By Don Terry | Saturday, October 18, 2025 | 6 min read
The events of October 7 marked a brutal turning point. In the early hours of that morning, Hamas fighters crossed the border, killing over 1,100 Israelis and taking hundreds of hostages. The sheer savagery of the attack stunned the world. But what came after was another kind of nightmare—this time in Gaza. The response was swift and overwhelming: airstrikes, ground assaults, and a campaign that has claimed more than 67,000 Palestinian lives. Entire neighborhoods were flattened, families torn apart, and a place already trapped by years of blockade was left in ruins. By the time Trump’s second term loomed, Gaza had become little more than a scarred landscape of ash and grief.
What has unfolded since then is not some abstract geopolitical contest. It is blood, fire, and ruin. And buried within this war, beneath the bombs and speeches and diplomatic theater, is a quieter story: how Donald Trump’s private maneuvering with Benjamin Netanyahu helped make it almost impossible for Joe Biden to forge any meaningful peace.
To understand why, it’s important to recognize what Netanyahu wanted. He did not want the war to end quickly. For him, every missile, every strike, every day of fighting was also a day of political survival. As long as Israel was at war, Netanyahu could cast himself as Israel’s indispensable wartime leader. He could stall or sidestep his corruption cases.
He could weaken his rivals and cling to power by wrapping himself in the flag. In his calculus, war wasn’t just national defense—it was personal salvation. And in 2024, he made a bet: if he could keep the war going long enough, he might outlast Biden, whose Democratic Party was growing restless with his government’s actions, and wait for the return of someone far more accommodating.
That someone was Donald Trump. During his first term, Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, sidelined Palestinians, and essentially gave Netanyahu a free hand. The occupation continued unchecked, and Gaza, already suffocating under blockade, slipped further into darkness. Trump’s approach to foreign policy has always been transactional. He isn’t guided by ideological commitments so much as he is by the language of deals, leverage, and self-interest. He isn’t a traditional neoconservative, hungry for new wars or empire-building, but neither is he a peacemaker in any real sense. His worldview is rooted in the art of the bargain, not moral clarity.
Still, Trump’s relationship with Netanyahu is complicated. Unlike figures such as Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham, who treat the Israeli prime minister with something close to reverence, Trump sees him through a more pragmatic lens. When Israel began taking actions that threatened U.S. interests in the Gulf—including strikes that rattled Qatar and other partners—Trump’s patience began to thin. For him, the Middle East isn’t sacred ground. It’s a marketplace. And if Netanyahu’s war threatened that marketplace, Trump would, eventually, look for a deal.
This was the moment when the Biden administration found itself cornered. As the fighting wore on and public support for the president continued to erode, his team couldn’t seem to put any real weight behind their calls for restraint. Netanyahu knew exactly how far Biden would go—no president facing re-election was going to pick a fight with Israel, not in such a volatile year. While Biden hesitated, Trump was already moving quietly in the background.
Through backchannels, he and his allies were in touch with Netanyahu’s circle, sketching out what a friendlier landscape might look like if Biden were pushed out of the picture. These weren’t official talks; they lived in the shadows, skirting the edges of legality and brushing up against the Logan Act. But Netanyahu didn’t care about legal lines drawn in Washington. He saw in Trump a far more dependable partner, someone who wouldn’t make him sweat.
This quiet backchanneling left Biden boxed in. While he tried, often haltingly, to nudge Israel toward restraint, Netanyahu simply waited him out. Trump’s looming presence—the promise of a friendlier administration just months away—made Biden’s leverage evaporate. Netanyahu believed he could prolong the war without consequences, and he was largely right.
Trump’s motivation wasn’t altruism. As the months wore on, he grew restless not because of Palestinian suffering, but because the war was no longer serving his own political interests. He wanted headlines, not headlines about mass death. He liked the idea of playing the global dealmaker, maybe even adding a Nobel Peace Prize to his résumé. It wasn’t morality that pulled him toward an agreement with Netanyahu. It was vanity. But vanity, in this case, achieved what Biden could not.
That doesn’t absolve Trump. He may not have been president when the war began, but his earlier embrace of Netanyahu helped pave the road to it. His embassy move, his gutting of the peace process, and his indulgence of Israeli hardliners all contributed to the current reality. When Gaza burned, those decisions loomed large. And even his recent efforts to rein Netanyahu in were not about justice or principle—they were about personal gain.
For Biden, the failure is harder to escape. He had a window, however narrow, to shift the trajectory of the conflict. He could have used America’s vast military and financial leverage to press Israel harder. He could have conditioned aid, or at least signaled that there were limits. But he never did. His caution became paralysis, and paralysis became complicity. By the time Trump’s backroom diplomacy became clear, it was already too late for Biden to change the outcome.
Now, Gaza lies in ruins. Netanyahu remains in power, though his position is more precarious. Trump is poised, once again, to capitalize on the chaos he helped create. And Biden, for all his talk of diplomacy, will be remembered for presiding over one of the deadliest campaigns in modern Middle Eastern history.
Whether Trump ever wins a Nobel Prize is beside the point. The prize itself, whatever prestige it once held, would be dwarfed by the scale of human suffering in Gaza. No medal can wash away the tens of thousands of lives lost, the families shattered, the cities turned to dust. But the episode lays bare how fragile American influence can be when foreign leaders know they can just wait for a more favorable White House.
If Biden reflects honestly on these months, he may feel regret. He should. History gave him a chance to shape events, and he hesitated. Trump, acting out of sheer self-interest, managed to do what Biden could not—not because he cared more, but because Netanyahu believed him. And in the end, belief is sometimes enough to shift the tide of war.