After the Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg advocated withholding aid to the Jewish state to punish it for one infraction or another, Joe Biden, the current frontrunner, called the suggestion “absolutely outrageous.” Supporters of Israel from both parties should be relieved that Biden is willing to stand up to the party’s left wing on this issue, writes Jonathan Tobin. But the good news ends there:

Pro-Israel Democrats should worry that their champion is the candidate who has been steadily losing ground since the race began in earnest over the summer. While Biden’s pro-Israel rhetoric is supported by 43 percent of Democrats, according to a Gallup poll, . . . it may also, like Biden himself, better represent the Democrats’ past than their future.

Biden is no longer the odds-on favorite to win the nomination. He’s trailing in the key early states of Iowa and New Hampshire, as well as flopping in the competition for campaign donations. Right now, the momentum is on the side of his more liberal rivals: Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg. That quartet make up the top tier of the Democratic field, and if the still large cast of also-rans drop out in the early going next year, that could leave Biden as the sole occupant of the moderate lane in the primaries.

In a competition with far more extreme critics of Israel than he ever was, Biden is the best that pro-Israel Democrats, who once dominated their party, . . . can muster. It is on his aging and uncertain shoulders that the fate of the Democrats as a pro-Israel party rests. That’s a prospect that should scare friends of the Jewish state, no matter which party they support.

Even if the agreement with Hamas to secure the release of some, and possibly all, of the remaining hostages—and the bodies of those no longer alive—is a prudent decision for Israel, it comes at a very high price: potentially leaving Hamas in control of Gaza and the release of vast numbers of Palestinian prisoners, many with blood on their hands. Nadav Shragai reminds us of the history of such agreements:

We cannot forget that the terrorists released in the Jibril deal during the summer of 1985 became the backbone of the first intifada, resulting in the murder of 165 Israelis. Approximately half of the terrorists released following the Oslo Accords joined Palestinian terror groups, with many participating in the second intifada that claimed 1,178 Israeli lives. Those freed in [exchange for Gilad Shalit in 2011] constructed Gaza, the world’s largest terror city, and brought about the October 7 massacre. We must ask ourselves: where will those released in the 2025 hostage deal lead us?

Taking these painful concessions into account Michael Oren argues that they might nonetheless be necessary:

From day one—October 7, 2023—Israel’s twin goals in Gaza were fundamentally irreconcilable. Israel could not, as its leaders pledged, simultaneously destroy Hamas and secure all of the hostages’ release. The terrorists who regarded the hostages as the key to their survival would hardly give them up for less than an Israeli commitment to end—and therefore lose—the war. Israelis, for their part, were torn between those who felt that they could not send their children to the army so long as hostages remained in captivity and those who held that, if Hamas wins, Israel will not have an army at all.

While 33 hostages will be released in the first stage, dozens—alive and dead—will remain in Gaza, prolonging their families’ suffering. The relatives of those killed by the Palestinian terrorists now going free will also be shattered. So, too, will the Israelis who still see soldiers dying in Gaza almost daily while Hamas rocket fire continues. What were all of Israel’s sacrifices for, they will ask. . . .

Perhaps this outcome was unavoidable from the beginning. Perhaps the deal is the only way of reconciling Israel’s mutually exclusive goals of annihilating Hamas and repatriating the hostages. Perhaps, despite Israel’s subsequent military triumph, this is the price for the failures of October 7.