A former senior staffer of former US president Joe Biden argued Tuesday that his former boss may have had a chance to secure a hostage deal already at the end of 2023, offering one of the first public reckonings from the previous administration regarding its handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
In a post on his personal blog, Ilan Goldenberg — who served in several high-level positions at the White House and the Pentagon since 2021 — argued that Biden had an opportunity just several months into the war, when his popularity among Israelis was at an all-time high for his full-throttled defense of the Jewish state in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught, and when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s popularity was still at a particularly low point, with much of the public viewing him as responsible for the failures that allowed the attack to take place.
Goldenberg maintains that at this unique moment, Biden could have given a speech directly to the Israeli public presenting them with a choice between two paths.
The first would begin with a ceasefire and hostage release deal that would require Israel to grant the Palestinian Authority a foothold in Gaza, which would unlock the sought-after support of Arab allies in rebuilding and restabilizing Gaza. Such a deal would have involved a ceasefire in Lebanon and allowed for the advancement of a Saudi normalization deal.
The second path offered a continuation of the war for an indefinite period during which more hostages and Israeli soldiers would die, Jerusalem would be increasingly isolated in the region, and Hamas would remain in control of Gaza.
Goldenberg acknowledged that a then-still-unpopular Netanyahu could still have rejected the effort to get Israel on the first path, with the premier’s hard-right base rallying behind him, and the former Biden aide admitted that Hamas could well have played spoiler.
“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,” Goldenberg wrote.
“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,” he added.
The reflection offered a different take on the Biden administration’s handling of the war after former White House Middle East czar Brett McGurk presented an unapologetic defense of the former president’s policy in a Washington Post op-ed last week.
In the latter account, McGurk framed Hamas as the only obstacle in hostage negotiations that dragged on for over a year between the first and second agreements.
The more senior McGurk largely vindicated Netanyahu — who retweeted the op-ed — while arguing that US support for Israel allowed for the weakening of Iran and its proxies in late 2024 and that this led an isolated Hamas to finally compromise and agree to a hostage deal last month.
Last year, The Times of Israel revealed that the Biden administration had again weighed having the president give the “moment of reckoning” speech in May, but ultimately shelved the idea in favor of a different address during which the president revealed the components of what was then the latest Israeli hostage deal offer and called Hamas to get on board.
By then, Netanyahu’s polling numbers had begun to recover, while Biden’s favorables among Israelis had nosedived over his intensifying alarm over the humanitarian situation in Gaza and his decision to withhold a shipment of 2,000 lbs bombs that he feared would lead to the deaths of too many civilians.
At the end of 2023, though, IDF operations had already struck significant blows to Hamas to the point where it could not carry out another October 7-like attack, according to Goldenberg. But already then, Netanyahu had made clear that he wasn’t interested in advancing a viable alternative to the terror group, which massively increased the chances that Israel would be bogged down in Gaza indefinitely, the former Biden aide maintained.