Forget Trump — Agreeing to a Ceasefire Was Netanyahu’s Own Calculation
Almost immediately after the announcement that Israel and Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza, a consensus emerged in the international and Israeli media: pressure and threats from President-elect Donald Trump is what led Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to finally agree to a deal that had been on the table since May 2024. The story about Steven Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, who arrived in Jerusalem on Saturday morning and informed Netanyahu that he had no intention of waiting until the end of Shabbat to speak with him, is fast becoming folklore.
“There would be no deal had the great and mighty Donald Trump not taken Netanyahu’s hand, bent it behind his back, then bent it a little more, then a little more, then pushed his head onto the table, then whispered in his ear that in a moment he will kick him in the balls,” Haaretz journalist Chaim Levinson tweeted on Wednesday, summarizing the general sentiment. “It’s a shame Biden didn’t realize this a long time ago.”
We don’t know exactly what was said during the conversation between Witkoff and Netanyahu. It is possible that Trump did threaten Netanyahu and that the Israeli prime minister feared the president-elect’s wrath. But a closer look reveals that there are different dynamics at play. In reality, the decision to accept the ceasefire deal appears to have less to do with Trump than with the shifting perception of the war inside Israel.
Let’s rewind: right after returning from his first visit to Israel after the Hamas attack of October 7, President Biden warned Israel not to reoccupy Gaza. He also said he was convinced that “Israel will do everything in its power to avoid killing innocent civilians,” and that he was confident Gaza’s population would have access to medicine, food, and water. Biden additionally warned Israel not to repeat the mistakes the United States made after 9/11 and not to let the desire to “deliver justice” take over. Netanyahu listened to all of this, then did the opposite.
Throughout the war, Israel summarily ignored American warnings, even when they were accompanied by explicit threats to halt weapons shipments — such as before Israel invaded Rafah last May, and as it starved northern Gaza in recent months. And while it is possible that Trump scares Netanyahu more than Biden, we must ask: if Netanyahu had refused to agree to the deal now, would Trump have stopped arms shipments to Israel or lifted the U.S. veto on anti-Israel resolutions at the UN?
Trump’s pick for U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, supports the territorial maximalism of the Israeli far right and doesn’t believe in the word “occupation.” Would Trump’s administration really do something no American administration has ever done before? So, while Trump’s pressure is undoubtedly significant, we should look at what is happening within Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with U.S. president Donald Trump at the White House in Washington DC, March 5, 2018. (Haim Zach/GPO)
As I predicted less than two months ago, shortly before the ceasefire in Lebanon: “Ending the war in the north will inevitably bring the Israeli public’s attention back to the war in Gaza, and questions about the viability of it continuing will resurface. Even if Trump gives the green light to continue the ethnic cleansing in Gaza, it’s not certain that this will be enough to convince the Israeli public. Whether or not Israel intends it to, ending the war in Lebanon may hasten the end of the war in Gaza.” That, in my reading, is exactly what has transpired.
Some will argue that the agreement was a product of shifts in Hamas’ thinking after it was left alone to face the Israeli war machine, following Hezbollah’s decision to stop firing and the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. But if Hamas had ever believed (and it is questionable whether it truly did) that the threat of an intensification of Hezbollah’s attacks would prevent Israel from doing whatever it wanted in Gaza, the invasion of Rafah likely proved otherwise. Besides, the Assad regime was hostile to Hamas, and the new regime in Syria might actually be more sympathetic — as the recent visit to Damascus of Qatar’s prime minister suggests.
There is no reason to doubt National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s claim that the political pressure he exerted on Netanyahu repeatedly thwarted a deal over the past year. The notion that the agreement was achieved because Hamas abandoned all its demands due to Netanyahu’s stubbornness is “a nice story, but it’s not true. In fact, it’s the exact opposite of reality,” wrote Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman in Ynet, who has repeatedly demonstrated how Netanyahu himself sabotaged the deal after the United States and Hamas agreed to it eight months ago.
It was almost embarrassing to watch U.S. National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby on Israel’s Channel 12 explaining that Hamas only folded and agreed to the ceasefire because Israel killed its former leader Yahya Sinwar — just days after Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated in an interview with The New York Times that Sinwar’s assassination actually made the negotiations significantly more difficult. Washington would be better off deciding on one lie to tell, then coordinating it among themselves.
An increasingly unpopular war
Inside Israel, the war in Gaza has become a burden on the government, the military, and society as a whole. In all the recent polls, a clear majority — between 60 and 70 percent, or even higher — supports ending the war. Contrary to what might have been expected, ending the war in Lebanon actually strengthened the desire to end the war in Gaza.
There are various reasons for this. The weekly demonstrations led by the families of hostages may not match the scale of the protest that erupted following the discovery of the bodies of six hostages murdered by Hamas back in September, but the challenge they pose to the government has not diminished. On the contrary, never before have so many Israelis taken to the stage at such large protests and so bluntly called for an end to a war while Israel is waging it.
Israelis protest calling for the release of hostages in Gaza outside the Defense Ministry Headquarters in Tel Aviv, September 7, 2024. (Erik Marmor/Flash90)
In a recent speech during one of these protests, as yet another Israeli delegation set off for ceasefire negotiations in Qatar, Einav Zangauker — a prominent activist whose son, Matan, is being held captive in Gaza — predicted that the delegation would return with Hamas’ demand to stop the war, and Netanyahu would claim that Hamas had hardened its positions. “Don’t buy those lies,” she told the crowd.
The military is also showing signs of fatigue. Despite dedicating significant efforts to the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza since early October, Hamas remains far from defeated and is still inflicting casualties on the Israeli army. Just last week, 15 soldiers were killed in Beit Hanoun — an area the military first occupied at the start of the ground invasion over 14 months ago.
The mission to rescue the hostages, as soldiers have testified, appears impossible. All that remains is the destruction of northern Gaza for the sake of it. A reserve officer, who has served more than 200 days in Gaza, told me that the prevailing mood among soldiers is that the war is going nowhere — not because of moral opposition (62 percent of Israelis agree with the statement “there are no innocents in Gaza,” according to a recent survey by the aChord Center), but because its goals are unclear.
More importantly, it is likely that Netanyahu himself has begun to reassess the notion that he has nothing to gain from ending the war and only stands to lose. One might have assumed that his popularity would have surged following what virtually the entire Israeli media described as Israel’s sweeping victories in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Gaza. In reality, the opposite occurred. Recent polls show Netanyahu’s coalition dropping to 49 seats out of 120, close to its standing immediately after October 7, while the center-left bloc could form a majority even without the Knesset’s remaining Palestinian parties.
Altogether, it appears that the hostage families’ protests — which gain fuel every time the military brings home another hostage in a body bag — alongside the exhaustion and loss of motivation within the military, the unpopularity of the war among the public, and Netanyahu’s declining poll numbers, may have led the prime minister to the conclusion that continuing the war indefinitely would leave his chances of winning the next election — scheduled for a year and 10 months from now — as slim to nonexistent.
As a result, Netanyahu may have decided that now is the time to cut his losses. Even if Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich decide to bring down the government, Netanyahu has a fair chance of succeeding in early elections by presenting the scalps of Sinwar and Nasrallah in one hand and embracing the returning hostages with the other.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the Knesset in Jerusalem, December 23, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
The perfect excuse
If this is the case, Trump’s pressure — whether real or exaggerated — serves as the perfect excuse for Netanyahu to explain to his supporters why he climbed down from the tree of “total victory.” If Channel 14, Netanyahu’s propaganda network, is reporting on the “tough conversation” between Netanyahu and Witkoff, one suspects that the source of the information is the Prime Minister’s Office, not the Americans. Netanyahu has a clear interest in amplifying this narrative: that way, he can claim he fought valiantly against the “leftists” in the Biden administration but was powerless against the unpredictable and easily angered Republican from Mar-a-Lago.
The proof that both the war and its cessation are internal Israeli matters will likely come in 42 days, when the first stage of the deal concludes and the second stage begins, which is supposed to include Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza. After the agreement was signed in Qatar, Trump said it is proof that his administration will “seek peace and negotiate deals” in the Middle East, suggesting that he expects this ceasefire to bring an end to the war. The wording of the agreement — which stipulates that negotiations toward the second phase will start on the 16th day of the first phase, and that as long as these negotiations continue the ceasefire will remain in place — points in the same direction.
Yet Smotrich is conditioning his current decision to remain in the government on Israel resuming the war, conquering Gaza in its entirety, and severely restricting humanitarian aid after phase one of the deal has been completed. In Friday’s cabinet meeting that approved the deal, Netanyahu said he received assurances from Trump to resume the war if negotiations ahead of the second stage fail. This apparently runs against Trump’s will, but under pressure from the right, Netanayhu may well agree to a resumption in fighting — meaning that American pressure, even under the “great and mighty” Trump, has a limit.