Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct during months-long negotiations to reach a ceasefire in Gaza and swap Israeli captives for Palestinian prisoners is “deeply problematic,” Ilan Goldenberg, a senior adviser to former US Vice President (and Democratic presidential candidate in the November 2024 elections) Kamala Harris, said in an article published by the former official on the Substack website on Wednesday, February 19, 2025.

The article by Goldenberg, who later served as the Harris presidential campaign’s “emissary to American Jewry,” represents the first real-world account from a senior official in former President Joe Biden’s administration of what the previous administration could have done differently to secure a cease-fire, though other officials insisted they responded as appropriately as possible given the situation they faced.

“I want to stress at the outset that making decisions in the middle of a war with incomplete information is extremely difficult,” Goldenberg began his article. “I saw many honest people who were trying to do the right thing and were acting in good faith even though I was certain that we made many mistakes.”

At first glance, Goldenberg’s testimony is strikingly similar to that of Biden’s top Middle East adviser, Brett McGurk, who in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post placed the greatest blame on Hamas for the collapse of repeated ceasefire negotiations (over 12 months of war), despite well-founded claims from diplomats, hostage families, and media reports.

“Much of the focus so far has been on the consequences of President Biden’s May 2024 proposal and whether if Biden had put more pressure on Netanyahu, we could have gotten the deal much sooner,” Goldenberg says.

“I think getting a deal in May was not possible; Hamas was taking a hard line and sticking to its vision of a wider regional war, but also, Netanyahu’s behavior was very problematic as evidenced by accounts from other members of the war cabinet; leaks from Israeli negotiators; his refusal to engage seriously on the day-after plan; and his bad faith engagement with President Biden,” he adds.

“It was the major setbacks to Iran and Hezbollah in the fall of 2024 that caused Hamas to reduce its negotiating position, and it was Gideon Sa’ar’s entry into the government in September that gave Netanyahu the flexibility to maintain his coalition despite the loss of Ben-Gvir that set the terms for the hostage deal,” Goldenberg believes. “But there is a lot of reality in the fact that Netanyahu was more concerned with preserving his government than with releasing the hostages, since he could have won the support of a large part of the Israeli opposition to reach an agreement at any time.”

Goldenberg wonders what would have happened if Biden had proposed a vision for ending the Gaza war in December 2023, or January 2024, when Biden was still very popular in Israel and had leverage over Netanyahu — who was as unpopular domestically as he was before.

“Had Biden chosen at that moment to have a real public disagreement with Netanyahu and done so with the support of [opposition MK Benny] Gantz, he would have had enormous leverage to influence Israeli decision-making,” the former official says. Goldenberg suggests that Biden’s speech could have forced Netanyahu to pursue a more centrist strategy—(and possibly) strike a deal with Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, abandon extremist coalition partners like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, and perhaps lead to an agreement on elections by the end of 2024.

“What if Biden had given a speech and offered the Israeli public and the world two paths,” Goldenberg explains, “behind the first door was a ceasefire and a hostage deal that would end the war. The international community, including the Gulf states, would have worked with Israel to rebuild Gaza. There would have been an Arab-led international force that would eventually be replaced by Palestinian security forces that would take control of Gaza. The Israelis wouldn’t have had to fight forever. The deal could have included a ceasefire in the north as well. The United States would have supported this plan 100 percent, and it would have been the first step toward normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia and the entire Arab world. For Israel to accept this, it would have had to accept the role of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, but there would also have been major demands made of the Palestinians, including reforming their government, ending the system of paying salaries to prisoners, and reforming UNRWA.”

Instead, Goldenberg concludes, “We will never know how things would have turned out; what we do know is where we ended up. The war dragged on for a year, with great suffering in Gaza and continued hostage deaths. The differences between Netanyahu and Biden played out in fragmented and incoherent ways, with Netanyahu exploiting every opportunity to create distance between himself and Biden, weakening Biden’s standing with the Israeli public and ultimately eroding his influence. We ended up in the spring of 2024 with a convoluted policy of some cooperation and some confrontation that didn’t really work. In late May, President Biden called for a ceasefire, an agreement on the hostages, and a better course for our policy, but by then his influence with Netanyahu had disappeared.”