Ceasefire Deal Is Too Little, Too Late for the People of Gaza | Opinion

On Wednesday, negotiators finally secured the long-sought ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, at least temporarily halting a conflict that killed at least 46,000 and perhaps as many as 64,000 Palestinians, most of them innocent civilians. And while President Joe Biden may consider this ceasefire as a capstone to his presidency, it is not only deeply fragile but also an indictment of his electorally disastrous and morally reprehensible refusal to take meaningful risks for peace earlier. As in Ukraine, Biden made the fateful decision to cling to war aims that had become untenable, even as pointless civilian suffering escalated and the political upside of his posture vanished.

Since the shocking and abhorrent Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023 that left more than 1,200 Israelis dead, most of them also innocent civilians, the Biden administration enthusiastically backed Israel’s military response and then seemed to repeat the same cycle over and over again—reporters were told that Biden was frustrated with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or horrified by the civilian casualty toll. As conditions in Gaza went from bad to worse, though, the United States never seriously threatened to use its considerable leverage to force a cease-fire. Blank checks were signed virtually without interruption.

This posture may have at least made some political sense in the early days of the war, but Netanyahu soon understood that Biden’s reticence to restrain him had the effect of legitimizing blind vengeance as policy. Israel’s war aims went from absurd—the total elimination of Hamas from Gaza—to cosmic—crushing all Iranian-backed forces in the region, from Hezbollah to Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and possibly the regime in Tehran itself. And while everyone is patting themselves on the back for exposing Hezbollah in Lebanon as a paper tiger, driving Assad from power and comprehensively embarrassing Iran, the victory is likely to be short-lived. Syria remains weak and ripe for Iranian meddling, and Tehran’s losses in Lebanon were nothing that a large, powerful state cannot reconstitute in short order.

That raises the painful question of why it took 15 long months as well as the election of Republican President-elect Donald Trump and his personal intervention, to bring about this ceasefire. We may never know, but all along, Biden seemed to be driven by two related impulses. One was a career-long deference to the Israeli narrative of the longstanding conflict, and the other a long-dated but unshakeable belief that even a tiny bit of public friction with Israel would be electorally damaging to Democrats. Biden simply could not be moved from this position, even as the political fallout on the left heavily damaged first his own re-election prospects and eventually those of his designated successor, Vice President Kamala Harris.

The timing of the cease-fire also suggests that Netanyahu was holding out not for any specific war aim, but for a change of party control in the White House. With Trump’s election, Israel was suddenly free of any meaningful future constraint on the further application of blunt force and, more importantly, from any shackles if the conflict resumes. And if it does, whatever terrible things the Biden administration was holding back will be on the table, including the long-held Israeli far-right dream of annexing the West Bank and “transferring” the Palestinian population elsewhere. The only way to ensure that these outcomes would be off the table was for Harris to win the election.

The missed opportunities for Biden here should be obvious. Had he leaned harder and earlier on Netanyahu, he could conceivably have brought this conflict to an end before the election, providing a critical boost to the struggling Harris campaign, whose inability to separate herself from her boss’s complicity helped diminish rank-and-file enthusiasm and led to a seemingly endless parade of stories about disaffected leftists staying home. Democratic foreign policy professionals really need to ask themselves why no one in their camp was able to formulate or issue a threat credible enough to bring about the outcome they all said they desired, which was the timely application of a ceasefire. Wishing and hoping obviously did not get it done.

The moral dimension is even more painful to contemplate. To be blunt, why did so many Palestinians need to die, be driven from their homes and suffer the scars of trauma and loss only to arrive at a ceasefire formula that is essentially unchanged from May 2024? The way that so many elected Democrats ignored or hand-waved away the unfathomable brutality and violence that has been visited on an already dispossessed and powerless population was obviously shameful at the time and will only look worse as reporters are finally able to report in more detail about the appalling conditions on the ground in Gaza.

The parallels to Biden’s stewardship of the Ukraine conflict are also uncomfortable. The administration’s early embrace of Kyiv’s struggle for survival remains one of the high points of Biden’s tenure, but the president seemed blind to the need to adjust once the war became a grinding stalemate that Ukraine could not actually win. Instead, maintaining that stalemate seemed to go from an unfortunate reality to the actual underlying policy goal, leaving another conflict ripe for the incoming president to resolve with his signature lack of concern about decorum and whatever hallowed nostrums of foreign policy wisdom were hanging on the walls of the Biden White House.

And the lessons should be crystal clear. Trump and his allies are unafraid of ruffling feathers and taking massive risks to get what they want in the foreign policy realm, for both their own narrow political interests as well as their appraisal of America’s. Biden-era Democrats, on the other hand, were ultimately so terrified by the prospect of applying pressure on allies that they failed to achieve either their political or foreign policy goals, leaving both in the hands of Trump.

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.