BEN RHODES FROWNS: Former Obama Official Ben Rhodes Can’t Bring Himself To Give Trump Credit For Israel-Hamas Deal.
“It’s not really a peace deal in the sense that we still don’t know who’s going to govern Gaza. We still don’t know if Hamas is going to disarm,” Rhodes continued. “We’re at phase one, quite literally, of what would be a very long road to some kind of lasting peace. So, look, I think a transactional — and, you know, it’s interesting to reflect on that quote you put up, I mean, a transactional style of diplomacy, it can get you that kind of short-term win, right? You know, you take care of a piece of business, but it’s not necessarily designed for the kind of patient follow-through and painstaking work that is necessary to address something as deep as the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians.”
Trump terminated the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran in May 2018, calling it “a horrible deal that should never, ever have been made.” The 2015 agreement faced backlash from critics of the deal claiming it “paved the road” for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.
No wonder Rhodes is unhappy with Trump’s role in securing a hostage exchange and (likely temporary) ceasefire, as Jewish Insider noted in July:
Rhodes said, “If you think you can continue to take money from AIPAC, whether you’re Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer or whomever, AIPAC is part of the constellation of forces that have delivered this country into the hands of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.”
“And you cannot give them a carveout,” Rhodes continued. “And we need to have this fight as a party because these are the wrong people to have under your tent. I’m usually a big-tent person, but the kind of people who are supporting Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump, I don’t want them — my leaders of my political party — like, cozying up to those people.”
During his time at the White House, Rhodes was one of Obama’s closest advisors and masterminded the public relations push behind the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. He told The New York Times in 2016 that he “created an echo chamber” of experts who would feed reporters positive analyses of the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say,” Rhodes stated.
Rhodes was a strident critic of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly earning himself the nickname of “Hamas” in the White House. In his 2019 book The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, Rhodes wrote that Israel was “driven by the settler movement and ultra-Orthodox emigres” and that Netanyahu used “political pressure within the United States to demoralize any meaningful push for peace, just as he used settlements as a means of demoralizing Palestinians.”
As Lee Smith wrote at the beginning of 2020: Obama Passed the Buck. Trump Refused to Play. “The Iran deal was never meant to stop Iran from building a bomb—it was supposed to delay it until disaster happened on someone else’s watch.”