AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: To talk more about the ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza, we’re joined now by three guests. Muhammad Shehada is a writer and analyst from Gaza. He’s chief of communications at Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. He joins us from Copenhagen. Jeremy Scahill is co-founder of Drop Site News. And Daniel Levy is president of the U.S./Middle East Project and a former Israeli peace negotiator under Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin.

So, Daniel, I’d like to begin with you. If you could just start by responding to Netanyahu delaying the Cabinet vote, and what you think the cause of that is, in particular, the pressure on him from right-wing members of his coalition?

DANIEL LEVY: Right. So, what we’re led to believe is that the proximate cause — in other words, what the media in Israel is being background briefed on; I’m not sure if they’re saying it publicly yet — is that this has to do with the lists of prisoners that would need to be let go by Israel, the Palestinian prisoners. There are thousands of Palestinian prisoners, often held in detention without trial, in Israeli prisons. And this has to do with the names that Hamas is insisting will be on that list. We don’t know whether this will torpedo things or not.

What we do know — and let’s stick with that — is that Netanyahu didn’t want to get to this moment. You can listen to the lies of the outgoing administration, of Secretary Blinken. You know, sometimes in a negotiation it’s useful to have some constructive ambiguity. One of the mediators may even have to align with the narrative of one of the parties to give them that victory now, even if they haven’t got the victory, to get a deal over the line. But there’s also a kind of lie which is just a lie, and it undermines things. And we’ve been told throughout that the problem is Hamas; that’s the reason there’s no deal. But every Israeli journalist who’s been serious who’s covered this — and it’s rare to have unanimity there — from left and right, pro- and anti-Netanyahu, have acknowledged that Netanyahu worked hardest to prevent this deal.

And Netanyahu has changed under the pressure of a president who’s perceived to be someone who can act like the leader of a superpower, who Netanyahu can’t wrap around his little finger like he could with Biden. That’s the circumstance in which Netanyahu has found himself being dragged into a deal that threatens his domestic political stability. He wants to continue with this war. And therefore, Netanyahu will do everything, today and, I imagine, if we move forward, throughout the period of implementation and as one tries to get further down the road — he will do everything to torpedo this, hoping that it will be easy. Given narratives that exist in the West, it will be easy to say, “Look, you see, Hamas are the ones who are to blame.” That’s the fragility of this thing. That’s where Netanyahu is. And that’s what we’re having to contend with in these very hours.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what the objections are of Bezalel Smotrich, as well as Ben-Gvir. And explain what it would mean if one of them left — Smotrich said he will not approve this — and if both of them left. Will Netanyahu survive as prime minister?

DANIEL LEVY: OK, let’s do the coalition math first, if I may. Smotrich or Ben-Gvir, if one of those leaves, and Ben-Gvir is the one who has — his faction have set this out more clearly — that, on its own, if they left the government, and even voted against the government, would not bring down the coalition. Together, if they left and voted against the government, that brings down the coalition. They can certainly leave and say that they are leaving because of this deal, but if Netanyahu reverses the terms, then they will return, or that they will leave, but they will hold their fire in terms of bringing down the coalition. And I think that’s probably — that’s the ballpark in which we are. The opposition will offer a safety net over the implementation of the deal. They won’t offer a general safety net.

What all this adds up to — without boring people with the intricacies of Israeli coalition math, what all this adds up to is that Netanyahu has a political problem if he moves forward with this. And it’s one of the main reasons — there were other things, but it’s one of the main reasons he did not want to go to a deal. But his problem is that that was only sustainable when domestic pressure was the only factor, if there was no significant external pressure. The only actor that can bring significant external pressure is the U.S., because the U.S. offers the weapons, the arms, the political, diplomatic, economic cover. Israel couldn’t do this for a day without the U.S. The Biden administration refused to use that leverage.

Why are the coalition allies from the extreme right against this? The point is very simple. Their vision — and it is a vision shared by many in the Israeli media, by many in Netanyahu’s own party, and it is the vision that, let’s face it, Netanyahu himself has pursued for most of this assault on Gaza — the vision is that Gaza will be shrunk; ultimately, the Nakba will be continued, the removal of Palestinians; that Israelis will resettle in Gaza. And it’s part of a broader vision of the permanent denial of rights, dispossession and removal from the physical expanse, that began with the Nakba — why are Gazans refugees in the first place — of this particular Zionist vision. They see that if Palestinians are allowed back to the north, that if the Israeli military has to withdraw — these are all things that are part of an agreement — that that vision will take a serious hit. And they look at this, and they say, “Wait a minute. The Palestinians are still here. They’re still standing. Hamas is still standing. Hamas is still exacting a price from the IDF. Palestinian resistance is resilient. This isn’t what we thought we had signed up for. We thought we were going to get total victory, with American assistance.” And suddenly they look around, and they see that Israel’s legal, political, economic vulnerabilities, which this has caused, are not being offset by the kind of grandiose schemes for accelerating the displacement of Palestinians that they thought they would get.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Muhammad Shehada, I want to ask you about a piece that you recently published, which was based on conversations with numerous Israeli, Palestinian and Arab officials involved in the talks. They all expressed surprise, including the Israeli officials, that the Biden administration has continued to publicly blame Hamas as the obstacle to a ceasefire, when it was clear to all involved that it was Netanyahu who was holding up the agreement. So, if you could talk about this latest development of the postponement of the Cabinet vote and also respond to the terms of the agreement that was passed yesterday, agreed upon yesterday?

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Thanks so much, Nermeen. And thanks for bringing together a team of very good and close friends. Good to be here with Daniel and Jeremy.

I’ll start with the first issue on the terms of agreement. It is literally, word for word — I read the whole text very carefully — it’s, word for word, the same text as the one that was produced by Israel’s own team on the 27th of May, 2024, so about seven to eight months ago. Hamas accepted it on July 2nd. Hamas was informed by mediators that the Israeli team gave a positive response, as well. Netanyahu immediately rejected it, as soon as Hamas’s answer was given, and imposed four conditions that his own generals, his own advisers, his own negotiators said that these conditions are impossible and render a deal unfeasible. But he insisted on them.

The Biden administration immediately took a very easy approach. They decided to absolve themselves of any responsibility for refusing or failing to pressure Netanyahu by rewriting history. That’s what a very senior Israeli security official told me recently in November. He said Biden’s team is engaging in a shameful attempt to rewrite history, basically gaslighting, putting all blame on Hamas, so that it sounds that they tried their best with Netanyahu, they got him to accept, and Hamas is to blame. The other thing is that mediators and Israel’s own negotiating team have been begging Biden’s team for months to name and shame Netanyahu, believing that it can create some domestic pressure on him. Biden refused consistently. We know — yesterday in The Times of Israel it came out, citing Israeli negotiators — that Blinken, when he used the narrative of saying “Netanyahu accepted, Hamas rejected,” it threw a wrench in the negotiations and collapsed them. That’s what an Israeli negotiator himself said. So, in a way, we had a consistent effort by Biden’s team to cover up and buy time for the unfolding genocide in Gaza.

The other element about what is happening now and where things stand is that Netanyahu, in the very last minute, as Daniel said, is trying to impose new conditions that would destroy the possibility of reaching a deal. His office just released a statement that negates completely the very explicitly stated terms of the appendix that was attached to the deal yesterday. For example, in the appendix, it says that the IDF should reduce its soldiers at the Philadelphi Corridor, that separates Rafah from Egypt, throughout the first phase of the ceasefire, and they should withdraw from that Philadelphi Corridor by day 50 of the ceasefire. Netanyahu is now saying, “No, no, no, no. There will be zero reduction. No IDF post will be removed. There will be redeployment, and there will not be any withdrawal by day 50.” The second point that he’s insisting on is to say there will not be any ending of the war unless Hamas accepts Israel’s condition to achieve the objectives of the war. What are the objectives of the war? Is that Hamas should cease to exist. So he’s saying to Hamas, “Dismantle yourself. Do exactly the job that Israel, the IDF failed to accomplish throughout the last 15 months of genocide, of destroying Hamas’s military force. Do it yourself as Hamas. Hand over your arms. Surrender. Bend the knee. Or, otherwise, the war continues.” And neither of these conditions were in the ceasefire agreement. So, that’s how he’s trying to ruin it.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me bring Jeremy Scahill into this conversation. Jeremy, just before the ceasefire was announced yesterday, you wrote a piece on “The Trump Factor.” Yesterday, President Biden spoke twice, right after the announcement, which also puts enormous pressure on Netanyahu, since all the world and networks are reporting there’s a deal, and yet he is trying to bring together his coalition to support it. Biden spoke both in the afternoon, and he gave his farewell address from the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office last night and said, “This is my deal from May,” though did give a nod to President-elect Trump weighing in at the same time, as if there’s two governments. Explain what the difference is this time from when Biden did put this forward in May.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, you know, it’s very clear, if you read the Israeli press and listen to Israeli politicians and political leaders, that this deal would not be signed, certainly not at this time, but for the intervention of Donald Trump. And much of the media coverage of Trump’s threats on this were focused on Hamas, because Trump kept saying, “If the hostages aren’t released, there’s going to be hell unleashed in the Middle East.” And, you know, he wasn’t specifying what his threat was, but it was — you know, most of it was focused on Hamas.

But what happened was that Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East is not someone like an Antony Blinken or a Henry Kissinger. Instead, it’s kind of, you know, like a scene from The Godfather, where Tom Hagan gets sent as the consigliere to sort of do the bidding of the don. He sends another billionaire real estate tycoon, Steve Witkoff, to the region, and Witkoff then is in the room with CIA Director Bill Burns, with Brett McGurk, the current envoy, with all of these mediators. And we understand from Israeli media coverage that last Friday Witkoff is in Doha. He calls Netanyahu’s people and says, “I’m coming tomorrow to Israel, and I expect Netanyahu to be there.” And they say, “Oh, well, no, it’s Shabbat. He’s not going to be able to meet with you.” And Witkoff, who himself is Jewish, was like, “I don’t care what day it is.” He arrives there and, by all accounts, sort of said, “This deal is going to happen before President-elect Trump takes office.”

Now, some of this, I think, is true, and I don’t think we can understate the role that Trump played in forcing this deal through. And it really exposes the utter moral rot that existed within the Biden White House on this issue of stopping the war, because before he even gets into office, Trump is showing the vast powers of the American presidency. He’s doing it in an unorthodox way. He’s doing it before he assumes office. But it just shows that Joe Biden could have ended this long ago if he used some of the levers of American power available to him, as Daniel said.

This does benefit Netanyahu to an extent, because it can sort of be portrayed as, you know, “Trump forced us into doing this.” But the devil is in the details. Last night, Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, echoed something that Netanyahu has been hinting at, which is that the Israelis view this as a bitter pill that they have to swallow right now, but they’re not even talking about phase two and phase three. Netanyahu really is sort of implying, and Mike Waltz co-signed that last night in interviews, that it’s really just a phase one deal and that once we get a decent number of hostages released from Gaza, then we can resume the war. Trump’s national security adviser said that the aim of totally destroying Hamas and demilitarizing Gaza is a just one that the United States supports. So, while Trump should be given credit for doing something that Biden and Harris systematically refused to do, this remains an extremely dangerous moment, as evidenced by the fact that Netanyahu has now ordered his forces into a full-spectrum, full-scale attack against the Palestinians of Gaza leading up to Sunday.

One last point, Amy, echoing some of what Muhammad and Daniel said, this narrative that Hamas has been the impediment to a ceasefire has been a lie for this entire time. From the very beginning, Hamas officials told Israeli negotiators and others that they wanted to make a deal to exchange the Israelis taken on October 7th for Palestinians being held. Antony Blinken has been the liar-in-chief, promoting this narrative. I was shown a document, Amy, this week by — that was signed by Hamas’s negotiators, all of them, and it was a copy of the ceasefire agreement that Hamas’s team signed and stamped on Monday. Every day after that, leading up to Wednesday — so, all through the evening Monday, all through the day Tuesday, all through the day Wednesday — Antony Blinken and Israeli officials kept saying, “We’re just waiting on Hamas to accept the deal.” I have seen proof that Hamas actually formally accepted the terms of the ceasefire on Monday. And Blinken and the Americans knew this, and they continued to feed into this lie. That’s indicative of this whole story that’s been going on for almost a year and a half where a genocide has been committed against the Palestinian people, and the United States has not just serviced it with weapons and political support, but also consistently promoting lies and a narrative that ultimately was very, very lethal.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Jeremy, if you could elaborate on why you think it is that it was so important for Trump to get this deal agreed upon? And I’d just like to read comments that a former director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry made earlier today, saying that this “total victory for Israel” — he called the ceasefire agreement a “total victory for Israel” — happened not in Gaza, but in Washington. Trump is seen as a total victory, for Israel has so much to benefit from Trump regarding its international status and other issues. So, if you could — 

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, I mean — 

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — respond, Jeremy?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, you know, let’s remember that Trump is an unorthodox political figure. Whatever anyone thinks about him, he’s an unusual character in the history of the American presidency, and he is not a creature of the Washington swamp. He may be a creature of other kinds of swamps, but he’s not a creature of the Washington swamp. And so, you know, part of what is happening here, it’s akin a little bit to what Ronald Reagan did to Jimmy Carter during the election in 1980 with the Iran hostage situation. It’s not exactly the same, but there are some vibes of that. And I think Trump wanted to sail into his inauguration with what he could claim was like a major diplomatic victory in a war that has gone on for 16 months and which quite likely was the defining factor that cost Kamala Harris the election against Donald Trump.

On a different level, I think that Trump has a much broader agenda. I don’t think he particularly wants to see the Middle East in flames when he takes power. He’s very, very interested in getting a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. I think that’s one of the prizes that he’s going to move toward handing Netanyahu in all of this. But there’s also some really dangerous things at play that extend beyond that normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia. The West Bank, Israel wants to fully and officially annex the West Bank. Trump’s number one donor, Miriam Adelson, has made very clear she wants the West Bank annexed. Mike Huckabee, the incoming U.S. ambassador to Israel, has said there’s no such thing as a Palestinian, no such territory as the West Bank. So, let’s not pretend for a moment that Trump was motivated by humanitarian, you know, sort of concern. But he is viewing this, I think, as a business transaction, and Trump wants capitalism in the Middle East. And he ultimately endorses an agenda that is going to be very bad for the Palestinian people. But in the short term, no question: Donald Trump the defining factor in forcing this through.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Daniel Levy, if you could respond, in fact, to that point? Because a number of people have suggested that what the U.S. offered Netanyahu in return for his agreeing to the terms of the agreement is free license to expand settlements in the West Bank.

DANIEL LEVY: Does anyone who says that suggest that a Trump administration, a Republican ecosystem, was going to clamp down on settlements in the West Bank? This is the point. It’s a very important distinction to make, and Jeremy walked us to that distinction. It’s one thing to say — and this is, I think, what we’ve all been saying — that Netanyahu looks at Trump and says, “OK, he’s the leader of a superpower. He acts like it. He’s unpredictable. When my personal political interests cut across what he perceives to be the American interest of the moment, he’s the top dog here. I can’t do what I did with the liar-in-chief Blinken and the rot that is the White House,” as Jeremy correctly described it. So, there’s a difference between that, which has changed, has upended Netanyahu’s political calculation — there’s a difference between that and anyone trying to depict Trump, his team, the administration, the Republican ecosystem, the evangelical dispensational Zionists, the Miriam Adelson donor world — between trying to depict all of those things as somehow having an agenda of Palestinian rights and liberation and ending occupation and apartheid. Of course, that would be pure silliness.

But the difference here is that Israel expected to get all those things, to get an even more permissive environment when it came to violations of international law and trampling Palestinian rights on the West Bank and everywhere else, to get even more of an American lean in to Abraham Accords-style normalization, to get an even more aggressive assault on the international legal infrastructure and architecture, like the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice. They expected to get all of those things but not have to deal with pesky requests on a Gaza ceasefire because the Gaza continuation of that war and the holding of the hostages is something that irks, apparently, the incoming administration. So, I think this idea that they’re getting a quid pro quo is a nonsense. They’re getting those things anyway. They simply expected to be able to get them and do whatever they wanted on everything else.

And that’s, very sadly, the difference when it comes to, again, this final powerful demonstration of the Biden administration in all its weakness. And let’s just think about this for a moment. They have spent billions of American taxpayer dollars sending arms to Israel. They have spent other billions of American taxpayer dollars trying to secure safe shipping from the Houthis. The Houthis have told us all along this would end if you get a ceasefire in Gaza. They’ve spent some hundreds of millions of dollars probably in making good on just a tiny fraction of the damage done in Gaza that was caused by their original billions in weapons. All of that money until — now, some have profited from that. Let’s not be naive here. But all of that in order to pursue a policy that, literally, in a matter of days, all it took was to say “on this, no,” that is shameful.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Muhammad Shehada, we give you the last word. You were born in Gaza. We’re speaking to you, though, in Copenhagen. As Trump takes office and the first hostages are expected to be released — three women on Sunday, a thousand Palestinian prisoners expected to be released in these weeks — what concerns you most about the future of the Palestinian people? We just have a minute.

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Basically, what concerns me the most is that as soon as this war is going to end, Israel will impose a permanent state of nonlife on Gaza, leave every Gazan with the destruction that it created for the next decades, while at the same time Gaza and Palestine will be pushed into complete irrelevancy. Everybody is going to pretend like it doesn’t exist anymore, and try to force us to look the other way, so that that’s going to be even more painful than the war, people just suffering every day nonstop, indefinitely, without any option or horizon.

AMY GOODMAN: Muhammad Shehada, we thank you for being with us, Gaza-born writer and analyst, chief of communications at Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of Drop Site News, we’ll link to your pieces. And Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project, former Israeli peace negotiator under two Israeli prime ministers, Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin.

Up next, we come back to D.C. to look at the confirmation hearing for Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick to be attorney general. Back in 20 seconds.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Shame” by Madlib. The legendary producer lost his home, equipment and decades of music in the L.A. fire.