What's Behind Biden's Risky Gaza Ceasefire Gamble

Two weeks after unveiling a ceasefire plan hailed as the best chance yet to put an end to the eight-month war in the Gaza Strip, President Joe Biden faces major obstacles toward bringing his proposal to life, not least of which are the opposing perceptions of Israel and Hamas as to what the deal actually entails.

With the odds of a permanent ceasefire appearing remote for the time being, former U.S., Israeli and Palestinian officials who played active roles during previous rounds of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks outline to Newsweek the strategy and stakes behind the Biden's administrations big bet at a rare time when foreign policy has come to dominate the campaign trail months before what's expected to be a tight election.

"In the decades that I was involved in this, the Palestinian issue never affected core American interests," Aaron David Miller, who served as a U.S. State Department adviser on Arab-Israeli negotiations from 1988 to 2003, told Newsweek. "Now it does."

Upon entering office after a tumultuous election against incumbent President Donald Trump, now once against set to be his rival in November despite unprecedented legal troubles, Biden sought to pursue a long-desired pivot of Washington's foreign policy attention to the Asia-Pacific, where China is considered to be the U.S.' top global challenger. The shift was first frustrated by the eruption of the still-ongoing Russia-Ukraine in February 2022, but the deadliest-ever flare-up of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last October may prove even more consequential.

Miller, who today serves as a senior fellow for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, warned that the Biden administration today faces a triple threat of a rise in domestic and foreign terrorism directed toward the U.S., instability in the Persian Gulf region and Iran potentially recalibrating its hesitance to obtain nuclear weapons, all exacerbated by a Middle East war that has commanded the attention of voters like never before.

"The 20 years we were involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, when Americans were actually dying and we were killing innocent Afghans and Iraqis, never came close to the domestic traction that this issue is receiving here," Miller said.

But in the face of this daunting task of resolving a conflict that has already spread to several other fronts across the Middle East, Miller said that the Biden administration "is the only party that is truly in a hurry" to reach a deal.

Based on their public messaging, neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor Hamas Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar appear to be operating at the same pace, he argued.

"The main story is that negotiations succeed or fail based on the urgency of the two or three main parties to the negotiation, when pain combines with the prospect of gain," Miller said. "And when leaders, in this case Netanyahu and Sinwar, judge that there is more to be gained from breaking the status quo, in this case, engaging seriously on this Israeli proposal, and that outweighs the risks of maintaining the status quo, you get traction."

"Based on my 27 years of working Arab-Israeli negotiations," he added, "there is an acute absence of urgency on the part of both Hamas and the Netanyahu government."

Since the very day that Biden first announced his three-phase road map on May 31, conflicting messages have emerged from all three parties regarding the proposal and the impact it would have on the conflict.

The White House has consistently maintained that the proposal was an Israeli one and thus had the backing of Netanyahu's government. But the Israeli premier has not publicly endorsed the plan and his officials have repeatedly stated that acceptance of the deal was tied to assurances it would allow the nation to achieve all three of its wartime goals, including delivering a lasting defeat of Hamas, something not mentioned in Biden's description of the deal or the U.S. text that won the elusive approval of the United Nations Security Council last Sunday.

"Israel will not end the war before achieving all its war objectives: destroying Hamas' military and governing capabilities, freeing all the hostages and ensuring Gaza doesn't pose a threat to Israel in the future," one Israeli official recently told Newsweek on background. "The proposal presented enables Israel to achieve these goals and Israel will indeed do so."

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has also stated that the deal at hand was virtually identical to the one Hamas had agreed to during the previous ceasefire push that unraveled last month amid diverging versions of the text. The collapse of the previous pact paved the way for Israel to commence operations that have since intensified in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

Hamas, for its part, initially welcomed Biden's remarks on the current ceasefire plan, only to later argue that the proposal they received differed significantly from what Biden had described. In a six-point explanatory note shared with Newsweek last week, the group complained of "confusion and controversy" over these perceived inconsistencies.

And after Hamas submitted its official response to the plan on Wednesday, Israeli officials cited in various outlets swiftly characterized the reply as a rejection, while U.S. officials said most of the differences could be worked out through further talks mediated by Qatar and Egypt.

With such distance lingering between the two sides, Miller felt that the "only realistic pathway out of this" would be achieving the first phase of the agreement, which calls for a six-week ceasefire, the exchange of some Hamas-held hostages for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, a withdrawal of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) personnel from populated areas of Gaza and a surge of humanitarian assistance to the war-torn territory.

"Even if you get these two to agree on a more a comprehensive proposal, they'll never get beyond phase one," Miller said. "That's where we are. And that's not a good place."

Ghaith al-Omari, who served as an adviser to the Palestinian negotiation team from 1999 to 2001, also conveyed widely held expectations that the deal may never reach phase two, which constitutes a permanent ceasefire, the release of all living Hamas-held hostages and a total IDF exit from Gaza, much less phase three, which calls for a yet unspecified reconstruction plan for the Palestinian territory.

"The assumption has always been that really the only thing that's going to be implemented is phase one," Omari told Newsweek.

Still, Omari pointed out that the Biden administration hopes that a six-week calm could steal the momentum from the war and lead to other breakthroughs, potentially even progress on a long-hoped deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which has increasingly sought to leverage its growing clout in the region to secure a better deal with the U.S. in ongoing talks.

And with other powers such as China and Russia vying for greater influence in the Middle East in the midst of a brave new era of great power competition, the U.S. is especially inclined to press forward, even at a potentially steep cost.

"I think there's always a risk in putting major initiatives out there, because it can fail, and, if it fails, then you look weak," Omari, who is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said. "And this is at a time when people are questioning if the U.S. today is the U.S. of the past, a huge superpower, etc. I think there's a lot at stake in failure."

"However, I just don't see that there's much of a choice because there's also a lot of stakes in inaction," he added. "Before the initiative, a lot of what I heard from Arab officials was the U.S. was doing nothing, they're absent. It's one of those cases of 'Damned if you do, damned if you don't.'"

Even reaching the first phase is far from guaranteed, however.

From Hamas' perspective, any agreement that does not clearly enable a lasting cessation of hostilities could set up a situation where the group cedes leverage ahead of renewed IDF action toward a decisive military victory.

"When I talk to an Israeli official, they would say, 'You can count on Hamas to do something to give us an excuse to go after them,'" Omari said. "That's certainly in the background. This is exactly why Hamas is reluctant to say yes. That's why they came with a response that focuses heavily on, first of all, clarity, and they want guarantees."

Daniel Levy, who served as an Israeli negotiator in the 1990s and early 2000s and joined Omari in helping to draft the 2003 Geneva Accord, argued that "there are very good reasons that not just Hamas, but any party who would be in that position, would draw that conclusion" that the deal is deliberately designed in a way to ultimately allow Israel to pursue its wartime goals once the ceasefire expires.

"What Hamas needs is for there to be plausibility, credibility," Levy, who is now the president of the U.S./Middle East Project policy institute, told Newsweek, "and what America has done has generated zero faith that there's plausibility and credibility in its diplomacy."

The resulting situation has manifested into what Levy described as a kind of "Gordian Knot" through which the Biden administration has sought to market an agreement ambiguous enough to meet the transparent yet opposing demands of the two parties.

The U.S. calculation, as Levy saw it, is that "doing the kinds of things in terms of leaning on the Israeli side and the kind of stand that would require that might get you to a ceasefire would entail a higher political price than the losses as the war continues."

But if the goal is, as the Biden administration says, to bring a lasting end to the war in Gaza, thus scoring a historic foreign policy win, Levy said the U.S. approach so far was on a collision course with reality.

"It seems to be just this Hail Mary pass that, maybe despite everything, Hamas will feel pressure, it will say yes, maybe despite everything, Bibi [Netanyahu] will feel then he has to go along with it," Levy said. "Maybe it will then be into implementation, once you get into implementation, maybe despite Bibi's insistence, you can create some realities on the ground where it can't really go back to that."

"It flies in the face of everything we know about what's going on on the Israeli side. It flies in the face of everything we know about the relative pressures on Hamas," he added. "And so we are stuck. American diplomacy has failed."