, and the Obamaites pulling the strings in his administration, wanted to appease Iran while only paying lip service to Israel’s security concerns. By September 2024, the Democrats’ foostie-playing with radical pro-Hamas activists had matched the fever pitch on American campuses from UCLA to Haaaahhhvaaaahd. Taking this deal while the US government was run by Hamas sympathizers — especially Harris as the prospect for the next four years — would have meant disaster for Israel.
That’s why Netanyahu made Baskin aware that he wanted to wait for the next administration to cut a deal of any kind by September 2024:
Baskin would soon learn that the Israelis had no intention of striking any agreement before a change of administration in Washington. On December 26, 2024, Baskin met Ronen Bar, then head of the Shin Bet agency, where he “was requested not to use my back channels, because ‘in three weeks there will be a ceasefire deal’”.
“From that moment, it was clear to me that the only way that the war would come to an end is when President Trump makes the decision that it has to end,” he said.
That was a gamble of sorts by Netanyahu, but the stakes were low. If Harris had won the election, Netanyahu could have waited until after the election to re-engage on the terms of this proposal. He might have needed to cut a deal while Biden’s handlers still ran the presidency, though, because Harris is even more hostile to Israel. Biden’s politburo may have wanted a legacy-defining deal by that point, too, especially if they believed that Harris would clean out the Obamaites during the transition. However, there was no way this deal would work with either Biden or Harris in charge, because Hamas wouldn’t have taken their obligations seriously while either of them were in charge, which is why refusal wasn’t much of a gamble for Netanyahu.
In the end, Netanyahu took the deal because Trump took Iran’s nuclear threat off the table. Israel also humiliated the mullahs in the Twelve Day War by utterly destroying their air defenses within hours, but the end of the rapidly growing nuclear threat by Trump gave Netanyahu the upper hand in these negotiations. With Trump restoring the credibility of American security guarantees to Israel and Iran out of the way, this deal actually could work in Israel’s favor. Hamas would have little choice now but to comply, as Trump has made clear that his threats of intervention are not just bluster.
I don’t doubt that the Biden regency had this opportunity to get hostages out a year earlier. Biden’s minders simply didn’t want to take the deal or provide the necessary support to Israel to make it work. That’s what happens when an American politburo decides to side with radical-Islamist theocracies rather than liberal democracies, and their supporters turn into rabid pro-terror activists.
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