Biden's Choice
America’s Shameful Failures in Gaza | Ben Rhodes | The New York Review of Books
Biden’s Choice
Illustration by Edel Rodriguez
In March 2024, five months into Israel’s war on Gaza, President Joe Biden warned that an Israeli assault on the city of Rafah would cross a “red line” that would make him reconsider America’s unconditional support. At the time around 1.4 million Palestinians were huddled in Rafah, the sole crossing point for aid entering Gaza. “You cannot have 30,000 more Palestinians dead,” Biden said. But Israel went ahead with the attack, US weapons transfers continued after a sole shipment was paused, and another 30,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza.
Near the beginning of Crossing the Red Line, his revealing book on the Biden administration’s policy in Gaza, the journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed quotes an unnamed White House official arguing that the president’s warning had in fact worked. The scale of killing in Rafah, the aide insisted, “slowed and it was not just because there was nobody left to kill.” But anyone with an Internet connection can see that Rafah was reduced to rubble. The aide’s attempt at spin reads like an indictment of the American political and national security apparatus.
The record is clear: Israel’s destruction of Gaza would not have been possible without US support. The US was Israel’s largest source of weapons, at a cost of nearly $20 billion by the end of Biden’s term. Israel dropped American-supplied bombs on civilians from American-supplied planes. To keep the weapons flowing, the Biden administration ignored legislation—including the so-called Leahy Law and Sections 502B and 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act—that restricts weapons transfers to governments suspected of committing war crimes and human rights abuses or obstructing US aid from reaching civilians.
The White House also shielded Israel from accountability. It vetoed multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions and repeatedly attacked institutions, like the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, that challenged Israel’s conduct. The administration also discredited opposition in the US, particularly protesters on college campuses, all while dubiously casting the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as eager for a cease-fire.
By late September 2026 Israel’s US-backed bombardment had killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, 20,000 of whom were children. (The number is likely higher, with many buried under the 68 million tons of rubble in Gaza.) Many human rights organizations, a United Nations inquiry led by this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, and dozens of leading scholars have concluded that this constitutes a genocide.
In Crossing the Red Line, Ahmed, who covered the Biden administration for HuffPost, documents how a presidency that began by promising to end wars and save democracy from authoritarianism ended in moral and political collapse. In doing so, he probes uncomfortable questions. Why did Biden choose not to exert any meaningful leverage even after it became clear that Netanyahu was ignoring his warnings? What led individual staffers to rationalize their participation in a policy that showed so little regard for human life? How did the foreign policy of a Democratic president become so untethered from any ethical or legal foundation at a time when his party was claiming to defend democratic values and the rule of law at home?
Reading Ahmed’s book, you get the sense that there was something grimly inevitable about Biden’s support for genocide; even in retrospect, officials seem incapable of believing that they could have substantially broken with Israel. But that thinking is as dangerous as it is wrong: American policy is the product of choices made by a president and his team, and we must reckon with that reality to make different choices in the future.
Iwent to work as a speechwriter for Barack Obama in 2007. Early in his first term, I was tasked with writing a speech, to be delivered in Cairo, that was intended to reset US relations with the Muslim world. Obama told me that his chief objective was to speak openly and honestly about issues that had become sources of tension during the George W. Bush administration.
While I was drafting the speech, senior White House staff asked me to sit down with a leader of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) who wanted to share his thoughts. One of his requests for the speech seemed innocuous: Obama should call on Muslims to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Yet even as a thirty-one-year-old speechwriter, I understood the policy shift embedded in this request. Endorsing such a formal recognition would be taking a position on the right of return for Palestinian refugees, a so-called final status issue that was supposed to be left up to negotiations. Moreover, it would imply that non-Jewish Israelis were second-class citizens (which they effectively became in 2018 when the Knesset passed a law declaring Israel to be a state for the Jewish people).
The Cairo speech left out the call to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Instead Obama described the US–Israel bond as “unbreakable” and denounced antisemitism and Holocaust denial. He also called the “occupation” of Palestine “intolerable” and rejected the legitimacy of Israeli settlements. “Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied,” he said, “neither can Palestine’s.”
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In the weeks that followed, we got pushback from members of Congress, Democratic donors, and pro-Israel media outlets and personalities. Their complaints were similar. Why hadn’t Obama traveled to Israel in addition to Egypt? Why hadn’t he referred to Israel as the historic homeland of the Jewish people? Why hadn’t he recognized Israel as a Jewish state? Over time those demands made their way into Obama’s speeches as we succumbed to the drumbeat around us.
This pattern repeated itself over eight years. For the most pro-Israel elements of the organized American Jewish community, the guiding principle has been that there should be “no daylight” between the United States and Israel. Indeed, in 2009, when Obama suggested in a meeting with community leaders that he’d have more credibility as a defender of Israel if he occasionally differed with its government, it led to attacks that persisted for years. However, the burden of ensuring US and Israeli unity was entirely on Obama: unless he aligned his public positions with those of Netanyahu, a right-winger who presided over a military occupation of Palestinian land in what I consider an apartheid system, he would pay a political price.
When Obama did break with Netanyahu—in calling for the borders of a future Palestinian state to be based on the 1967 lines with agreed-on land swaps, or in barring photographers from a meeting between the two of them—days of controversy and hyperbolic media coverage followed. Aggravated Democratic members of Congress and donors lit up the White House phone lines. Meanwhile, like clockwork, new pro-Israel legislation—providing weapons or sanctioning Iran—was introduced each year around the time of AIPAC’s policy conference in Washington and passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.
To his credit, Obama defied the wishes of an Israeli prime minister more substantially than any other president this century. Just to have the space to negotiate his nuclear deal with Iran, Obama told Democrats in the House and the Senate that he would veto their AIPAC-backed Iran sanctions bills. The result was the unprecedented sight, in 2015, of a Republican Speaker of the House inviting the prime minister of a foreign country to deliver a speech to Congress in which he lambasted American foreign policy, demanded a confrontation with Iran, and won bipartisan standing ovations for it.
When the 2015 nuclear deal was completed, pro-Israel groups spent tens of millions of dollars trying to kill it. I led a two-month effort from the Obama White House in which we relentlessly briefed and cajoled Democratic senators just to ensure we had forty votes to sustain it in the Senate. Ask yourself: Why is it so much easier to take the United States to war than to forge a diplomatic agreement to avoid one?
The enormous political capital spent in the process made it feel impossible to buck other pro-Israel priorities. After the bruising fight over the Iran deal, the Obama administration (shamefully, in retrospect) gave Netanyahu a ten-year, $38 billion memorandum of understanding for military assistance despite his intransigence on Iran and Palestine; the House of Representatives voted 405–4 to endorse it. The price of violating the no daylight rule, as with the fallout from the Cairo speech, was giving Israel other things that it wanted.
This cycle of pressure and expected accommodation inevitably shapes the behavior of the people carrying out foreign policy, who like to claim that they operate independently of politics. In private, my colleagues were often withering about Israel’s conduct. But voicing such thoughts in public was understood to be career suicide. Consider just one example. Sarah Margon, Biden’s nominee to be the State Department’s senior official responsible for democracy and human rights, was unable to achieve Senate confirmation because she once tweeted in support of Airbnb’s short-lived boycott of West Bank settlements.
Or consider me. During the Obama administration, I was known in Washington to be a critic of Israel’s policies and a pugnacious defender of the Iran deal. Yet you can find footage of me online reiterating Israel’s right to defend itself in Gaza, trumpeting the unprecedented security assistance that we provided, and reciting talking points about a two-state solution while the Israeli government was making that an impossibility. At the time it felt anodyne; in retrospect it doesn’t.
Still, by the end of the Obama administration, the pro-Israel media was attacking me relentlessly and prominent donors were occasionally chewing me out. In 2018 I learned through press reports that a group of former Mossad agents known as Black Cube was digging up dirt on me. Operatives had even contacted my wife under the false pretense of being a movie production company: the aptly named “Shell Productions.” None of this was subtle. Indeed it was so heavy handed that it almost seemed as if Black Cube wanted these efforts to become public. Perhaps that was the point of the vitriol directed at me: to show other people working in US national security what they could expect if they strayed from the no daylight approach.
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Among the American national security and political class, the belief that you can’t challenge Israel has become so entrenched that officials experience support for Israel not as a choice but as incontestable. It calls to mind Italo Calvino’s observation about America: “Here we are in a totalitarian structure of a medieval kind, based on the fact that no alternative exists nor even any awareness of the possibility of an alternative.”
Ahmed describes a photo that Biden once inscribed to Netanyahu with the words “Bibi, I don’t agree with a damn thing you say but I love you.” I heard Biden use that same formulation several times when I worked with him in the Obama White House. I always wondered: But why do you love him?
Biden was typical of US officials in his support for Israel but atypical in the ardor of that support. During his vice-presidency, he was at times uncomfortable with Obama’s willingness to publicly break with Netanyahu. He made it clear during his 2020 campaign that he would take a different approach. He rejected a progressive demand to simply refer to Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza in the Democratic Party platform. In response to calls to make assistance to Israel conditional on its actions, Antony Blinken—the future secretary of state—told the Democratic Majority for Israel that Biden “would not tie military assistance to Israel to any political decisions that it makes, period, full stop.”
This approach carried over into Biden’s presidency. Ahmed usefully reviews the administration’s record prior to October 7, 2023. Biden embraced the Abraham Accords—a deal brokered by Jared Kushner between the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Israel that made Palestinians irrelevant to the pursuit of “peace” between Israel and the Arab world—as a centerpiece of his Middle East policy. He broke a campaign promise to reenter Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, from which Donald Trump had withdrawn, and demanded a “longer and stronger” agreement in language that echoed the deal’s pro-Israel critics. He continued punitive policies initiated by the first Trump administration, failing to restore Palestinian representation in Washington and to reopen a US consulate in East Jerusalem. “Biden,” Ahmed writes, “notably became the first president since Richard Nixon to not even propose a road map for Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
Instead Biden and his team focused on bringing Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords, dangling before Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman the prospect of a mutual defense pact and a civil nuclear program. Such an agreement would have upended decades of Saudi policy, which based recognition of Israel on the creation of a Palestinian state. This fact was not lost on either bin Salman or the Palestinians. In fact, according to The Times of Israel, records obtained from private Hamas meetings stated plainly that one of the motives behind the October 7 attacks was “to thwart the Saudi kingdom’s process of normalization.”
There is no justification for the terror and brutality unleashed by Hamas on that horrific day. But in the Biden administration’s policies before October 7, we see the seeds of its support for the terror and brutality that Israel unleashed on the people of Gaza: No conditions on aid to Israel. No public breaks with Netanyahu. Little regard for the plight of the Palestinians.
Ahmed’s account of the administration’s initial decisions after October 7 is both chilling and familiar. Israel’s intentions were clear from the start. Netanyahu vowed to make Gaza a “deserted island.” Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, declared that he had “ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel.” Rather than a military campaign against Hamas, Israel’s leaders were pledging to inflict collective punishment on two million men, women, and children: an open statement of intent to commit a war crime.
In response, the Biden administration fast-tracked shipments of weapons that Israel needed to carry out its assault. The White House clearly thought that this was both the right policy and good politics for Biden’s reelection campaign, Ahmed writes: “Many of the voices the administration saw as most relevant vindicated Biden’s posture, like pro-Israel groups and donors with influence in policy circles and, crucially, the election.” Ahmed painfully records the administration’s disregard for Arab American citizens trapped in Gaza as it focused relentlessly on recovering Jewish American citizens held hostage by Hamas.
Biden underscored this unequal valuation of human life at a press conference on October 25, 2023. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” he declared, even though his administration was using the Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers in its casualty assessments.
Most of Crossing the Red Line tells the story of how officials sustained their unconditional support for Israel until the bitter end of the Biden administration. “The Gaza policy circle was small and insular,” Ahmed writes, a description that feels familiar. In the Obama years, matters of sensitivity or presidential priority were dealt with not in a cabinet-level or interagency meeting but rather by a “small group” led by the national security adviser. This allowed the president to maintain tight control over a policy; intentionally or not, it also limited the scope of dissenting voices.
The top of Biden’s policy circle was, in Ahmed’s reporting, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, the White House Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Ahmed had little access to these players—although McGurk, whom Ahmed singles out for the breadth of his bureaucratic maneuvering on behalf of Israel, enters the story when, at an event, he directly confronts Ahmed over his coverage. To compensate, Ahmed often relied on midlevel officials from the National Security Council, the State Department, and USAID. This gives the reader the strangely riveting perspective of aides who experienced the contorted rationalizations and political spin required to continue arming a country committing war crimes.
GPO/Handout/Anadolu/Getty Images
Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, Joe Biden, and Benjamin Netanyahu at a news conference, Tel Aviv, October 18, 2023
I worked closely with Sullivan, Blinken, and McGurk through the Obama years and have collaborated with them on projects outside government. Each holds Ivy League degrees and took different paths to advance rapidly to the top of the national security apparatus. Sullivan was a close confidante and protégé of Hillary Clinton at the State Department and on her presidential campaigns. Blinken was Joe Biden’s top staffer for years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then joined him in the Obama White House. McGurk worked in Iraq during the Bush administration and continued to do so after Obama’s election.
What they (and I) share is the experience of operating within the machinery of America’s post–September 11 foreign policy. For twenty-five years the US has been at war, normalizing the killing of people from North Africa to South Asia. The powers of the presidency have mushroomed relative to those of Congress, while support for Israel has become more vigorously policed within our politics. All these factors converged in the Biden administration’s post–October 7 policies.
On multiple occasions Blinken invoked emergency measures to rush arms to Israel, bypassing standard protocols that required prenotification to Congress. When Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen pressed the administration to adhere to prohibitions on arming a military committing war crimes, Sullivan proposed a compromise. The result was National Security Memorandum 20, an executive action that required the State Department to investigate whether governments receiving military aid were committing human rights abuses or impeding US humanitarian aid, and the president to “remediate the situation” by suspending weapons transfers. This unleashed a monthslong process to determine whether Israel was, in fact, violating international law. Unusual decisions were made. For instance, Deborah Lipstadt, an envoy for combating antisemitism, was involved in those determinations even though she had no experience adjudicating violations of the laws of war.
Reading about these endless meetings, I remembered that participants must leave smartphones outside White House and State Department rooms. Picture those officials sitting in windowless rooms without their phones, incapable of reaching a formal conclusion that a single war crime was committed in Gaza while the world watched war crimes live-streamed on theirs. Kafka himself might have had a hard time conjuring such a bureaucracy.
Ahmed provides a particularly effective account of the administration’s failure to dislodge Israel’s systematic restrictions on food, medicine, and other aid. Sullivan and McGurk, in his account, became fixated on persuading Netanyahu to allow a trickle of aid trucks into Gaza but did not leverage US military assistance to force a more fundamental change in Israel’s policy of starving the enclave. Airdrops were launched despite warnings that they were an inefficient, dehumanizing, and dangerous way to deliver aid. (Some Palestinians were killed and wounded by the drops.) Biden ordered the US military to build a $230 million pier off the coast of Gaza to deliver assistance that should have been driven across the border in trucks—a plan that failed spectacularly (the pier fell apart) but that had Netanyahu’s support.
One exception to this contorted approach took place after an Israeli strike killed seven staffers of José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen. While Israel had previously killed aid workers in Gaza, this strike drew outsize attention in Washington, where Andrés is a beloved local restaurateur and humanitarian. Biden responded with unusual public outrage, and Israel allowed a large (albeit temporary) spike in aid trucks crossing the border. It was a fleeting success that belied the president’s theory that public pressure on Israel did not work—a lesson the administration chose to ignore.
At the center of Ahmed’s account is that “red line” Biden drew over the Israeli invasion of Rafah in the spring of 2024. Despite pledges to moderate its operations in response to Biden’s pressure, when Israel launched its offensive, a UN worker tells Ahmed, “we lost access to everything overnight,” escalating the aid crisis. Despite Biden’s warnings, Israel killed, wounded, and displaced Palestinians in enormous numbers. An unnamed White House official calls Rafah “one of the most upsetting moments” of a two-decade career in foreign policy.
In response, a single shipment of two-thousand-pound US bombs was paused. This was hardly a cutoff, and yet still Netanyahu attacked Biden for endangering Israel’s security. The administration furiously countered by citing all the support that it was providing to Netanyahu. Biden and his team had started a fight that they didn’t want to win. The weapons kept flowing. Any prospect of exerting meaningful leverage was over.
From that point on Biden and his team retreated deeper into a defensive crouch, backing an Israeli government that was plainly ignoring them. In May 2024 Biden delivered a speech announcing that Israel had accepted the framework of a cease-fire even as Netanyahu was publicly saying the opposite. No matter: for months administration spokespeople cast Hamas as the impediment to an agreement while the Israeli campaign continued unabated.
Ahmed portrays a Democratic administration falling out of step with a growing number of its voters. Biden’s communications team accused reporters who challenged their approach, like Ahmed, of aiding Hamas. Instead, he writes, they focused on cable television, Washington think tanks, and friendly outlets like The Atlantic. When Congress passed, and Biden signed, a long-stagnant bill banning TikTok, lawmakers cited the platform’s perceived bias against Israel as one of the reasons why.
Ahmed also describes officials trapped in their own feedback loops as encampments sprang up across American campuses protesting US support for the war on Gaza. An aide told Ahmed that one senior National Security Council staffer, influenced by cable news coverage, “had no clue about the protesters’ demands but called them ‘pro-Hamas.’” The administration used its bully pulpit to condemn antisemitism in ways that did little to recognize what was motivating most protesters. “This blatant anti-Semitism is reprehensible and dangerous,” Biden declared, “and it has absolutely no place on college campuses.” Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University protest leader and green card holder who was detained for 104 days under Trump despite committing no crime, told Ahmed that “the Biden administration laid the groundwork to my detention.”
As the 2024 election approached, Biden officials were simultaneously running the most powerful government in the world and, in Ahmed’s account, behaving as if they were powerless to change their own policies. No Palestinian was permitted to speak at the Democratic National Convention despite the efforts of members of the Uncommitted National Movement who had opposed Biden’s Gaza policy and renomination but were looking for ways to motivate its supporters to back Kamala Harris. The weapons kept flowing even as officials voiced frustration with Netanyahu in anonymous comments to reporters. Israel escalated its war in Lebanon even as negotiations intended to avoid that escalation were ongoing.
After the election the Biden administration aggressively lobbied Democrats to vote against a Bernie Sanders–backed bill to block weapons transfers to Israel. Ahmed obtained White House talking points sent to Congress that equated casting a vote for the legislation with helping Hamas and Hezbollah, echoing the Israeli prime minister, who was gleefully welcoming Trump’s return. “The lame-duck administration,” Ahmed writes, “was at most a mix of arsenal and punching bag.”
To enter the rooms where these policies are debated and decided, you first pass through gates protected by armed Secret Service agents. You receive an intelligence briefing that uses euphemisms like “noncombatants” to describe the killing of children. You are handed memos teeing up a decision to transfer weapons to the Israeli government that look identical to countless other memos that fill your inbox.
You sit in a meeting in which dissent on that memo is not welcome and the outcome feels preordained. You have discussions about plans to get more aid into Gaza and convince yourself that you’re trying to save the lives those weapons are taking. Maybe you start thinking about the next meeting on a less punishing subject, or head to the carryout window of the White House mess to get a sandwich. Or maybe you convince yourself that your support for Netanyahu is a necessary evil to defeat Donald Trump and save democracy.
The people you hear from directly are likely to reinforce what you’re doing: the big donors who congratulate you after some statement of support for Israel; the members of Congress who tell you to hang in there; the cable news talking heads, think tankers, and opinion writers. You don’t talk to Palestinians or Lebanese. You don’t speak to aid workers on the ground in Gaza. You don’t even spend much time scrolling through Instagram or TikTok (and if you do, your algorithm is probably not feeding you the content enraging so many people outside your silo).
There is something banal about how the days blend together: meetings, memos, phone calls, meals eaten exhaustedly at your desk. Yet as automatic as it all feels, you are participating in life-and-death decisions; you are making choices, even if they feel inevitable.
Ahmed highlights the few Biden officials who chose to resign and speak out. Josh Paul—a former State Department official responsible for arms transfers who quit shortly after October 7—publicly opposed one of those arms packages that was expedited outside normal procedures. He dissented in what Ahmed describes as “a blistering LinkedIn post.”
At first I read that as an unintentionally tragicomic description of the asymmetry of power: while his former colleagues ran the US government, Paul was writing LinkedIn posts. Yet perhaps that misreads the nature of power itself. Because if all you do in government is operate imperial machinery to a predetermined end, what power do you really have? Sure, someone like Paul could not directly influence outcomes once he left government. But he was acting on his own belief about what is right and what is wrong, and there’s a different kind of power in that.
Paul was hardly alone. While those officials were sitting in windowless rooms, much of the world was increasingly distraught over the United States and Israel’s conduct, even as many storied institutions of journalism seemed reluctant to challenge it. Palestinians used social media to show what was happening in Gaza, and in turn, they started to be seen.
I spoke only a few times to Biden officials during these events—usually to complain about their policy or to hear their complaints about something I’d said about it online. I was struck by how much we seemed to inhabit different realities. Mostly I heard arguments about what they felt they could not do: Biden was set in his ways or Netanyahu would ignore their pressure. Or they argued that they were doing more than I saw. Or they speculated that they would pay a higher political price for breaking with Israel than for supporting it. In other words, I heard a version of the story Ahmed tells.
I left those conversations feeling anger and frustration but also a measure of concern for the well-being of the people saying these things. Not because I excused what the Biden team was doing, but because of what they were doing to themselves.
I lived the hypocrisy of American foreign policy for eight years. I was proud of many things: the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris Climate Agreement, and the normalization of relations with Cuba, which I negotiated. I was also deeply conflicted about the violence that I had to defend: the surge in Afghanistan, drone strikes, sanctions that took lives. At the time I told myself that the good outweighed the bad. Since then, I’ve had to reckon with doubts about whether that’s true, or—even if it was—why it was so normal for me to tolerate that equation. But in all my years in the White House, I never had to support something that a UN inquiry found to be genocide.
Make no mistake: Biden and his team are responsible for a Gaza policy that was extreme even by the standards of US foreign policy, a policy that reinforced the global perception that Americans refuse to reckon with the violence the US systematically unleashes on the world while its officials talk about democratic values and a rules-based order. Throughout the war on Gaza, the Biden administration continued to speak about American exceptionalism. We like to think that “exceptionalism” describes a virtuous nation with an indispensable global responsibility. But for much of the world, it describes a superpower exempting itself and Israel from the rules that it demands others follow. The Biden administration strenuously objected to the credible findings that a “genocide” took place under their watch but did not hesitate to describe what China did to Uyghurs or what ISIS did to Yazidis as genocides.
Ultimately, we are defined both by the choices we make and by the choices we don’t make, not by the versions of ourselves that live in our heads. The aide who told Ahmed that the killing in Rafah “slowed and it was not just because there was nobody left to kill” probably believed what he was saying. That is how you rationalize participation in a system that should be untenable.
Crossing the Red Line appears at a time when public opinion has shifted dramatically on Israel and Palestine. But as we approach another presidential campaign, it is not clear whether the Democratic Party or its national security establishment has reckoned with Gaza. Its leadership in Congress—Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries—still welcomes AIPAC’s support and votes to arm the Israeli government.
Biden’s senior officials have expressed some regrets over their Gaza policy but have not stated clearly and categorically that what they did was wrong. McGurk has recently released a book that focuses on the administration’s effort to secure the release of Israeli hostages without confronting its complicity in the violence rained down on Palestinians.
Instead, he describes the rare instances of Biden putting public pressure on Israel as counterproductive.The extremism of Donald Trump makes it easier for Democrats to avoid self-reproach. An oft-repeated Joe Biden maxim was “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.” Everyone benefits from a comparison with Trump. But Biden’s disregard for international law in Gaza and his demonization of those who protested his Gaza policy foreshadowed the Trump administration’s dismantling of the international order and its attacks on dissent, higher education, and free speech. Meanwhile the growing disconnect between US policy and public opinion on Israel contributes to a sense that perhaps politics don’t matter at all: How can politicians and senior officials be trusted to fight for anything we care about, whether ending wars or lowering prices, if people in power can get away with insisting that what we see happening is not happening?
All of this requires a deeper reckoning by the Democratic Party than has taken place to date. Near the end of his book, Ahmed sums up the mindset that must change:
The implication from Biden’s circle—a big part of the Democratic brain trust that hopes to regain positions of power in post-Trump politics—has consistently been that the greater offense is not in the horror of the war but in questioning those who shaped it.
But those who fail to reckon with the horror that took place in Gaza cannot be trusted to act differently in the future. We do not have to accept that what we are seeing in Gaza and the West Bank is inevitable any more than we have to accept that our grim American present is permanent.
Of course, there are many Americans who care deeply about Israel. As someone who comes from a Jewish background, with family members who perished in the Holocaust, I understand that a commitment to the safety of Jews as a people is connected to the depth of feeling that many have for Israel. But Jewish safety—in Israel or the US—is not served by insisting that the might of a superpower should be enlisted to help Israel carry out the atrocities we have witnessed. The policy of no daylight has been damaging to both America and Israel. It must end, and the mindset of people in future Democratic administrations must be different.
Something is shifting in our culture. The fever of self-censorship is breaking. The cost of complicity is rising. The plight of Palestinians is at last being seen. An awareness is building that there is an alternative: a moral awakening out of the ashes of moral abomination.
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