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An excerpt:
From Gerson Baskin's article.
<And what [Gershon] Baskin has said, and he wrote
this in the Times of Israel recently, is that in September 2024,
the same deal that was just made, but tens of thousands of lives lost later
was on the table and it was not only on the table. Every
side was ready to commit to it except
the Biden administration wasn't pushing
Netanyahu or Israel. Why? What else was
happening in September 2024? That's when Israel began its campaign to maul
Hezbollah, to begin to assassinate all of its leadership, to assassinate Hassan Nasallah as he was negotiating a ceasefire as he was working on
negotiating a cessation of conflict in
the south of Lebanon and they killed
him. and the Biden administration, the
people around Biden, especially Brett McGurk, who today is working for theSaudis in a series of Saudi arms
industry linked tech firms. Brett
McGurk became so enthralled with the
idea of destroying Hezbollah along with
Amos Hochstein, the Israeli born
negotiator for Lebanon for Biden, that
Biden sat around and did nothing. This
is also corroborated by Kamala Harris's own
memoir where she said that every time she would bringup the concept of a ceasefire, Biden would say,"Well, I'm a Zionist" and then he would proceed to
ship more 2,000 pound weapons to
Israel. So, this could have all been
done by Biden. Tony Blinken could have
had these Israeli captives who
are now being released on the White
House lawn. Biden could have vied for the Nobel Prize, but he chose not to.
Tens of thousands were murdered.
Hundreds are being pulled from the
rubble every day that we didn't even
know were dead. Gaza is 83% destroyed.
And so this is the actually the legacy of Biden, this is Biden's failure.>
From Gerson Baskin's article.
What we should also know is that this deal could have been done a long time ago. Hamas agreed to all the same terms in September 2024, as outlined in the “Three Weeks Deal” that I had received in both written and voice messages, in Arabic and English. But at that point, the Israeli negotiators responded that “the Prime Minister did not agree to end the war.” Even though the “Three Week Deal” proposal landed on the desk of President Biden, his person in charge, Bret McGurk, refused to stray from the bad deal that he was negotiating.
I met with members of the American negotiating team in October 2024, and they were as frustrated as I was with their inability to convince Biden and Biden’s people to look seriously at the deal on the table. The Qataris invited me to Doha in October 2024, and I presented to them the deal that Hamas agreed to, which they were fully aware of, but they said that without the American adoption of the plan, nothing could be done, because the obstacle was Israel, not Hamas. That is the same message I received from the Egyptian intelligence – Hamas was ready for a deal to release all of the hostages, not to govern Gaza any longer, and to end the war. But Israel was not prepared to go ahead.
On December 26, 2024, I met with Ronen Bar in his office in the Shin Bet headquarters. In that meeting, three weeks before Trump entered the White House, I was asked not to use my back channels because “in three weeks there will be a ceasefire deal.” Trump told Netanyahu that he wanted a ceasefire before he entered the White House, and Ronen Bar knew it would happen, and it did on January 19, 2025. To me, it was clear that President Biden projected American weakness while President Trump projects American power.
From that moment, on December 26, 2024, it was clear to me that the only way the war would come to an end would be when President Trump decides it has to end. From that time, my primary efforts were to communicate with Steve Witkoff and find a way to work a back channel between the American side and Hamas, knowing that the negotiation did not have to be directly with the Israeli side. The Israeli side would accept whatever Trump forced them to accept.
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