Subject: Re: Hostage deal reached
Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. But the fact remains that there was no deal and now there is a deal.

Sure. After months of effort by the Administration and Egypt and Qatar and others - and even longer before that of Biden paying a political cost to make sure the weapons kept flowing - we now have a deal. How much of that is due solely to the handful of meetings Witkoff had is an open question....

The thing we don’t know for a fact is if it’s a *good* deal or not.

....but there it is. Netanyahu's cabinet members and coalition allies apparently weren't in the loop in the very final negotiations. As information about what's in the deal spreads, the right-wing members of his government are super-pissed about it. No one bothered to tell poor Tom Cotton that Trump was going to take credit for the deal, rather than blame Biden for forcing a bad deal on Israel, either - so he got way over his skis and savaged the deal in a public statement earlier today:

https://collive.com/senator-to...

So we may very well find ourselves in the classic, "Trump seizes the credit if it turns out well but passes the blame if it doesn't" situation. Once he threatened hell to pay if the hostages weren't released before he took office, he wanted them released. But he's not going to be thrilled when Hamas declares victory by outlasting the Israeli army and forcing them to withdraw, and holds a celebratory parade to honor the terrorists that they got Israel to release. If a lot of people that he wanted to like him decide later that this wasn't a good deal...well, then it's going to become Biden's deal; but if those people decide that is was a good deal, he's going to claim it was 100% his doing and demand his Nobel Prize.