DAVID: Aloha. This is David in Honolulu. Today is my last day as president of the University of Hawaii after a 47-year career here, ending with 11 years as president. This podcast was recorded at…
TAMARA KEITH, HOST:
1:05 p.m. on Thursday, January 16.
DAVID: Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I’ll be enjoying my new life as a retiree. I’m probably at the beach. OK, here’s the show.
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KEITH: Wow. Congratulations.
ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: I’m sort of envious that he both worked in Hawaii and now gets to retire and enjoy Hawaii, even (laughter) further as a retiree.
GREG MYRE, BYLINE: That’s a great job. I want to be president of the University of Hawaii.
KEITH: I don’t think we’re qualified, unfortunately.
MYRE: Well, that’s a totally different subject.
KEITH: Hey there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.
KHALID: I’m Asma Khalid. I also cover the White House.
MYRE: And I’m Greg Myre. I cover national security.
KEITH: Today on the pod, with just days left in the Biden administration, there’s finally a ceasefire and hostage-release deal to stop the fighting in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. Greg, you are in Israel now, so what is in this deal?
MYRE: Right. So this deal has several phases – the first one would last for six weeks. The fighting is supposed to stop. That could happen as soon as Sunday. Hamas is supposed to release, over this next six weeks, 33 of the 98 hostages it’s still holding – some of them alive, some dead. Israel is supposed to free about a thousand Palestinian prisoners and detainees. Then will come a second phase. Israel is supposed to fully withdraw its troops from the Gaza Strip. More hostages and prisoners will be freed. The war then should be completely finished. But there is this very long-term process of rebuilding Gaza after the devastation of the war, some key questions that haven’t been answered, like who’s going to run Gaza?
KEITH: Asma, you have been in briefings with administration officials. How did this deal come to pass?
KHALID: The broad framework that Greg outlined there is actually something that President Biden first announced from the White House on a Friday in late May. And over the last several months we had heard that perhaps if we’re getting close to a ceasefire, things kind of backed up. I mean, it’s been a very long process, and that’s something that Biden himself alluded to when he announced this deal.
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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: You know, those of you who have followed the negotiations can attest, the road to this deal has not been easy. I’ve worked in foreign policy for decades. This is one of the toughest negotiations I’ve ever experienced. And we reached this point because of the pressure that Israel built on Hamas, backed by the United States.
KHALID: You know, what we heard from a senior administration official is that the region is in a really different position as well, right? Once the Lebanon ceasefire deal was announced, that they sort of then intensified these talks in Gaza. And, you know, just over the last couple of weeks, things really reached a serious point, is what we were told. In the last 96 hours, in fact, Biden’s lead Middle East negotiator was joined by President-elect Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy. They were working together out in the region to nail down the final arrangements. And what they described to us was a situation in Qatar where they had Israeli officials on one floor of a house and then Hamas negotiators on another floor of a house, and they were shuttling this all back and forth between each other.
But, you know, Tam, I mentioned there Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, and I really do think it is an important and somewhat open question about whether or not this deal would have come to fruition if we did not have a transition at this moment in time, and we didn’t have Trump coming in as a new president.
KEITH: Greg, let’s talk about this a little bit because Trump had warned that there would be hell to pay if these hostages were not released before he took office. The Biden and incoming Trump administrations did speak with one voice in these negotiations at the end. They were working in total cooperation. What did that do in terms of the dynamics to making this deal happen, particularly from the Israeli side?
MYRE: Right. I mean, I think it had to have some impact. I mean, there have been speculations for months and months that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was not going to make a major move while the U.S. election was playing out. And then Trump wins the election, and then that he won’t make a move until perhaps Trump comes into office. And then Trump says, I want a deal before I’m in office. So you have to think it played a role here in their minds. They haven’t come out and said that publicly, but it’s pretty hard to believe it’s just mere coincidence that the deal has come together, especially since it was a deal that, as Asma noted, was essentially on the table since last May.
Now, another key point here, Trump is already claiming some credit for this deal, but with claiming credit comes responsibility. And so, in some sense, we may be seeing a little bit of a reversal compared to the previous transition in 2020, 2021, when Trump had done a deal with the Taliban for U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan. Biden inherited that deal. It was then his job to pull the U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. That turned into a real fiasco and hampered him throughout his administration. In a sense, we’ve – they’ve changed positions now – Trump claiming credit for this deal on Monday. This deal will be his. It will be his responsibility to see it through.
And even as scheduled, it’s going to take weeks and weeks, several months to play out. There are Israeli American hostages there, so that, of course, will be a key point, and there’s going to be problems. There’s no way this is going to be – to go smoothly. So he’ll have responsibility for managing that and can’t merely claim that it was something he inherited, since his envoy was there at the very final key moments of the talks when the essential details were being nailed down.
KHALID: But I do think it will be hard for Biden, when history is written about him, to totally escape from this legacy. I mean, this is a war that ultimately became his war. For months and months, Biden would be protested by folks on the left about how he had handled or mishandled the response here to this war. There was a portion of the Democratic Party that was really, really unhappy with how he handled the situation, particularly as the death toll of Palestinian civilians was increasing. And so I do think that there are going to be questions about Biden’s legacy of how long he allowed this to go on particularly, and what sort of power he had in influencing an ally like Israel.
KEITH: Yeah. I mean, I think that there’s an open debate about how much influence he had with Prime Minister Netanyahu to get Israel to accept any deal. And certainly, there’s also debate about whether Biden did enough to exert what leverage he could have.
MYRE: Yeah. I think Biden was in this very difficult position. He’s been a lifelong supporter of Israel. He wanted to show that he was fully behind them. He continued to send them weapons throughout this conflict. But at the same time, he saw how this was playing out with a high civilian casualty death toll. He spoke out against that – not strong enough, according to many of – people in the Democratic Party and the left. So he was in this sort of in-between position. That’s a really tough place to be during a war, which tend to be very polarizing events and you’re on one side or the other. There’s not a lot of gray space and not a lot of room for nuance or to try to say, yes, I support you, but don’t do this. So he kind of got caught a little bit in the middle there of supporting Israel but taking issue with the way they were prosecuting the war. And I think that hurt him very much at home, and perhaps somewhat here in Israel as well.
KEITH: All right. Well, we’re going to take a quick break, and we’ll have more in a moment.
And we’re back. And in some ways, the deal might be the easy part. Greg, certainly these negotiations dragged on a long time. At some point, though, they’re going to have to figure out how to rebuild Gaza. What’s the plan there?
MYRE: Yeah. There’s a lot of things we don’t know – probably more we don’t know than we do know. Gaza has been absolutely devastated. There are very few places to live in Gaza. So many of the homes and other buildings have been torn down. Little over 2 million people there. Virtually everyone in the territory has been forced out of their home and had to move around multiple times as the war moved around to different parts of the territory. There’s just not places to go back to. A lot of people are going to be living in tents for a long, long time.
One of the things the ceasefire is supposed to do is allow a great surge in assistance into Gaza. Now, there’s just the immediate problem of food and medicine to keep people alive, and then there’ll be the longer-term stuff of rebuilding homes. It’s not clear where that money is going to come from. Some of the Arab countries are expected to put in money. Western countries will put in money. But there’s no fund, a pile or a pot of money just sitting there, waiting to be used to rebuild all the homes that will be necessary in Gaza.
Who’s going to govern Gaza? That’s not clear. Hamas is still there. Israel says it won’t let them return to govern the place. Who’s going to provide security in Gaza? That’s not clear either. The Israelis are supposed to pull out in the coming weeks. What security force will take their place? So all of these unanswered questions still have to be dealt with. And at minimum, even if all goes well and it stays relatively calm, this is a multiyear rebuilding process.
KHALID: Greg, I wanted to get your assessment on what this ceasefire hostage deal does for the long-term idea of a two-state solution. This is something you often heard the Democrats, Biden talk about, this vision in the long run. And I was at an event the other day with Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, and then the incoming national security adviser as well – Mike Waltz for Donald Trump. And they talk about this idea of creating a sort of stable Middle East region – a vision of peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. And it feels like all of this jumps over the fact that this big, existential question has yet to be resolved. And I don’t see how it’s actually going to be resolved with this immediate ceasefire hostage deal.
MYRE: Yeah, Asma, you’re making a very important point there. And I think as someone who’s been going back and forth between Washington and the Middle East, you see this sort of different level of conversation in Washington and in diplomatic circles. You’ll hear about the need to create the conditions for Palestinian statehood, the two-state solution. You really just don’t hear that here because it just feels so unrealistic at the moment. Benjamin Netanyahu has been in office for most of the past 15 years. He’s said explicitly he doesn’t want to see a Palestinian state created on his watch. You have the Palestinians deeply divided between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, Hamas in Gaza, that have different approaches.
It’s just not a realistic prospect. You know, you’ve got to stop the war. You’ve got to take care of the needs of Palestinians. You’ve got to create some stability. But then moving on to talking about a political solution that would require big compromises by the Palestinian factions, by an Israeli government, as to creating a Palestinian state.
KEITH: Asma, I do want to turn to President Biden’s farewell speech last night. He only briefly touched on the ceasefire. This was meant to be one of those set-piece speeches, his last Oval Office address. And in some ways, it was crafted in the mold of other presidential farewells through history. Like, he was talking about his legacy and how he wants to be remembered, and he was thanking the American people. But he also followed in the tradition of presidents like Washington and Eisenhower, issuing a warning at the end.
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BIDEN: That’s why, in my farewell address tonight, I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. This is a dangerous concern (ph) – that’s a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people, with dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America, of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.
KEITH: I was quite surprised to hear that come out of his mouth. I was not expecting that.
KHALID: Yeah. I was equally surprised, Tam. You know, that term oligarchy – this is the first time I have heard Biden use it in an American context, right? When you’ve heard him refer to oligarchs, it’s been to refer to corruption in Russia or Ukraine. It was really, really unexpected to me. I will say he went on to single-out the tech industry, talking about this concerns that he has for a, quote, “tech industrial complex,” and called out sort of the convergence of money, power, technology, and how that’s dangerous in his view, leading to misinformation, disinformation and sowing distrust and division. It was really surprising to me, Tam, also because it felt so different than the previous alarm bells we have heard from Joe Biden. I expected to hear him ringing the alarms about authoritarianism, you know, possibly the alarm bells about his successor. But he did not once name-check Donald Trump in that speech.
KEITH: All right. Well, that is all for today. I’m Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.
KHALID: I’m Asma Khalid. I cover the White House as well.
MYRE: And I’m Greg Myre. I cover national security.
KEITH: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
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