The terrorist group Hamas rejected Israel’s latest cease-fire proposal over the weekend. The deal would have sought a mutual six-week cessation of hostilities, which would secure the release of the hostages in Hamas’s custody over the course of three stages. Beginning with the elderly, sick, and wounded, Hamas would have handed over 40 hostages in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian detainees (including those who were lawfully convicted of murdering Israelis) and the increased provision of humanitarian assistance. But it was not to be.
This is only the latest cease-fire proposal at which Hamas has balked. It rejected a similar proposal in late February despite what the New York Times described as “significant concessions” from Israeli negotiators. Hamas refused similar overtures in late December and late January. All the while, the Biden administration has applied ever-growing pressure to the Israeli government — culminating in last week’s demand that Jerusalem concede to an “immediate cease-fire,” presumably on terms acceptable to Hamas (which were and remain the “cessation of aggression against our people” and require the withdrawal of all Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip).
Perhaps Biden has made such a public show of trying to force Israel to abandon its war aims in the Strip because the Israelis are the only party listening to him. Maybe the expectation of Israel to behave like a responsible negotiating partner is an outgrowth of the fact that no one truly expects Hamas to act like a civilized sovereign. The Israelis are at liberty to resent this double standard, of course, but there is a backhanded compliment in Biden’s prohibitive public focus on Israel. After all, they’re the only reasonable party to this conflict.
That compliment extends to Israel’s supporters in the United States. The Jewish state’s proponents are expected to understand that the Biden administration’s complex approach to making all sides of this conflict happy is a performance that is not for their benefit. It’s incumbent on them to compartmentalize Biden’s efforts to isolate Jerusalem and balance them against the material support with which his White House has provisioned Israel. No such expectation is demanded of Israel’s critics — some of whom mirror Hamas’s absolutism and recalcitrance. After all, no one should expect keffiyeh-clad demonstrators barking antisemitic slogans at Democratic donors to internalize the nuanced position the White House has established for itself. Once again, there is only one reasonable party to this conflict.
Both at home and abroad, the Biden administration has set far higher expectations for the pro-Israeli side of this fight than for the other side. Perversely, the Biden administration’s assessment that only one side of this war is capable of rationality has led the administration to devote all its energies to appeasing the side that has made a virtue of injudiciousness. George W. Bush once deployed a memorable phrase to describe this phenomenon, and the Biden White House has more than lived down to it.