This hostage deal is Biden’s victory. It’s also Biden’s shame.
The sitting president put months of work into this deal, but he also let this war drag on, and on, and on
President Joe Biden listens during an event in the Rose Garden of the White House in 2022. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Contributing Columnist Emily Tamkin January 15, 2025
President Joe Biden’s administration has secured a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas — and President-elect Donald Trump is taking much of the credit. The parallel that immediately jumps to mind is that of President Jimmy Carter, whose work to resolve the Iran hostage crisis only paid dividends after his successor had been sworn into office. But we can learn from that history not only because of its similarities to today, but also because of the ways in which Biden is not Carter, and Israel is not Iran.
Thirty-three hostages are expected to be released in the first phase of the three-part ceasefire, with all hostages — including the remains of the dead — returned by the end. The staggering death toll in Gaza from Israel’s air and ground campaign, which a study in the renowned medical journal The Lancet recently said may be up to 40 percent higher than initially estimated, can stop climbing.
The deal comes with less than a week left of Biden’s administration. To Biden’s credit, it took months of behind the scenes efforts by his team to lay the foundation for this outcome. And to his discredit, the fact that those efforts took as many needless months as they did will also always be part of his legacy.
Like Biden, Carter spent his last year in office as a one-term president consumed with negotiations over trying to get hostages released — in that case, American diplomats being held in Iran. And like Biden, too, Carter faced significant political repercussions over the drawn-out process. As the State Department’s Office of the Historian notes, “The crisis dominated the headlines and news broadcasts and made the administration look weak and ineffectual.”
But no matter the public perception, Carter’s diplomacy quietly made crucial progress toward the hostages’ eventual release. And the fruits of that work only became apparent after President Ronald Reagan had taken his place.
As Forward columnist Dan Perry put it earlier this week, the timing of this new hostage deal is perhaps not incidental. It is likely that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed to a deal that leaves Hamas in power — which Israel previously rejected — after months of saying he would not do just that, at least in part because of Trump, whom Netanyahu considers an ally, and whose nominees seem unlikely to check extremist Israeli ambitions in the West Bank.
It was perhaps not incidental in the case of Carter and Reagan either, given allegations that Reagan’s team reached out to Iran via regional leaders to say a potential Reagan administration would give the Iranians a better deal if they did not release the hostages before the presidential election.
But as tempting as it is to see history rhyming — a crisis in the Middle East, inflation, a president finally achieving a deal only on his way out the door — there is an important difference. Namely: Israel is not Iran.
Where Carter was exclusively negotiating with an enemy country, one of the two parties with whom Biden was negotiating was Israel, an American ally. And although the Biden administration repeatedly placed primary blame on Hamas for scuttling ceasefire efforts, we know that, for example, ceasefire negotiations this summer were reportedly complicated by conditions that Netanyahu added in.
We know that Israeli ministers have taken credit for blocking potential deals. And we know that, through it all, the Biden administration continued to arm Israel, and to do so even as Israel crossed supposed “red lines” articulated by the Biden administration, like by deepening its offensive in Rafah or neglecting to comply with demands on aid.
The Biden administration also provided cover to Israel on the international stage, and in particular at the United Nations.
The comparison between Carter and Biden’s various challenges in securing a hostage release deal is not one to one, of course. Israel wasn’t the party holding the hostages; that role belonged to Hamas, which is obviously not an American ally. But still, an important difference is that Carter was negotiating with an adversary. It is, and always must be, remarkable that in efforts to end this brutal war, a power that has repeatedly ignored the Biden administration’s instructions and pleas is, ostensibly, its friend.
It is perhaps too early to make sweeping assessments about what this deal shows us, but one question we can ask now is whether Biden privileged preserving U.S.-Israel friendship — even as his own relationship with Netanyahu reportedly deteriorated — over reaching a deal. We can ask whether Biden’s idea of what the relationship should be failed to reflect the realities of what the relationship is.
One diplomat told The Washington Post that the ceasefire deal was thanks to President-elect Donald Trump. Trump’s election, per that diplomat, was “the first time there has been real pressure on the Israeli side to accept a deal.” Perhaps there’s a degree to which that’s spin. Perhaps, just as it’s said that only President Richard Nixon could go to China to negotiate with Mao Zedong, only the party that accuses its enemies of selling out Israel and thus being full of antisemites could push Israel to take a deal that leaves Hamas in power — something Netanyahu had previously vehemently insisted he would not consider.
And maybe it’s true, as the Post’s anonymous diplomat also said, that talks could move forward because of Hamas’s diminished position, including the death of Oct. 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar this past October.
But also true is that, while Trump will undoubtedly get credit for this deal, it happened under Biden. There are two ways to read this.
One is that, finally, at the eleventh hour, Biden’s administration made a deal happen, the culmination of months of diplomacy. The other is that it did not happen sooner in part because of Biden.
Over the past months, we’ve seen Palestinian children killed and starved. We’ve watched as hostages were killed for no real reason, while their families begged the Israeli government to prioritize their lives. We’ve seen aid workers killed, and aid trucks delayed, and even attacked by Israeli extremists. If Trump’s imminent return to power did mark a change in the pressure on Israel to reach a deal, that, too, is part of what Biden will be remembered for — that in the end, without another party’s entry on the stage, he simply couldn’t get it done.
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