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Even before the peace deal in the Middle East had been put to page and circulated among the many anxious stakeholders, the question of credit was already at the fore. It was, as most things dealing with that region and Washington’s tentacles into it, anything but an easy verdict.
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As President Joe Biden on Wednesday finished announcing the deal that would potentially end a 15-month war in Gaza, a reporter asked the twilight leader in the White House entry hall: “Who gets credit for this, you or Trump?” A puzzled Biden turned around and asked if the query was a joke. It clearly was not, nor did it carry a clear answer. The unlikely and uncomfortable answer is each man carried some responsibility for the agreement.
The fight between the Israelis and Palestinians has been a slog since October of 2023, when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostage, according to Israeli tallies. The event precipitated a massive response that plunged the region into chaos and left world leaders flummoxed by its ricochet. Palestinians say more than 46,000 of their people have died—about half being women and children—in an unrelenting ground and air campaign from Israel.
The deal announced in principle on Wednesday puts a halt to that conflict, starting in phases that kick off with hostage-for-prisoner trades and a six-week ceasefire. But the deal itself was a byproduct of complicated diplomacy back in the United States, with Biden’s team working closely with President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming team and regional partners in Doha. The two-fold U.S. cooperation between otherwise rival camps came after a hard-fought election in which both sides offered competing visions of peace in the Middle East, and which key leaders in Gaza were closely monitoring. It’s not a stretch to say the election-year calendar in the United States likely dragged out the negotiations far longer than might have been seen during a non-election season.
Ultimately, both Biden and Trump had a hand to play, and historians for generations will mull which pol had the bigger role. In the immediate wake of the deal, though, both sought to claim credit.
Trump, preempting Biden’s announcement, said the deal “only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November.” Trump has been warning Hamas that there be would “hell to pay” if the hostages were not released before he takes office on Monday, and his negotiator, Steve Witkoff, has been conducting his own form of shuttle diplomacy in the region while Biden’s Middle East guru, Brett McGurk, has been joining by speakerphone.
For his part, Biden sought to cast the breakthrough as something that dated back to his framework announced in May and was only realized in recent weeks because of his team’s persistence. “Its terms will be implemented for the most part by the next administration,” Biden said. “For the past few days we have been speaking as one team.”
The eleventh-hour diplomatic push carried plenty of echoes of 1981 and the Iran hostage crisis that ended just as President Jimmy Carter was leaving office and Ronald Reagan arrived in Washington. It’s a comparison that Trump’s team has been less-than-subtle in promoting, though its historical parallels certainly have their limits. (For instance, it does not seem like Trump’s team had its own John B. Connally Jr. flying around the region to torpedo an election year peace deal the way Reagan did. Trump’s belligerent threats, however, suggest his friend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was more inclined to give Trump the win than his foil Biden.)
Biden, though, proved to be in the job when the deal here came together, and he called it “one of the toughest negotiations I’ve ever experienced.” Despite Trump’s insistence that he was to credit for the deal, his envoy Witkoff made clear to reporters that McGurk was the man with the brief. The cooperation between the outgoing and incoming teams was hardly the stuff of buddy films, but both teams rightly noted that the crisis demanded more than political hacking to get it done.
With Trump’s Inauguration scheduled for next week and his campaigns over for all practical purposes, the credit question is mostly one for egos and presidential libraries. Biden is coasting toward his retirement years, Trump is roaring back to Washington this weekend to set in motion a second term. Both will rightly want to snag the prize of credit for the agreement but neither reached it alone. In perhaps the oddest last-chapter twist, Trump probably helped Biden get one last win as President, and Biden likely set in motion the first victory of Trump’s second term. It’s tough to imagine either finds much pleasure in that piece of the history, but sometimes that make-it-work ethos is what the office requires.
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