Answer: No, but everyone around him has. After spending the last eleven months trying to pressure Israel into concessions that Hamas refuses to accept anyway, the White House has just about given up on crafting another operational pause in Gaza. As Axios reports, Biden’s team has found itself without any progress or credibility with either side in this fight — mainly because it keeps attempting to ignore the reality of the conflict.
Barak Ravid chalks it up to hardening positions by the belligerents as his lead:
The White House is reassessing its strategy for a hostage-release and ceasefire in Gaza deal as President Biden’s top aides deliberate whether there is a point in presenting a new proposal as Hamas and Israel both take tougher positions in negotiations, U.S. officials say.
Why it matters: Biden, who is personally engaged in drawing the U.S. strategy, wants to continue pushing for a deal, but his advisors think a new proposal would go nowhere right now.
Readers need to drop down several paragraphs to find out what really matters:
Officials said the White House faces a difficult dilemma because they feel Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar doesn’t want a deal right now.
And even if he does, Biden doesn’t want to be seen as rewarding Hamas with more concessions after it murdered hostages and is making more extreme demands, officials said.
Hamas hasn’t been interested in any deal, not unless it includes an Israeli surrender. That’s why they took the hostages in the first place. We didn’t need to see a captured Hamas document purportedly from Sinwar himself (Israeli intel disputes that) to figure that out. Sinwar has played Biden and his team for his own propaganda and strategic purposes, driving wedges between Israel and its allies in his greater plan to force its collapse and annihilation at the hands of the radical Islamists in Iran’s coalition of terror networks.
A child could have seen through Sinwar’s strategy. If that document got written by a mid-level flunky, as the IDF now suggests, it’s only because he wanted to curry favor by telling the boss to do exactly what Sinwar has always done, with hostages and with propaganda.
In truth, a hostage deal and a cease-fire agreement acceptable to all sides was never going to happen. Sinwar started a war and wants to keep fighting it, operational pauses or not, until he achieves his goal of Israel’s destruction. Israel doesn’t want to get destroyed, and they want to end this war now rather than keep fighting it for another 20 years. That has been the insurmountable reality since October 7, and really since Hamas seized total power after their election in 2006 and began firing rockets into Israel. That’s why Hamas continually violates cease-fire agreements, including the one in place on October 7, and why they keep abducting hostages to avoid the consequences of the total war they keep initiating.
The Israeli negotiators have become equally pessimistic, Israeli media now report. They expect the US to drop its plans to produce a “take it or leave it” proposal that at least would have allowed the mediators to demand that Hamas take a look:
The chances of a phased hostage-ceasefire agreement being achieved on the basis of Israel’s May proposal are “close to zero” and there is “very broad pessimism” among the Israeli negotiators, Channel 12 reported Sunday, citing unnamed sources in the Israeli security establishment.
The US, which had indicated it was planning to present a new bridging proposal in the next two or three days, is now regarded as unlikely to do so, it added.
The report cited immense frustration among Israel’s negotiators who, it said, had believed until recently it was possible to at least reach an agreement between Israel and the mediators that would then be conveyed to Hamas.
But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Hebrew press conference last Monday, at which he repeatedly insisted on maintaining IDF control of the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border — a stance that was not specified in the Netanyahu-approved May proposal — “buried” the chances of such an agreement. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar then hardened his positions, the report said.
Worth noting, however, is that this press conference followed the discovery that Hamas executed six hostages in Rafah. I’d call that a “hardening” of Sinwar’s position that preceded Netanyahu’s demand for control of Hamas’ potential lines of communication.
Israel’s chief negotiator points this out as well. Gal Hirsch told a conference in DC that Israel has not yet turned down a deal, but that murdering hostages makes it clear that Hamas really doesn’t want anything except total victory:
“There is a direct link between international pressure on Israel and Hamas’ willingness to negotiate,” Gal Hirsch, Israel’s chief negotiator for hostages and missing persons, said in an interview on the main stage of the MEAD Conference, held in Washington, DC. “While our negotiating team is in Doha, Hamas continues to kill hostages in Gaza. The military pressure will not stop.”
Hirsch, speaking with Israel Hayom political commentator Ariel Kahana, discussed the complex dynamics of negotiations with Hamas. He expressed frustration with what he described as a false narrative that Israel is obstructing a deal. “Unfortunately, many have embraced the narrative pushed by Hamas — that we are the ones blocking the deal. This is false. We have never canceled any deal that was on the table. It simply hasn’t happened,” Hirsch said.
And Hirsch also warned that the West keeps playing right into Sinwar’s hands:
“There is a direct correlation between the international pressure on Israel and Hamas’ desire to negotiate. When Israel is under pressure from its allies and other nations, Hamas feels it has achieved much without negotiating and recognizes the hostages as its most valuable asset right now.”
Perhaps the White House has finally figured this out. If they have, though, they should stop blaming the Israelis and Netanyahu for trying to win a war that Hamas insists on starting over and over again.
