It is a bit of a Groundhog Day situation. There’s no denying that the contours of the agreement we now see between Israel and Hamas, negotiated by the US — with Egypt and Qatar as mediators, since those two parties don’t talk to each other directly — are the same terms that have been on the table since May last year. Hamas publicly said “yes” to those terms in July 2024. Not a lot has changed from that point of view.

There is a very serious sense that the Israelis had been the sticking point, despite the fact that the US was very often saying, “No, it’s Hamas that has been the obstacle.” The defenders of this outcome — which means the Israeli government and the outgoing Biden administration — argue that they were able to get a deal now because Hamas has been weakened by all these months and months of fighting. That is a line of argument we have heard repeatedly from the Biden administration throughout its unchecked support for Israel’s offensive on Gaza from January 2024 onward.

They were saying, “The Israelis are putting so much pressure on Hamas, they’re going to come to the table to get a deal.” They said this in January; they said it in March; they said it over the summer. It’s not a line of argument that I think carries a lot of tangible weight in terms of whether Hamas was willing to agree. Hamas had been clear that they were willing to agree.

I think the argument is that the war in Lebanon happened and Hezbollah turned out to be something of a paper tiger. Israel certainly proved to have greater capabilities to degrade it than people thought, and that changed the dynamic in terms of whether Hamas could expect to have support from the outside.

Another very important thing to think about in terms of what has changed is that the strategic picture in Gaza changed. We have now seen instances of what has been widely described as ethnic cleansing in Northern Gaza. We have seen a decimation of the infrastructure across the Strip, particularly in the north, but also in the south and Rafah, where real infrastructure had been set up.

What that means is that it created a political space for some of the most extreme and frankly blood-lusting voices in Israeli society to feel, “We have bled Gaza — we have really ground it down.” I think that has created the space for Netanyahu to sell the deal and say, “Look what we’ve been able to do — look how much vengeance we’ve gotten.”

That certainly doesn’t mean that the war has been won, going by Netanyahu’s own terms. He was talking about the ultimate destruction of Hamas. That hasn’t happened. He’s still sitting across the table from Hamas as the most prominent Palestinian force in Gaza, and he hasn’t endorsed any kind of alternative to rule the Strip. But I think that is something quite important to remember.

As Netanyahu was making his calculation over whether to reject a deal again or to finally say yes, I think that the Trump trepidation factor was very much there. There is an idea out there that President Trump is a peacemaker, a dealmaker, or a dove. I am extremely skeptical of that idea. I think peace is rooted in fundamental dynamics that he has no interest in — dynamics around humanity and mutual respect, with tangible and systemic changes. But the fear of dealing with President Trump is very much a factor for Netanyahu.

It’s important to remember that at the end of the last Trump presidency, he and Netanyahu had something of a falling out, and Netanyahu is very sensitive to that. He did not want to be looking at four years of fighting. He’s already in a very tough political position at home with a coalition government that he’s trying to balance. He is still on trial and will most likely face the commission of inquiry over the October 7 attack and how he could let it happen.

In view of all that, I think that Netanyahu stared down Donald Trump and thought, “Okay, I want to make a concession here and win him over.” As for the idea that Trump pressured Netanyahu: it’s more a question of style, like so much about the Trump team, than any tangible forms of pressure. There has been no discussion of taking back US support for Israel.

If anything, as soon as he came into office, Trump gave the Israelis a gift by lifting the sanctions the Biden administration had imposed on violent settlers in the occupied West Bank. But rhetorically and emotionally, Trump and his envoy were shaking their fists, saying, “We don’t care if it’s Shabbat — we will meet with Netanyahu — you will deal with us.”

That does cast a shadow over the Biden administration’s claims. Notoriously, they were pushing the argument that they were “working tirelessly for a cease-fire.” What could they have been doing differently? This moment invites us to think about where the Biden administration could have chosen to take different steps and at least try those steps, even if perhaps they didn’t work out.

Throughout the period since October 7, the Biden administration officials were not only concerned with the president’s long-standing identification as a Zionist and a very staunch defender of Israel. They were also scared of their own shadows in a way that Democratic foreign policy operatives have been for decades. They were afraid of being branded as weak on national security, so they felt they had to overplay their hand.

Netanyahu, as someone who has lived in the US and worked with both Republican and Democratic presidents, knew how to play the Biden team. You saw him doing this during the exact period when the cease-fire terms were first introduced in May and June of last year. He was actively working with hawks in Congress to promote a narrative that the US had halted military support for Israel.

That was totally untrue, but it worked. You saw the Biden administration very quickly backtrack from any suggestion that they were limiting military support. They had limited one package of bombs, but they released a lot of that as soon as Netanyahu was out there doing short clips. Trump can’t be played by Netanyahu in the same way, and that’s another reason why we now have a deal.

I think about that by looking at the calendar. We’re now getting toward the point where the parties to the deal should be talking about setting up the second phase, but conditions have not improved in a way that suggests peace is on the horizon. In the occupied West Bank and Jenin, we are seeing an expanding violent operation by the Palestinian Authority, supported by the Israelis and very much working hand in hand, as they have done for decades. I think that raises the cost for Hamas of being seen as continuing with the deal.

It also suggests that on the Israeli side, there is still a desire to move forward militarily against Palestinians rather than be seen as cutting a deal with them. I think that is linked to the dynamics of the coalition government. When Netanyahu agreed to the deal, one of his far-right allies, Itamar Ben-Gvir, did quit the government, but his other ally from the extreme right, Bezalel Smotrich, has remained in the cabinet as finance minister.

According to Smotrich, he has a promise from Netanyahu that fighting will continue after the first phase of the cease-fire, that the war is not over, and that Israel will somehow achieve the goal of destroying Hamas, which as we know remains very elusive. I think that factor is very much driving Netanyahu’s actions. The escalation in the West Bank suggests that he’s not feeling the need to clamp down on violence against Palestinians.

We are approaching a critical deadline, which is the point at which the Israeli parliament has told UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East] it can no longer operate. UNRWA is the chief UN agency supporting Palestinians: it’s the backbone of any humanitarian response. The Knesset has said, “We are going to shut you down.” That looming deadline, without any solution in sight, is another reason why I think we’re not likely to see a second phase unless something very significant changes, because we need the same factor that got Netanyahu here: the Trump trepidation factor.

There’s no indication that the Trump administration will do anything to defend UNRWA or to push for any kind of serious humanitarian response for Gaza. Without that, I don’t see how there’s an appetite to keep going among Palestinians or in the broader region, including the mediators working on these negotiations, Qatar and Egypt. I don’t know how they can bring everyone to the table if it looks like it’s just continued warfare and expanding misery for Palestinians, because you’ve also seen the US turn around and say, “We are pulling back on our humanitarian and development aid contributions.”

All of that has me quite worried that we may not see the second phase of this deal. But there are other dynamics to keep track of. With the release of some of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 — in violation of international law, it’s important to remember — those folks are going to be talking not only about what they have experienced, but about what it felt like to be in Gaza for fifteen months, not knowing whether their government was ever going to bring them home and reunite them with their loved ones.

Regardless of how they were cared for, they were in a very active war zone with limited supplies. As that information spreads, perhaps the war in Gaza will come home to Israeli society in a different way and change the dynamics to create a greater impetus for Netanyahu to accept a deal in order to bring more hostages home. Those are some of the unknown factors.

The comment about carpet bombing from Joe Biden echoes a broader self-justifying narrative that we’ve seen from the administration for a lot of the war: without us, the Israelis would have been acting in unbelievably violent ways. That raises a question: Knowing about that willingness, and knowing the data and evidence you were getting from the ground about large-scale targeting of civilian infrastructure that was often deemed disproportionate by experts in international law and by people able to do the research, why would you let them go on?

You’ve seen Biden, Blinken, and others in the administration do a set of exit interviews to say, “Weren’t we great? This could have been so much worse.” That flies in the face of their own rhetoric about believing in international order and international law. If you support that framework, it’s never in question whether Israel can carpet bomb Gaza — it’s just not permitted. It’s not in question whether Israel can stop all humanitarian aid going into Gaza. That’s not how international law is supposed to work.

For the Biden administration’s top figures to be saying, “Give us credit for asking the Israelis to stand by the bare minimum,” while in fact they were often exceeding it, I think that’s a very hard pill for people to swallow. That argument is not going to have the effect that they think it will. Perhaps in the very insular set of Washington foreign policy makers, this will be enough for them to regain admission to nice dinner parties and speak at the Munich Security Conference and feel good about that. But I think the broader judgement of history will still be quite negative.

I was struck by comments from Jack Lew, who had been Biden’s ambassador in Jerusalem (where the US embassy is located, unlike those of other countries). Lew said that Israel was facing a narrative war as they waged this offensive, and often you would see people overestimating the extent. People would say, “Children have been killed by this Israeli attack,” but when you looked closer, they were the children of Hamas fighters.

That comment is haunting. The memory of it is never going to leave you. It contains so much: an assumption of guilt by association, which again is not the kind of principle the US is supposed to stand for, and a real inching toward justifying the deaths of minors and of innocent people. That’s where the Biden administration should be reflecting on how they have pulled us all into litigating minutiae when the broad strokes of the campaign really do violate a lot of what they have said they should stand for. We haven’t seen them reckon with that to any great degree.

The one person who expressed a little bit of regret was Samantha Power, the administrator of the US Agency for International Development, who famously wrote the book A Problem From Hell about genocide. Of course, many people say that the US has enabled a genocide in Gaza. Samantha Power in her exit interview said that she regrets a cease-fire could not have been reached earlier. She declined to specify why, or what she could have done differently. She also declined to comment on another situation that many people are calling a genocide, in Sudan, where a US partner, the United Arab Emirates, is engaging in activity that many see as war crimes.

On its way out, the Biden administration has not done a lot of reflection. As you know, I’m working on a book about the administration’s approach to Gaza, and I’ve been talking to a lot of these people. The narratives they’ve been devising for themselves and for their friends are very much about saying, “Look at the broader strategic picture — Israel is stronger, Hezbollah is weaker, Bashar al-Assad in Syria is gone.”

There’s something very interesting and to a degree chilling about the way that they are still seeking credit after fifteen months of war, with most likely upward of 60,000 deaths, according to the latest studies, and the decimation of a huge strip of land. They are still trying to present it in a rosy way. That has been the most telling thing about the Biden administration’s final statements, along with their effort to wrench some credit for the cease-fire, deeply flawed and questionable as it is. I think that shows you that they don’t want to go down in history as a reflective administration — at least not so far.

That note is a very important one: often, organizations that campaign around issues present findings that seem to justify their arguments, and we should be careful with those findings. Having said that, I think the broader picture of the vote in November 2024 has been missed. Some people, including Donald Trump himself, are presenting it as a Trump landslide, because he did exceed expectations by winning the popular vote for the first time. People are seeing it as an incredible mandate with a groundswell of support moving toward the Republican Party and Trumpism.

More astute observers have shown that on a range of issues — not just Gaza, but a whole host of issues from student debt to climate change — the Democratic Party failed to mobilize its core base. Was it a groundswell of people suddenly going for Trump, or was it a question of people who were potentially soft Biden/Harris supporters not showing up at the polls? That’s the bigger story that we’re seeing. When it comes to Gaza, there’s certainly a high likelihood that it was a factor in the broader constellation of disappointment and disillusionment with the Biden presidency that also includes issues like student debt forgiveness or not bringing about a truly radical shift toward climate goals.

Speaking to folks who were involved in the Biden and then Harris campaigns, they are doing a lot of image management, unfortunately, saying, “We ran a damn good campaign, and we did our best.” Again, there hasn’t been a real process of reflection within Democratic political circles. But I think it will come probably later this year, as Democrats start to think about how to fight the midterms in 2026.

What that will involve is a lot more humility, thinking about how they could have brought their base out, because they didn’t do it in November 2024. When it comes to the salience of Gaza for the election, I’ve been talking to people who were managing Kamala Harris’s approach to these issues and to communities that were in question. You had the Arab American community, of course, which was seen as being in question; on the other hand, there was a concern that the Democrats might lose some Jewish Americans, a block of people who historically vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates.

They were very much being targeted by Republicans and by Netanyahu, who were telling them, “Biden could have done more for Israel.” I think Gaza is inseparable from how so many critical voter blocks were talking and thinking in October and November 2024. We will only see its salience grow as we get away from the point where people are applying for new jobs and framing themselves as having been very successful and we can hopefully have more honest and frank conversations.

From the first week of the Trump administration, the battle lines among Trump’s team are quite clear. Steve Witkoff, who has been his mediator and special Middle East envoy, is already engaged in talking about phase two of the deal and trying to craft that, using his long-standing relationships with Qatar in particular. But he is already being attacked for it by some hard-line Israel supporters who present him as a stooge of Qatar and (by extension) a stooge of Hamas.

Those narratives are out there. They often come from hawkish voices and from folks who just don’t see any value in negotiations. They see the world in zero-sum terms: “We must crush our enemies.” The nicer, more finessed face of that is Marco Rubio, the new secretary of state, and (to an extent) Mike Huckabee, the new ambassador to Israel. These are figures who have very clear, hawkish, pro-Israel views — hard-line views on how to deal with Palestinians, and deep skepticism about any degree of autonomy or Palestinian rights.

There is going to be an internal push-pull dynamic. If Rubio keeps his job, which is very much an open question in Washington foreign policy circles, he will be a player in this. Netanyahu will certainly be trying to push Trump in a more bellicose direction, and that does extend to Iran. Depending on how the question marks over the Gaza cease-fire are resolved, that will tell us a lot about the direction of Trump’s Iran policy.

We have heard from the Iranian side a willingness to get back to negotiations with the US. That is also being framed in a standard show of bluster, but one that is grounded in reality to some degree. The Iranians are saying, “We’ve expanded on our nuclear development and our enrichment and missile capabilities to an extent that hadn’t been reached under the previous Trump administration.”

That is indisputably true. Trump now turns around and says, “Wow, Iran is such a big risk — they’re closer to having a bomb.” But they’re closer to having a bomb because Trump removed the limits on their nuclear capacity by withdrawing from the agreement that Barack Obama negotiated. He is dealing with a self-made dilemma.

I have been in the room with the Iranian president when he has come to New York, talking about wanting to cut a deal with the US. The prospect of Trump becoming president again was very much already there. I think the desire on the Iranian side is sincere. But as so often with Trump, the question is whether there is actually a system in place to craft a deal and also get that deal through Congress, a place where skepticism of Iran and many other political actors in the Muslim-majority world runs very deep.

That skepticism is going to run through the Republican Party and through some very hard-line pro-Israel Democrats. It was hard for Obama to get his deal with Iran through Congress. If Trump does pursue some kind of agreement, that will become a big congressional fight.

As to the risk of stumbling into a war — Trump wants to pitch himself as being antiwar. That was part of his inauguration speech, when he talked about being defined by the wars that the US will not go into. But war is not always a matter of strategy, planning, and rational decision-making. It can just be a question of the wrong set of people at the wrong time.

Tensions are now so inflamed in the region. Suspicion of the US is so great, and there is a limited desire, even on the part of US-aligned regimes like the Saudis or the Gulf states, to play the role of mediators or to help finesse the situation and calm things down. Everyone’s holding their breath, and the risk of an unintentional conflict arising from any form of escalation is there.

It could be related to the Houthis in Yemen, or it could be related to militias in Iraq. That is something that people often forget, but unfortunately, we saw during the Gaza war that there are a significant number of US troops posted all over the Middle East in places where they are vulnerable. There were three US soldiers killed almost a year ago when they were targeted by a pro-Iranian militia.

Any of those situations could lead to a violent reaction from President Trump that could upend any hope of a diplomatic resolution. Of course, there are many voices now saying, “Look, Israel was able to go into Lebanon, and it wasn’t demolished or decimated. In fact, Israel has now had its first exchange of missiles with Iran. Maybe the Israelis can go further, and the risk is not as great as we thought it might be.”

The people who have created those expectations and impressions are the Biden administration officials who were simultaneously saying that they didn’t want to see a regional war. The chances of such a war are now higher because of the choices the US has been making even prior to Trump’s return to power.

There’s a real desire to pretend that Gaza is not going to matter in the long run. There’s already a very firm desire in Washington policy circles to say, “We’ll move on — people have gotten over very bloody mistakes in the past, major accusations of war crimes, and moments of ethnic cleansing.” I don’t think that’s possible.

I think that rosy scenario is rooted in a denial of agency to non-Western societies. It’s also rooted in a sense that the US can rebuild its standing in the way that it did after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which is the only parallel in terms of fueling outrage across the region and around the world.

But the US is just not in the same place that it was in 2003 as a global leader with a triumphalist narrative. In 2025, with Trump’s reelection, the rest of the world is looking at the US and saying, “This is who the American electorate decided to promote — someone who has been undercutting every standard of democratic principles, who has been accused of sexual assault and other crimes, and who has pardoned far-right militias.”

On top of that, for a generation of people, Gaza has created a perception of the US that will be very hard to shed — a perception that the US is callous and often engaged in hollow talk about international laws and standards. That profound derision is very hard to overcome. You also have the impact of a newly mobilized movement, with Palestinians in the diaspora and on the ground in Gaza and the occupied West Bank who are telling the world about what’s happening to them in a completely different way.

In addition, there is a new pro-Palestinian movement that differs from what we saw in the 1960s and ’70s or in the 1990s. This is a movement that is connecting policy on Israel/Palestine to domestic conditions in their own countries and saying, “Our deep skepticism toward our governments over economic and social policy extends to foreign policy, and we want to see a pursuit of justice on all of those fronts.” As those battle lines are drawn, it’s not going to be possible to relegate Israel/Palestine as an issue to genteel discussions in think tanks or at Davos.

People want to be involved in discussion about that policy in a completely different way, in a way that even I find surprising, as someone who has covered foreign policy in Washington for more than a decade and in other locations prior to that. People are talking and thinking in a different way about foreign policy and the US role in the world.

It invites a discussion and hopefully a movement toward a more humane global order, because so many of the thoughts people had around international legal standards and the lessons they learned from past wars — not just the world wars, but also the US “war on terror” — were about how to minimize harm to civilians and ensure effective aid systems. Professionals in the field are now saying that a lot of that inheritance has been shattered and twisted beyond belief.

I was speaking with one very experienced US humanitarian official, and they were saying, “We had to pursue a project of setting up a field hospital. It’s not something that we ever like to do; it’s a huge outlay of resources, and it’s not very efficient in terms of how many people they can see.” There was resistance among professional humanitarians to doing that. But the official said to me, “All of that turned out to be wrong: we really needed field hospitals, because Israel, backed by the US, was decimating hospitals in a way that we never thought possible.”

A whole new conversation needs to take place about how we maintain standards of basic humanity, because we are going to continue having conflicts and instability, and people are going to want to protect innocent people. Gaza is inseparable from that conversation as an unfortunate case study of what can go so badly wrong and what needs to be different to create a more humane world.