Michael Arria
Mondoweiss / January 18, 2025
The Biden administration could have delivered the same ceasefire agreement last year, but they refused to exert pressure on Netanyahu.
Despite reports of potential snags, and looming threats to tank the deal from extreme right politicians, Israel’s security cabinet voted Friday to approve the recent ceasefire agreement and pause the attacks on Gaza.
The deal will cement the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, as well as Palestinians currently being held in Israeli jails. Netanyahu’s office said that the release of hostages is slated to start on Sunday afternoon.
The news comes just two days after President Biden, President-elect Donald Trump and mediators announced an agreement had been reached.
“This is the ceasefire agreement I introduced last spring,” declared Biden in a televised speech. “The road to this deal has not been easy — I’ve reached this point because of the pressure that Israel put on Hamas, backed by the United States.”
Biden’s statement is a curious one. On one hand, he’s right. The text of the agreement is almost exactly the same as the one that was introduced on May 27, 2024. However, Biden neglects to point out why that deal fell apart.
It wasn’t because of Hamas’ obstinance, as Israeli and U.S. officials have repeatedly claimed, but because Netanyahu consistently tacked on additional provisions in order to torpedo a deal. When a deal seemingly came together in May, Netanyahu said it couldn’t be accepted until Hamas was completely destroyed, an obvious impossibility. When hopes emerged in July, he demanded military screenings for Palestinians returning to northern Gaza and refused to relinquish Israeli control of the Philadelphi corridor.
“No one in Hamas can accept any form of Israeli presence in the Netzarim corridor and investigating the people while they are returning home. And no one accepts this and accepts the military presence in the Philadelphi corridor and the Rafah crossing,” Hamas’s political bureau Basem Naim told Drop Site News in September. “I think the only way to reach a deal is to lift these points from any deal,” otherwise “it means that we are accepting a permanent occupation of the Gaza Strip.”
The Biden administration allowed the Israeli government to torpedo the negotiations without pressure or push-back.
“The reason why a deal was never finalized is because Netanyahu has been imposing new last-minute conditions all the time,” tweeted Palestinian journalist Muhammad Shehada earlier this week. “So it’s been basically 8 months of the US pressing Hamas to accept more and more Israeli dictates to get Netanyahu on board, but he keeps adding new ones.”
Pressure finally developed as a result of the presidential transition.
“The current positive result would not have been reached without the efforts of the defense establishment, the one responsible for the terrible failure that led to the massacre,” writes Amos Harel in Haaretz. “And yet, negotiations would not have reached their final lap without Trump. Over the autumn, and increasingly so after his victory in the presidential election in November, he set his target: a full cease-fire and the gradual return of all the hostages.”
Questions about the ceasefire still remain and many are understandably concerned about Trump might have promised Netanyahu in order to force a deal. However, it’s clear that Netanyahu could have been pressured to take this deal last year and that thousands of Palestinians have been killed since those negotiations fell apart.
In an interview with Democracy Now earlier this week, negotiator Daniel Levy pointed out that Netanyahu experienced pressure to reject the deal from far-right Israeli lawmakers, but none from the most powerful country in the world.
“What all this adds up to — without boring people with the intricacies of Israeli coalition math, what all this adds up to is that Netanyahu has a political problem if he moves forward with this. And it’s one of the main reasons — there were other things, but it’s one of the main reasons he did not want to go to a deal,” said Levy. “But his problem is that that was only sustainable when domestic pressure was the only factor, if there was no significant external pressure. The only actor that can bring significant external pressure is the U.S., because the U.S. offers the weapons, the arms, the political, diplomatic, economic cover. Israel couldn’t do this for a day without the U.S. The Biden administration refused to use that leverage.”
Michael Arria is Mondoweiss’ U.S. correspondent
