LEILA FADEL, HOST:
For more on President Trump's role in brokering the deal, we're joined by Gershon Baskin. He's a veteran hostage negotiator, Israeli peace activist and was involved in back-channel discussions over this deal. Good morning and thank you for being on the program.
GERSHON BASKIN: Good morning.
FADEL: So first, could you just briefly describe what role you played in or access you had to these negotiations?
BASKIN: Well, for about two months now, I've been in regular communication with Steve Witkoff, the presidential envoy to the Middle East and his No. 1 confidant. And from that point, I was communicating with him. Mostly a one-way communication on the importance of the U.S. understanding that the only way that the war in Gaza would end is if President Trump decides that it has to end because Prime Minister Netanyahu had no interest in ending the war whatsoever. He was willing to continue it forever because it keeps him in power.
At one point, about two months ago, it became a two-way communication. I think, slowly building up to a level of trust and understanding the role that I could play, having 18 years of experience of being in contact with leaders within Hamas. It became much more intense as the time went on. A month ago, we were in daily contact - telephone and WhatsApp messages - and I was not acting as a U.S. employee. I had no relationship with the U.S. government, but I was acting as someone who could communicate.
My belief since Trump entered the White House was that there was no Israeli interlocutor for a peace deal. We didn't have to negotiate with the Israelis. We only had to negotiate with the Americans and Hamas. It was difficult for me, and my challenge with Hamas was to convince them. Every time they said, Israel won't accept this, Israel won't accept that, I kept telling Hamas, Israel won't accept anything. You have to imagine that you're sitting in a room across the table from Donald Trump, not from Netanyahu. The person you need to convince is Trump. Trump will impose a deal on Israel when the time is right, when he believes that you are serious about ending this war, returning the hostages, no longer controlling Gaza. When the Americans are convinced that that's the reality, then Trump will impose a deal on Israel. At the end of the day, that's, in fact, what happened.
FADEL: So how much credit do President Trump and Steve Witkoff then deserve for this deal?
BASKIN: A hundred percent. There's no question about it. Without Trump, this would not have happened. And it was a challenge because Trump and Witkoff held the Israeli position that Hamas can be brought to its knees, that Hamas would surrender. One of the difficult discussions I had repeatedly with Witkoff was my position, my understanding that Hamas will never surrender, certainly not to Israel. Hamas would be willing to fight to the very last Gazan, but they will never surrender to Israel. And until the Americans accepted that as the reality, there was no chance that Trump would impose an end to the war on Netanyahu. I'm not sure that they believe that Hamas could not be brought to its knees, but in the end of the day, as a result of the Israeli assassination attempt in Doha, it decided that the war had to end. It was getting too dangerous for the American relations with their Arab partners in the region, which are, honestly, in terms of Trump's point of view, much more valuable than his relationship with Israel.
FADEL: Really?
BASKIN: Yeah. I mean, Trump has sympathy for Netanyahu and for Israel, but he's a businessman. Steve Witkoff, if you look at him, he's an American Jew from New York, involved in real estate, but his investments - his business investments were in Qatar and in the UAE, not in Israel. This is a unique person working for a U.S. president in charge of the Middle East file, whose major focus was the Arab Gulf and not Israel.
FADEL: It sounds like what you're saying is that when Prime Minister Netanyahu made the decision to bomb Qatar and the negotiators, he went a step too far and, in some ways, brought about this deal.
BASKIN: I think that's exactly what happened. Part of the problem is that I don't think you can find a person in the Middle East - maybe in the entire world - who doesn't believe that Israel did it without a green light from Washington. The problem is that Israel failed. They didn't succeed. But the fact that it failed put Trump in a very difficult position, and he immediately had to dissociate himself and the United States from it, saying they didn't authorize it. They didn't green-light it. They warned the Qataris that it was coming. They didn't have enough time, etc.
FADEL: And you were passing those messages to Hamas, right?
BASKIN: Oh, certainly. When Witkoff sent me the message, he even said, don't distribute this, but you can tell Hamas that we had nothing to do with it. We didn't green-light it, and we didn't approve it. We condemned it. And then Trump put it on Truth Social that he condemned it. And I know that Witkoff wrote a lot of the messages that Trump put on Truth Social about the deal, or that's what I believe, at least, that Witkoff was the author of them. Trump put it out. It came out in his name. One of the reasons for the success of Witkoff is because everyone knows that when Witkoff speaks, he's speaking for President Trump.
FADEL: You've said that Hamas agreed to the same terms of this agreement that just was agreed to more than a year ago. And that means...
BASKIN: That's right.
FADEL: ...Tens of thousands of lives ago. Why wasn't a deal reached then? I mean, what is different about what President Trump did and what President Biden did?
BASKIN: I think there are two factors. One is that Biden's relationship with Israel was problematic from the Israeli side. Let's face it, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ron Dermer, his main ally in the Israeli government, are Republicans. They support the American Republican Party, not the Democratic Party. They were hostile to Barack Obama. They were hostile to Joe Biden, and they're very supportive of Donald Trump. So that was one thing.
Biden never had the leverage over Netanyahu that Trump has. I couldn't get Biden's people to look at the deal that I negotiated with Hamas in September 2024. The three-week deal that the war would end. Within three weeks, they would return all the hostages. They would no longer govern Gaza. I - it got to the desk of Biden, but Brett McGurk, who was in charge of the negotiations, wouldn't even look at it. The Qataris invited me to Doha. They had already seen the three-week deal, but they told me they couldn't do anything with it if the Americans didn't pick it up.
And I sat with two members of Biden's team in Tel Aviv, and they were so frustrated that we couldn't get the Biden people to move on the possibility of ending the war within three weeks. Trump is a different story. Netanyahu's a Republican, and Trump has the ability to tell Netanyahu what to do and not, and Netanyahu cannot say no to Trump.
FADEL: When you say he's a Republican, you mean he's a supporter of President Trump, right?
BASKIN: Yeah.
FADEL: Yeah.
BASKIN: That's what I mean. He's - clearly his ideology, his life philosophy, his worldview is much more aligned with the Trump Republican Party than with the Democratic Party in the United States.
FADEL: That's longtime Israeli hostage negotiator and peace activist Gershon Baskin, who is involved in back-channeling here in this deal. Thank you so much for your time.
BASKIN: You're very welcome. Thank you.
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