What We Could Have Done Differently on Gaza

The real moment of truth on our Gaza policy was at the end of 2023

As part of my writing, I think it’s important to evaluate as honestly as possible the policies of the Biden-Harris Administration during the 15 months after October 7th. This is my first attempt. As I do that, I want to state up front that making decisions in the middle of a war with imperfect information is incredibly hard. What I saw was a lot of dedicated people who were trying to do the right thing and were working from a position of good faith even if I’m sure we made plenty of mistakes.

Much of the focus thus far has been on the aftermath of the May 2024 proposal by President Biden and whether if Biden had put more pressure on Netanyahu, we could have gotten the deal much earlier. I believe that getting a deal in May was not possible. Hamas was taking a hard line and holding out for a regional war. But also, Netanyahu’s behavior was deeply problematic as evidenced by accounts from other members of the war cabinet; leaks from the Israeli negotiators; his refusal to engage seriously on a day after plan; and his bad faith engagement with President Biden. It was both the major setbacks to Iran and Hezbollah in the fall of 2024 that caused Hamas to pare back its negotiating position, AND Gidon Sa’ar’s entrance into the government in September which gave Netanyahu the flexibility to preserve his coalition while losing Ben Gvir that set the conditions for a hostage deal. Though it says a lot about Netanyahu that he cared more about preserving his government than getting the hostages out, since he could have had support for a deal from much of the Israeli opposition at any time.

For me though, I keep going back to the end of 2023 and early 2024 where we could have taken a different approach that may have put the war on an entirely different trajectory. We will never know.

The situation in December 2023

Near the end of 2023 Israel’s operations in Gaza had already done enough to ensure Hamas could not repeat the actions of October 7th. Hamas had been significantly degraded militarily and even more importantly its success on October 7th had come from the element of surprise, which could not be repeated. And so the question was about the other two primary objectives of the war – getting the hostages out and ensuring Hamas could not again rule Gaza.

I was willing to support a war and even wait on the hostages, if there was a clear plan to build a real alternative to Hamas that would eventually control the Gaza Strip. But that’s not what was happening. It became clear to me by this time – especially after an early December trip to the region – that Netanyahu was never going to make the incredibly hard decisions he would need to make to start to build an alternative to Hamas in Gaza. Such decisions would have involved working with the Arab States and the Palestinian Authority on some kind of a plan – similar to the one the Arab states are now again developing – to replace Hamas with a viable Palestinian alternative that would in the long-term probably mean the reunification of Gaza and the West Bank under one Palestinian leadership. Other members of Netanyahu’s war cabinet at the time such as Gallant, Gantz, and Eisenkot were not 100% sold on all this, but they were willing to have serious deliberations about it. Netanyahu was not, because he knew he would lose Ben Gvir and Smotrich and his hard right coalition, and so he stopped his government from having those discussions. Given that there was no partner on the Israeli side willing to seriously strategize on how to replace Hamas, I concluded there was no point in prolonging the war and we needed to shift to an approach of just trying to end it as quickly as possible and get all of the hostages out.

The other key factor at the time was that Joe Biden still had tremendous leverage over Bibi Netanyahu. Biden’s approval rating in Israel was quite high after having visited Israel in the aftermath of October 7th and responded so firmly to deter Iranian and Hezbollah actions while sending significant military assets to the region to defend Israel. At the same time, Netanyahu was as unpopular as he has ever been and was polling far behind Benny Gantz, another member of the war cabinet. This meant that if Biden had at that moment chosen to have a real public disagreement with Netanyahu and done it with Gantz’s support, he may have had tremendous leverage to affect Israeli decision making.

What could we have done differently in late 2023

Given the situation described above, what if at the moment of leverage in December 2023 or January 2024, Joe Biden had laid out a completely alternative vision for how to end the war, instead of waiting until May? What if at that time, he had concluded that one of the centers of gravity for getting a successful resolution of the war was ousting a far right wing extremist Israeli government that would never do what needed to be done to get the hostages out or plan for a real post-conflict scenario. What if at the peak of his popularity in Israel he had gone out and offered the Israeli public a choice. If he had given a speech and presented two pathways to the Israeli public and to the world. Behind door number 1 was a ceasefire and hostage deal that would end the war. The international community including the Gulf States would work with Israel to rebuild Gaza. There would be an Arab-led international force that would eventually be replaced with Palestinian Security Forces that would take over Gaza. Israelis would not have to continue fighting in perpetuity. The deal could have involved a ceasefire in the North as well. The U.S. would be behind this plan 100%. And this would be the first step towards normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia and the entire Arab world. For Israel to accept this, it would have to accept a role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, but there would also be major asks made of the Palestinians including reforming their government, ending the prisoner payment system, and reforming UNRWA.

Behind door number 2, there will be no hostage deal and end of the war. It will drag on for another year or more. Many more hostages will die, and Israel would continue to send its sons and daughters to war. The U.S. would still support Israel’s defense, but there would be little in the way of normalization or improved relations with the rest of the region. And in the end, without an alternative plan for Gaza, Hamas would still control the territory (Pretty much where we’ve ended up).

If Biden had done this a little over a year ago while he still had the Israeli public, would it have forced Netanyahu’s hand? Might it have forced Netanyahu to cut a deal with Gantz and Eisenkot to pursue a more centrist strategy that would have ended the war earlier, gotten the hostages out, and established a genuine alternative to Hamas. To get to that outcome, might it have forced him to abandon Ben Gvir and Smotrich and come to an agreement with Gantz for elections by the end of 2024. Might it have led to some of Netanyahu’s other coalition members or even members of Likud abandoning him and going for new elections? And given how unpopular Netanyahu was at the time, would elections have brought in a more centrist or center right Israeli government that could more responsibly prosecute the war? Maybe.

On the other hand, it was risky. It could have burned relations with the Israeli government and if it left the government in place, we would have had no leverage. And as we have seen both in the U.S. and Israel, the right wing has a tendency to stick together even when they are not necessarily aligned with leadership. Some of the steps that Biden would have been asking for were not very popular with the Israeli public, though the benefits he’d be offering – getting the hostages out and real prospects of normalization – were. And of course, Hamas also gets a vote. Even if we managed to trigger the necessary changes in Israeli behavior, it’s possible Hamas would not have been open to a deal - though in that case a more responsible Israeli government could still do much more to develop an effective plan to replace Hamas.

We will never know how things might have gone. What we do know is where we did end up. The war dragged on for a year with great suffering in Gaza and hostages continuing to die. The disagreements between Netanyahu and Biden surfaced piecemeal and incoherently, with Netanyahu using every opportunity to create distance between himself and Biden, and weaken Biden’s standing with the Israeli public eventually eroding his leverage. We ended up in the spring of 2024 with a contorted policy including some cooperation and some confrontation that really didn’t work. In late May, President Biden called for a ceasefire and hostage deal and put our policy on a better course. However, by then his leverage with Netanyahu was gone.

The Administration spent the next seven months pushing for a deal. It did the right thing in supporting Israel’s operations against Hezbollah and Iran and then helped negotiate the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire in Lebanon to isolate Hamas and lower its asking price. Meanwhile, the entrance of Gidon Sa’ar into the Israeli government combined with Trump’s election and his strong preference for a ceasefire created new flexibility and leverage with Netanyahu, and in January there was finally a deal.

We will never know, however, if it might have been possible a year earlier.