The last time an American president traveled to Israel, 11 days after the October 7 terror attacks, passengers aboard Air Force One received pocket-sized notecards describing how to behave should the motorcade come under rocket fire (“Do not exit the vehicle,” the tiny print helpfully read).
Ultimately, the air-raid sirens did not sound during then-President Joe Biden’s nine hours on the ground in Tel Aviv. Instead, Israelis watched calmly along the sparkling Mediterranean as his motorcade sped by, some of them playing beach volleyball on the sand, others taking sunset jogs under an apricot sky.
Almost exactly two years later, another president is making another last-minute trip to the country having accomplished what Biden, despite his best and often anguished efforts, could not: an agreement to release all hostages from Gaza, and a ceasefire many hope will lead to a permanent end to the Israel-Hamas war.
Many steps remain before that can happen, but President Donald Trump’s brief visit to Israel this week to preside over the Gaza truce he helped broker will nonetheless be a valedictory one, and a moment he’s been envisioning for months. In a lot of ways, it’s also a bookend to the similar journey his predecessor took in 2023.
Back then, Israel was traumatized after Hamas killed nearly 1,200 people and took more than 200 hostages into Gaza. It was a freighted moment, with Israelis and their neighbors in the region girding for what would come next.
President Joe Biden greets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after arriving in Tel Aviv, Israel, on October 18, 2023. – Evan Vucci/AP
Biden was there to offer a warm embrace: He hugged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the tarmac; he hugged relatives of the attacks’ victims later in the day. But he also came bearing a gentle warning: Don’t give in to the “primal rage” of revenge that leads to excessive loss of civilian life and squanders the world’s sympathy.
“I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it,” Biden told an audience of Israelis during a speech in a hotel basement in Tel Aviv, recalling the mistakes the United States made after 9/11.
“I know the choices are never clear or easy for the leadership,” Biden went on. “There’s always cost, but it requires being deliberate, requires asking very hard questions. That requires clarity about the objectives and an honest assessment about whether the path you’re on will achieve those objectives.”
It was easy to imagine Biden making the same point in private to Netanyahu, who was then in the process of determining Israel’s response to the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Whether he got “clarity” or an “honest assessment” from the prime minister was never quite clear, and over the ensuing years his advice seemed to mostly go ignored.
On Monday, Trump will arrive in a different Israel. No longer under imminent threat from Hamas’ rockets, the country is celebrating an arrangement that will allow all 20 of the living hostages to be released, along with the remains of hostages who have died.
It is also grappling with the moral damage Biden warned about. Its campaign in Gaza, which left the enclave in ruins and more than 60,000 of its inhabitants dead, has badly eroded its global standing. In recent weeks, as Israel’s military campaign intensified, some of its closest allies recognized a Palestinian state, a mostly symbolic move that still underscored Israel’s growing diplomatic seclusion.
Displaced Palestinians carry their belongings as they walk along the heavily damaged Al-Jalaa Street in Gaza City on Saturday. – Abdel Kareem Hana/AP
Among Americans, including within Trump’s conservative base, public opinion of Israel is at new lows. A Pew Research Center poll released this month found nearly 6 out of 10 Americans now hold a negative view of Israel. A recent New York Times/Siena survey showed pro-Palestinian sympathies narrowly outstripping support for Israel for the first time, by 35% to 34%.
At home as well, Netanyahu faces anger at allowing the war to grind on while the hostages languished underground. During a celebratory speech Saturday in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square — which the prime minister has never visited — Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff only had to mention Netanyahu’s name to be drowned out by booing.
“Guys, let me finish my thought,” he pleaded.
During his short time in Israel this week, Trump is expected to address Israel’s Knesset and potentially meet with hostages or their families following Monday’s expected release.
He also plans a stop in Sharm El Sheikh, the Egyptian resort where the deal was finalized, to sign the agreement while a clutch of his most powerful counterparts, including the leaders of France, Britain, Germany and Italy, watch on.
It’s a moment Trump has been anticipating for months, and an outcome many of his supporters believe warrants a Nobel Peace Prize. In the days leading up to his departure, administration officials remained on tenterhooks as the fragile deal came into effect; as one senior US official said late last week, “there’s still just a lot of ways that this can go wrong.”
It’s a sentiment that would be familiar to Biden and his aides, who spent the 15 months following his visit to Israel — the remainder of his single term — trying to resolve the Gaza conflict. It was a halting process, full of starts and stops, that often seemed to be nearing resolution only to fall apart at the last minute.
People demonstrate in support of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas at a rally in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Saturday. – Emilio Morenatti/AP
Some aides privately conceded Biden’s visit to Israel so quickly after October 7 risked burdening him with partial ownership of the decisions the country was making over exacting retribution for the attacks.
That ended up being prescient. The grinding war alienated Biden’s political base, preoccupied him as he was trying to run for reelection and, once he withdrew from contention, saddled his vice president, Kamala Harris, with the thorny task of explaining how she might approach the conflict differently (she never quite said, though wrote in her book last month that Biden’s “remarks about innocent Palestinians came off as inadequate and forced”).
Despite his decadeslong relationship with Netanyahu, Biden found he had little leverage with the prime minister, at least that he was willing to exert. Trump, too, has found his patience frequently tested by Netanyahu. Both presidents held heated telephone conversations with the prime minister that at times devolved into profanity.
How Trump found success where Biden could not is a complicated question, with divergent views even among allies of both men. Trump’s aides insist it was his dealmaking acumen, his ability to exert pressure and his willingness to try something different that led to the agreement.
“The definition of insanity is to do the same thing again and again, expecting a different result,” Vice President JD Vance said at a Cabinet meeting last week. “The reason we’re here is because the president actually charted a different course with a different team.”
Some former Biden officials said Trump built on the work they began.
“This is essentially the plan that we developed over many months and more or less left in a drawer for the incoming administration, and I’m very, very glad they picked it up,” Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said on a podcast last week.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, similarly argued last week that Trump inherited a “roadmap” for a comprehensive end to the war. He also said the time had finally arrived where both sides had little reason to keep fighting.
“To me, the key thing here is that Israel had no more military objectives to achieve in Gaza, and Hamas had lost a huge amount of its capacity to continue to resist militarily,” he said on NPR. “And when you put those two things together, this situation was ripe to be resolved.”
That, in many ways, reflects the view of current administration officials, who said last week that Hamas had shown signs it was tiring of the war and that Israel was ready to turn its attention back to its economy and restoring its diplomatic standing.
Or, as Trump said Friday, “I think they’re all tired of fighting.”
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