The staggering hypocrisy behind Trump’s deal to free the last living American hostage
Intermediary Bishara Bahbah has accused Israel of genocide — which has earned other critics detention
President Donald Trump speaks during a White House press conference May 12. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman May 13, 2025
Seeing photos of the newly freed American-Israeli hostage Edan Alexander reuniting with his parents fills me with unadulterated joy.
But the story of how President Donald Trump’s team negotiated with Hamas for the release of the 20-year-old hostage also fills me with questions.
Because at the same time Trump’s administration was proudly detaining and attempting to deport strong critics of Israel, accusing them of being “agents of Hamas,” the administration itself was actively dealing with actual Hamas operatives — working through a Trump supporter who is a fervid Israel critic.
According to a striking scoop detailing the negotiations from Axios, Alexander’s release came about after Hamas members reached out to Bishara Bahbah, the former leader of Arab Americans for Trump.
By using Bahbah as a third-party intermediary with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, senior Hamas officials sought — successfully — to circumvent Israeli interference. Witkoff, via Bahbah and Qatari interlocutors, communicated to Hamas that releasing Alexander without conditions “would carry a lot of weight with Trump.”
“Around 20 messages were passed between the sides in calls and texts to Bahbah over the last two weeks,” Axios reported. “Bahbah also spoke to Hamas chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya, according to a source familiar. Bahbah declined to comment.”
If all this resulted in freedom for Alexander, I’m all for it. But I’m wondering if the Trump administration has any arguments that could possibly make it make sense.
Make it make sense, say, that activists are disappeared from their homes and neighborhoods for accusing Israel of genocide — when Bishara, the key Trump ally in these negotiations, posted a chart of Gaza casualties labeled “The Israeli Genocide in the Gaza Strip,” to his X account on Dec. 28, 2023, with the comment “ISRAEL’S SAVAGERY HAS NO BOUNDS!”
What has no bounds is the hypocrisy and double standards of an administration that pulls funding from universities for not cracking down on outspoken critics of Israel, when Bahbah, who has been a Trump supporter from the beginning of his campaign, wrote on his X account, “We would rather die in Palestine than leave it to the Israelis.”
Again, none of this is to say that Trump’s deal to free Alexander wasn’t profoundly welcome. A freed hostage is a blessing. But the process demands an answer to one crucial question: Why is it that some critics of Israel face deportation on Trump’s initiative, while others, like Bahbah, become indispensable?
Bahbah, 67, is a Palestinian whose family lost property and ended up in a refugee camp following the creation of Israel. He has long supported compromise and a two-state solution, and he has a right as an American to be as harsh in his criticism of Israel as he wants. But all those other critics and protesters — Mahmoud Khalil, Badar Khan Suri, Rasha Alawieh — have the same rights.
One obvious explanation for the clear discrepancy between the administration’s treatment of Bahbah and of Israel’s more left-leaning critics is that it’s using political dissent as an excuse to deport non-citizens because, well, it wants to deport non-citizens. Trump promised to deport a million non-citizens, and pro-Palestinian protesters with disagreeable politics, even those here completely legally, might seem like low-hanging fruit.
But it’s becoming harder and harder for the administration to explain the wild contradictions in its own behavior.
Consider that on April 22, the same day that a delegation of congressional members traveled to Louisiana to demand the release of Rümeysa Öztürk — the Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University who was snatched off the street by plainclothes agents and spirited away to a detention facility for co-writing an op-ed critical of Israel — Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman al-Thani visited the White House and met Witkoff and Trump, a discussion that led, according to Axios, to Trump tapping Bahbah as an interlocutor with Hamas.
If this double-standard spins the heads of Trump’s opponents, it’s become equally baffling to his die-hard supporters. Trump went behind Israel’s back to cut deals with terrorists. He brought in Bahbah, whose career has been devoted to explaining what he called “the painful truth about Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands.”
“President Trump promised to drain the swamp,” said the right-wing podcaster and Trump cheerleader Ben Shapiro. “This is not, in fact, draining the swamp.”
And there are yet more reasons for Trump’s pro-Israel supporters to be, well, a bit anxious — even though he just achieved a major goal in securing Alexander’s release. He re-opened talks with Iran for a nuclear deal, which, largely due to the foolish advocacy of those same supporters, he canceled in his first administration. He accepted a $400 million bribe — I mean, airplane — from Qatar, Hamas’ main supporters. And on his first foreign trip, to the Middle East, he’s pursuing lucrative deals with Saudi Arabia and the UAE — and has left Israel off the itinerary.
“Trump has been a friend, a strong friend to Israel,” Hillel Fuld, a staunch online Israel defender, wrote on X to his 175,000 followers. “And Trump is doing some very questionable things in the past few weeks as it pertains to Israel.”
Very questionable things abroad — and at home. Thankfully, for those whom Trump’s administration has detained for supposed support of Hamas — while, again, directly engaging with talks with Hamas, in an unprecedented move for the U.S. government — federal judges have been thwarting their plans to undermine the First Amendment, due process and habeas corpus, protecting constitutional freedoms which in the end protect us all.
But questions about how firm, exactly, Trump’s ideals are when it comes to Israel — and how arbitrarily he chooses to enforce them at home — will persist. It may be that Trump, or his people, realized that U.S. interests are not totally aligned with those of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Or that Trump is simply doing what he has always done: following the money. Or that, in the case of Alexander, he chose a diplomatic win over, say, consistency.
Thank God Alexander is free. And to those of Trump’s supporters feeling newly uncertain about what his erratic Middle East decision-making might mean for them: Well, welcome to the club.
