If this cease-fire holds, its success will be a triumph that Trump and Netanyahu alone can claim.
Vox.com senior correspondent Zach Beauchamp is thoroughly unimpressed with the Gaza peace agreement, the initial stages of which seem likely to result in a sustained cessation of hostilities in the two-year war that broke out following the October 7 massacre.
In Beauchamp’s estimation, this very deal was on the table under Joe Biden. The recalcitrant Benjamin Netanyahu government just wouldn’t give the former president a win. And it was only because Donald Trump took a firmer hand with Bibi that Israel grudgingly accepted its own victory. Military power was not decisive here. “Trump strong-arming Bibi was decisive,” the Vox scribe and “distinguished visiting fellow” at the University of Pennsylvania wrote.
That’s just the tidy, bias-confirming narrative we might expect from someone with the depth of regional expertise commanded by the likes of Zach Beachamp. And yet, as is often the case, the facts as this correspondent understands them just aren’t true.
Beauchamp’s claim that the Biden administration was not tough enough on Netanyahu when it presented him with “take it or leave it” cease-fire terms in September 2024 is truly mystifying. That deal, if it had been implemented, would have released the hostages Hamas seized in 2023 in stages – first, women, the elderly, and the ill, and only later (if ever) fighting-age males, which would continue to be used as a bargaining chip. The bodies of the hostages inside Gaza — wherever they might have been — would be subject to subsequent “painstaking deliberations.”
In exchange for this act of beneficence, not only would Israel be compelled to reciprocate with the release of its own security detainees, but the Israeli Defense Forces would also have had to withdraw from most of the Gaza Strip, including much of the strategically vital Philadelphi Corridor bordering Egypt. That was all in “phase one.”
And as the Biden White House announced at the time, this was a proposal that “Israel had agreed to.” I bet you can guess which party did reject the terms on offer. That’s right: Hamas.
Even the sympathetic voices at the Washington Post couldn’t help but notice the “abrupt introduction by Hamas of a new demand surrounding which prisoners Israel would release,” one week after Biden’s proposal was forcefully put to Israel. The Post’s reporters could only dutifully relate what a “senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential talks” was telling them. And what they were hearing was that “Hamas introduced the new demand that has for now put a deal even further out of reach.”
In addition, it’s just obtuse to suggest that the arrangement Netanyahu and Trump imposed on Hamas is identical to the September 2024 overture. Under the Trump deal, all hostages, living or dead, are either delivered or accounted for up front – before Israel engages in reciprocity with the release of a disproportionate number of convicted murderers and terrorist masterminds. Under Trump’s framework, the IDF does not have to withdraw from the whole of Gaza and its strategically vital security corridors. Indeed, the Trump deal allows the IDF an indefinite presence in Gaza that is functionally endorsed by the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.
Not only was this deal not the result of Trump putting the screws to Netanyahu. It’s arguable that it would not have come about had Trump not let Netanyahu loose – in anticipated ways, like the IDF’s assault on Gaza City in the final days of this war, and also in unexpected ways, like the Israeli Air Force’s strike on a Hamas safehouse in Doha. The terms of another cease-fire agreement Biden negotiated in January 2025, and that Steve Witkoff pursued in the early days of this administration, attest to that fact. That temporary cessation of hostilities fell apart when Hamas refused to release the hostages. It was the application of military force, as well as the diplomatic offensive, that led the region’s Hamas-friendly intermediaries to convince the terrorist group to give up the ghost.
If this cease-fire holds, its success will be a triumph that Trump and Netanyahu alone can claim. It’s understandable that this set of facts irritates those who perceive themselves to be far more worldly in their outlook and professional in their comportment than the boor in the Oval Office. But that’s their problem. It would be nice if they worked their cognitive dissonance out on their own rather than forcing us to resolve their cognitive conundrums for them.