Joe Biden’s Team Is Rewriting Its History on Gaza

Interview byDaniel FinnAfter three years of slaughter in Gaza, some leading officials of the Biden administration are trying to justify their record. Figures like Antony Blinken and Brett McGurk have been on media tours recently giving their version of the story. Meanwhile, Akbar Shahid Ahmed has been working to provide a serious account of what really happened.Akbar’s book Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza cuts through the spin and presents a damning picture of Joe Biden and his team. Akbar is the diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Sun. He previously covered foreign policy issues for the Huffington Post.This is an edited transcript from Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the interview here.Daniel FinnIn the period immediately after the October 7 attack, what were the discussions among Biden administration officials, and were there any expressions of concern at that point about what Israel was likely to do next?Akbar Shahid AhmedMany of the officials involved in this policy will tell you that they did know there was going to be a tremendous Israeli response. Orders from the Biden administration to rush weapons to the Israelis were going out within hours of the attack. Of course, Palestinian fighters were still fighting in pockets of Israel until around October 10. It was a very broad attack. and there were aspects of it that even the Israelis couldn’t get a handle on immediately.During that early period, there were clear indicators that this was going to be much more severe than any past moment in the Israel-Palestine conflict and risk a level of US complicity in atrocities and mass immiseration. All of those indicators were already flashing red.Inside the government, by October 8, figures at the Department of State like Josh Paul, who later resigned, were asking colleagues if it was wise to be sending the Israelis bombs that were this large, when you’re talking about a population in Gaza that is 85 percent urbanized — 2.2 million people in densely packed neighborhoods and refugee camps.There were people inside the administration talking about trying to learn from the intensive military operations that the United States itself launched after 9/11, operations that very often fueled backlash, led to massacres of civilians, and didn’t have clear strategic and moral goals. There were US officials already saying, “Should we tell the Israelis that if they want our continued support, we need to see a battle plan from them?”You had absolutist comments coming immediately from Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders, talking about destroying Hamas. Israeli President Isaac Herzog, of course, suggested there were no innocents in Gaza. This view that collective punishment might be happening was very much in the sight of US officials. There were active discussions of demanding from Netanyahu a specific strategy for what he thought he was going to achieve by retaliating within Gaza.There were discussions about whether the United States should tell the Israelis to focus on intelligence and special operations: “Don’t launch a mass invasion of Gaza, you’re going to get bogged down and fuel a humanitarian crisis.” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who had been a US military commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, was weighing in to say, “We’ve seen military overreach before — we’ve been part of it.”From a very early stage, there was a sense that the United States could be a restraining factor on Israel. That’s very important to note, because now we see some of the most senior decision-makers in that period saying, “Gosh, we had no idea how our leverage could be used, and the Israelis were going to do what they were going to anyway.”But I document in the book, for instance, an incident on October 11, when the Israelis came to the Biden administration and said, “In addition to our retaliation in Gaza, we want to go into Lebanon and target Hezbollah.” Hezbollah was aligned with Hamas, but it had not been involved in the October 7 attacks. It began firing rockets at Israel on October 8 and proclaimed its solidarity with Palestinians.Officials in the Biden administration and others who had been tracking Lebanon for a very long time were extremely worried about what it would mean for Israel to open a two-front war, in view of Israel’s past record in Lebanon, which has been absolutely devastating. They were also concerned that attacking Hezbollah might bring Iran into the conflict.I chart in the book how Biden and his National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan got the Israelis to back down. They told them the intelligence that suggested Hezbollah was akin to Hamas and wanted to do something like October 7 was faulty. The ability of the United States to restrain Israel was there from the very start.Daniel FinnIf we look at that opening period from October to December 2023, when there was a short-lived truce, what was the thinking of people in the Biden administration about how this was going to end? What was the ultimate goal that they believed Israel could legitimately be striving for?Akbar Shahid AhmedOne official told me about their thinking in mid-November, right on the cusp of that truce. He said, “If our goal is to bring home the Israelis (and some American citizens, too) who were captured on October 7, and to be on the way toward replacing Hamas rule with something else in Gaza, we can achieve that. We can focus on that and also rein in the bloodshed and convince Israel to adhere to the laws of war.”That would have been a vision that took Palestinian life into account, at least to a limited degree. It would certainly still have been rooted in US and Israeli primacy. But what happened instead was something very different. You saw the truce collapse in early December, after some Israelis had been released in exchange for some Palestinians, and there was a surge in humanitarian aid. Biden administration officials then very quickly hewed back to the Israeli narrative of a military-first approach.The mediating countries like Qatar and Egypt saw the collapse of the truce as a very important and chilling sign. One official said to me that Hamas was not going to take the Americans seriously for a while after that, because Israel and the United States presented the breakdown of the truce as evidence of Hamas malfeasance.One of the most disturbing aspects of this was an effort to claim, without any evidence, that Hamas had unilaterally broken the truce in order to keep Israeli hostages so it could continue sexually assaulting them. This was a line pushed out by the White House almost immediately, while Israel’s mission to the United Nations, in coordination with Sheryl Sandberg, also shone a light on claims of sexual assault on October 7.The claim was so disturbing that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) itself put out a statement saying, “Please don’t comment on what you think might be happening with these hostages — it’s very disturbing to their families.”Hamas walked away from the abortive truce feeling quite burned. What you saw next were hollow US promises that somehow the Israeli campaign in Gaza was going to change. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan went to Israel soon afterward and said that this was moving into a lower-intensity campaign.That is definitely not what happened. What we saw instead was US complicity in a severe assault on Gaza City, a very similar assault on Khan Yunis, and eventually the destruction of Rafah, the southernmost town in Gaza.For these officials, the truce period didn’t change their root desire to have a no-daylight policy with Israel — what they described as the “bear hug.” In some cases, notably that of Brett McGurk, they also began to link the idea of a ceasefire with the exchange of prisoners and the supply of humanitarian aid to the moon-shot notion of a regional overhaul, expanding on the Abraham Accords to include Saudi Arabia.Instead of concentrating on the sudden outbreak of conflict, McGurk wanted the United States to hew back to bigger strategic aims from before October 7, when many experts — and even Joe Biden himself — said that those aims may have fueled Palestinian desperation and backlash. He ignored the people in and out of government who were saying that you had to take this step by step: the legal aspect, the humanitarian aspect, the strategic aspect.Daniel FinnIn November 2023, Biden made a public statement saying that he had no confidence in the casualty figures coming out of Gaza. A number of reporters (including you) showed at the time that, in private, the State Department considered the figures from the Gaza health ministry to be reliable. Were Biden’s comments the result of a premeditated decision by the administration to endorse this claim about the unreliability of the figures? Were there any second thoughts afterward?Akbar Shahid AhmedI’ve asked Biden’s spokespeople, right up until the summer of 2026, if he wants to retract specifically his expression of doubt about the civilian casualty figures, as well as his claim that there were “forty beheaded babies” on October 7, which has not been validated by any kind of intelligence. He has not indicated his desire to do that — his spokespeople haven’t engaged.I did not find evidence that it was premeditated. It certainly led to a scramble, because, as I reported at the time, the State Department was consistently using these numbers without attaching caveats to them. What then happened, with the validation of the president, is that you saw efforts by hard-line pro-Israel supporters to make it impossible for the US government to use these numbers.It’s an instance for me of how the Biden administration had a contradictory policy, undercutting what they said they wanted to happen. Not long before making that comment, Biden had said that we should not confuse Hamas with the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. But administration officials very often hewed back to their core tendencies. Biden is a lifelong Zionist with a real sense of skepticism toward Palestinians.Other figures were seeking to downplay the death toll among Palestinian civilians and then among Lebanese civilians as well. One diplomat told me that after October 7, the Biden administration was suddenly very interested in what was happening among Palestinians after a period of neglect, asking how the Gazans were living, what was happening, etc. But, as the official put it, the instinct was already to dispute whether it was as bad as the Palestinians were saying, and that was before Biden’s comment.Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk repeatedly said to their colleagues that “the Palestinians don’t look skinny in the photos.” This was after the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which sets the gold standard for measuring food security, had already stated that Gaza had the highest proportion of a population experiencing acute food insecurity that they had ever tracked.Officials will sometimes present this as a case of repeating the Israeli claims in order to bulletproof them, suggesting that that they were asking for data to either back up or challenge what they were being told by Netanyahu. However, the effect was very much to say that there was a real sense of doubt at the top. This made it possible to downplay many of the most devastating incidents.Less than a month after Biden’s press conference, the United States was also promoting unproven Israeli claims that the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City was a Hamas command and control center. This was in spite of the fact that the intelligence US officials themselves had access to in relation to Al-Shifa did not back up those claims.Daniel FinnThe period after the end of the first truce was also the period when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) held its first hearings over the case brought by South Africa, accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention. More or less simultaneously, this was when Israel launched a public campaign against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugess in the Near East (UNRWA), accusing it of collaborating with Hamas. The Biden administration and the governments of countries like Britain, Germany, and Australia responded by immediately suspending funding for UNRWA. Was there any hesitation in the US government about taking the Israeli claims at face value?Akbar Shahid AhmedUS officials were aware that Israel was going to make these claims about UNRWA. From my reporting, I have not found evidence that they knew it was going to happen on the day of the ICJ’s initial ruling, but they were aware this was coming.There were meetings between UNRWA and top US officials in the week before Israel went public with its claims. UNRWA management had felt that by firing some employees who were accused by Israel and announcing that they would do an investigation, they might satiate to a degree the Israeli desire to crack down on them.Of course, it was clear to everyone involved that UNRWA was the backbone of the humanitarian operation in Gaza. There were thousands of aid workers operating despite severe restrictions imposed by Israel, but all of them relied on UNRWA’s network of warehouses, trucks, and local contacts.Biden administration figures argued to me that giving credence to the Israeli narrative was a way to shield UNRWA by saying, “We are taking this seriously, we are suspending some funding, but that doesn’t mean we are outright denying UNRWA’s relevance or its importance.” But the effect was to trigger the domino effect you described — where US allies also suspended their funding, creating a major crunch for UNRWA as it faced the biggest need for its services in its history — and to embolden hard-line Israel supporters in Congress.There were Biden administration officials — figures like Julieta Noyes, the head of the State Department’s humanitarian aid bureau at the time — who intensely lobbied Congress not to pass new restrictions on US ties to UNRWA. But the administration had given Congress the ammunition it needed, so by April 2024, there was a ban on US funding for UNRWA that remains in place to this day.This also illustrates the limited willingness of these officials to use their leverage. People like Noyes didn’t resign from their posts — they said they were having greater influence on the inside. But many of those who stayed inside didn’t use pressure points that were available to them. For example, humanitarian experts said that Noyes could have triggered very serious investigations at the State Department and chose not to do that.Daniel FinnAt one point during 2024, US government officials were publicly discouraging Israel from going into Rafah, suggesting that it was a red line for them. But when Israel went into Rafah anyway, there were no significant consequences. At the same time, there was a moment when Biden imposed restrictions on certain bomb shipments to Israel. What impact did those restrictions have?Akbar Shahid AhmedFirst of all, it’s important to stress that applying basic standards of international law or US law is not meant to be optional. So many of these officials were operating in a post-9/11 US policy structure that often treats the law as optional and “leaves space for the policymaker,” as people in Washington put it.There was an incident in December 2023 where a munitions expert told Secretary of State Tony Blinken that there was no way the Israelis could use two-thousand-pound bombs in Gaza that would be discriminate and proportionate. But instead of talking about the relevant legislation, Blinken responded by saying, “You have to understand the Israelis are so traumatized — we can’t push them at this moment.”There was a serious red line over Rafah. The president said it repeatedly. Blinken himself said it to Netanyahu at the end of April: “If you treat Rafah the way you have treated the other parts of Gaza, our entire relationship with you could change.” Plans were drawn up. But the way that the Biden administration went about using its leverage was almost certain to doom their stated goals.The holdup of one shipment that you mentioned, consisting of two-thousand-pound bombs and some five-hundred-pound bombs, came out of an ad hoc process. In fact, I was told by one official whose job it was to explain and justify this policy that they heard about it from the news. When Israel leaked the news of this holdup, the Biden administration “folded like a tent,” in the words of Ben Rhodes, who served under Barack Obama.While Israel was violating Biden’s red line over Rafah, where more than 1.4 million Palestinians were sheltering, and simultaneously complaining about US pressure, the Biden administration helped them. Biden’s officials very quickly began telling people, “The Israelis do seem to be heeding what we’re saying.” They unveiled new weapons transfers in this period.The humanitarian toll in Rafah was entirely predictable and predicted. Biden himself made a commitment, saying to the Israelis, “You have to have a credible plan for dealing with the Palestinians pushed out of Rafah.” This came after a clear demonstration of how US leverage could have been used following the killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers in April 2024.Biden made demands about humanitarian aid, and Netanyahu complied, because Biden was taking a more threatening tone. You had a broader discussion about a red line and about cutting off weapons. Many US officials I spoke to, even at the highest levels, said that April 2024 was when they realized they could treat Israel like any other country and have influence over it like any other country, as one of them put it to me.This was in spite of the pressure they were facing from pro-Israel forces — they were willing to stand up in that moment. Importantly, they worked with the many other people in Congress and in the Democratic Party who were horrified about what had happened, instead of distancing themselves from the criticism. That’s when the leverage was effective.The fact that Rafah came right after that is to me extremely damning, because Biden knew the costs and knew what he could do to prevent it. There was a step-by-step choice by US officials, from Jake Sullivan to the White House Spokesperson John Kirby, to downplay the horrors of what was happening in Rafah. This was a period when thousands of people were being killed and which led directly to the current situation, where more than 1.6 million people still have nowhere to live.Daniel FinnOf course, 2024 was an election year, which had to be weighing on the thinking of everyone, including Biden himself. Before coming to the election directly, what was the response of the Biden administration and the Democratic Party leadership more broadly to the protests that were taking place in solidarity with the people of Gaza, especially the protests that were happening on university campuses?Akbar Shahid AhmedThere was very little sympathy in the Biden administration for the protesters. There were protests on college campuses but also at campaign rallies where Biden and Kamala Harris were appearing. There was a protest vote by the Uncommitted movement in the Democratic primary season.The Biden administration and the Democratic Party establishment engaged to a degree with some of the Uncommitted figures in the spring of 2024. But the broader protest movement was very often cast as being filled with Hamas sympathizers.Some officials, like Blinken or Jessica Lewis, the State Department official who oversaw weapons transfers, had protesters outside their homes, and their response was to be more stubborn. Instead of asking, “Why are people showing up at my house?” the response was, “How dare you?”It speaks to this broader hubris with the Biden administration. It is those students whose warnings that the United States was going to be complicit in one of the great disasters of the era who proved to be correct. But the administration’s choice was to argue that the protest movement was evidence of disorder and to embrace the crackdowns.As Mahmoud Khalil put it to me, this laid the groundwork for Khalil and other student protesters to be targeted by the Trump administration. It’s another instance of the Biden administration helping to undercut the values they said that they wanted to shield, because they were at the same time saying, “We respect dissent, we respect free speech.”There was also a very real sense that certain constituencies in the Democratic electoral tent simply did not matter. I can’t tell you how many times I heard Democratic Party operatives say, “Are Muslim and Arab voters really going to vote for Donald Trump, who’s proposed the Muslim ban?”Of course, there was also an element of “Let’s just get through the election.” This became dominant after Kamala Harris replaced Biden as the nominee. I was told by one Democratic congressional aide who was quite involved in trying to pressure the Biden administration over Gaza, “Let’s just win the election, get through, and see what happens.” Of course, many, many lives would be lost in that period with US support.Daniel FinnWas there serious concern in those circles that this might damage the Democratic Party in the fall elections? What was their attitude in particular to the Uncommitted movement, which was attempting to put Gaza on the agenda through the Democratic primaries in which Biden was standing?Akbar Shahid AhmedThe Uncommitted movement was a classic “work inside the tent” effort. They repeatedly said, “We are lifelong Democrats — we want to defeat Donald Trump — help us make that possible.” That was also the message from figures like Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Those Democratic critics were not saying, “Trump is offering something better.”It speaks to the influence of a very dated brain trust around Biden, comprising figures like Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon, and Anita Dunn. They promoted the idea that if the Biden administration questioned Israel, they would be seen as weak and lose crucial donors and voter blocs.There’s sometimes a sense that this was being driven by hard-line pro-Israel supporters and donors. But it was also symbiotic with a broader Democratic Party donor class that essentially said, “Don’t rock the boat — this doesn’t matter enough.”It wasn’t just people who had Israel at the top of their minds. It was a donor class that has been deeply entrenched, going back to the Clinton era, with ideas that the Democrats must be seen as strong on the world stage and strong in military terms. The narrative was very much, “We can’t afford to be seen to be abandoning our ally Israel in the face of Hamas and Iran.”Of course, that missed the existence of growing antiwar sentiment that people like Donald Trump or J. D. Vance were actually speaking to. Trump was saying, “Look at the mess in Ukraine, look at the mess in Gaza — I’ll solve this on the world stage.” Meanwhile, the Biden administration was saying, “We’re going to continue supporting our partners.”Democrats have positioned themselves as a party of diplomacy with Iran rather than war with Iran. But in 2024, it was the Biden administration’s consistent choice to let Israel escalate vis-à-vis Iran as well as in Lebanon. This was encapsulated by statements like the one from Kamala Harris at the convention, when she said, “We want to build the most lethal fighting force in the history of the world.”Daniel FinnThere was a lengthy piece in the New Yorker over the summer that included the lines of justification from some of the Biden administration officials like Tony Blinken and Brett McGurk. They claimed that they didn’t want to get into a confrontation with Israel, because they thought the Israelis were going to end their campaign in Gaza soon anyway. Then, when they began to suspect that the Israelis weren’t being entirely straight when they said it was going to be over in the next two weeks, they didn’t want to get into a confrontation with them because they thought they were on the brink of an agreed ceasefire. McGurk has been suggesting that every time there was any public tension between the US and Israeli governments, that made a ceasefire less likely. What do you make of those lines of justification based on their own reporting and research?Akbar Shahid AhmedThe New Yorker piece was very interesting to me. The New Yorker had the galleys of my book for four months by the time they published that piece, so I have to suspect that they took a lot of what was in my reporting and brought it to these officials.I think those public claims should be taken with a tremendous grain of salt. There’s a real reductionism in these post facto claims of Biden administration figures that they couldn’t have done anything differently. It eludes the fact that there were so many choices up and down the system that might have forced Israel to behave differently.I’m thinking here about lawyers who pointed out to me that in other conflicts, the United States very often asks partner countries for written assurances over how they’ll use American weapons. That doesn’t necessarily prevent them from committing war crimes or abuses or violations. But it is a line in the sand that is drawn.Importantly, it’s also something that becomes a question of liability and complicity for US officials. Are you saying at the get-go, “We really don’t want to be part of war crimes”? That choice was not made in this instance.In fact, there was a choice to tightly limit the flow of intelligence, which made it harder for humanitarian and diplomatic experts to establish what the United States knew about Israel’s intentions and actions. For instance, the Biden administration instituted a higher standard for access to intelligence for officials on this conflict than they did on Sudan, Ukraine, or anything else, saying you need a cabinet member’s approval.There was also a real effort to tie together the effort for a ceasefire to the humanitarian aid operation, which every aid expert and relief expert will tell you fuels an abnormal process that leads to the loss of life. They were receiving warnings repeatedly from their own experts saying what was possible and what routes should have been taken.I think about moments like the report in April–May 2024 that was negotiated by the administration with Chris van Hollen, their chief Democratic critic in Congress. It was a chance for the Biden administration to state frankly that the Israelis were blocking aid, as everyone said they were, and to weigh in on the legality of some of these actions.Instead, Blinken and those around him, like David Satterfield, Biden’s humanitarian envoy, chose to write a report that horrified experts. It cleared Israel of accusations of restricting aid by cherry-picking one month rather than the entire period from October 7. This allowed the flow of weapons to continue.It’s not the case that these officials were babes in the woods or that they thought the ceasefire was suddenly going to be achievable. There were so many other steps they could have taken.I want to address this claim from Brett McGurk that Hamas was being empowered and emboldened any time there was criticism of Israel. What we know from so much reporting and from my discussions with US officials, with Israelis, with the Qatari mediators, and with Hamas figures who I’ve interviewed, is that it was Netanyahu who was the stubborn one. It’s offensive to so many of us who have tracked this policy over two years to suddenly try to reframe it as if Hamas was the obstacle.The Biden administration itself repeatedly said, “We wish that Netanyahu would agree to a deal — we’re so close to a deal.” I highlight a kind of sliding-doors moment for many officials in August 2024 when they felt a deal was achievable. The figure that walked away and added new conditions in that period was Netanyahu. It was the Israeli side.There’s still an effort by those officials to rewrite the history. I interpret that in terms of them still wanting to work within the framework of how Washington does this and not wanting to question the overall US-Israel relationship. It’s easy to make Hamas the bogeyman and to say, “Give us another shot — trust us again.”Daniel FinnGoing back to the question of domestic politics, when Biden made way for Kamala Harris in summer 2024, there was hope in some circles that this could be an opportunity for a change of line over Gaza. Was there a missed opportunity at that point, and if so, why?Akbar Shahid AhmedHarris did express discomfort at certain aspects of the policy. Based on my reporting and that of others, she sometimes urged Biden to include rhetoric that was more sympathetic to Palestinians, and she expressed concern about Islamophobia.That said, Harris never demonstrated a real desire to break with Biden over Gaza, even privately, or to endorse a different policy in that way some figures in the cabinet did, when they were allowed to see Biden by Sullivan and McGurk.Was there an opportunity? Some of the figures around her, such as Phil Gordon and Ilan Goldenberg, are now attacking the way Brett McGurk is presenting the Biden-era policy and suggesting a very different US role in Israel/Palestine. I do think that some of her advisers could have offered her a different road map.There was a real debate right up until the convention, with donors and political operatives trying to get Harris to stake out a different position. Some of that was rooted in her potentially deeper empathy, and some of it was rooted in the fact that she was a lawyer. By this point, there was so much legal evidence that something was deeply wrong with the US-backed Israeli campaign.The Harris team will argue that they were in a campaign that was 98 percent Bidenland. There was deep caution. Again, there was a real sense of Democrats looking over their shoulder and wondering, “Will we be seen as weak?” Interestingly, in view of the party’s talk about equity, there was a real argument that a female candidate in particular could not be seen as insufficiently hawkish.Harris’s team chose not to take the advice for a change of line. I’ve asked them. right up until a couple of weeks before I released this book, if they wanted to make any statement of what she should have done differently — any statement of regret. There have been rumors, for instance, that Harris is willing to say they should have had a Palestinian American speaker on the stage at the Democratic National Convention.But she has not been willing to do that so far. There is some discussion about whether she might have a different policy speech in November 2026, after the midterms. But I think a lot of people will be saying, “What did you do at the time you had the power?”Don’t forget, it wasn’t just a question of what might happen if she won the election. It was also the fact that there were worsening conditions in Gaza during October and November 2024 while she was running. Israel subsequently launched a military intervention in Lebanon, and Harris didn’t put forward a different position on that, either.Daniel FinnAfter Harris lost the election, Biden and his officials still had the powers of their offices in the period before Trump’s inauguration. There is certainly no taboo from previous administrations against taking significant initiatives in the last days of a presidency: for example, in the dying weeks of the first Trump administration, there was a move to recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, which was linked to support for Israel through the Abraham Accords. Biden never reversed that decision, and it remains in place to the present day. Was there any consideration given by people in the Biden administration to making moves in relation to Gaza that might preempt what was likely to be coming under Trump and his team?Akbar Shahid AhmedThere were very significant, high-level discussions not long after the election about taking a different approach based on new intelligence that had come up the chain. Even Biden looked at this intelligence, which suggested Israeli knowledge of being part of violations of international law and pointed to US complicity in war crimes and the personal liability of US officials.These were very serious discussions that happened right at the top. The intelligence was taken seriously, and the analysis was seen as being relevant. For more than a year, you had lawyers and officials inside the US government gathering evidence and having heated discussions about whether Israel was adhering to the law. The sense from the White House and from Blinken’s team was always, “We don’t want to see a firm conclusion.”That was how many people involved described it to me. What you had were these heated discussions, including in that lame-duck period, going on for hours, where you might have a clear majority of the so-called interagency lawyers’ group say, “This is a war crime — let’s call it as such.”However, there was also a culture of — as one State Department lawyer put it to me — feeling that no one wanted to rock the boat. They had worked together previously, and they would probably work together again. Why be that person? So firm conclusions were not reached.There were some clear recommendations that Blinken in particular did receive to specifically sanction Israeli units involved in the alleged mistreatment and sexual assault of Palestinian detainees from Gaza. There was video evidence suggesting abuse. Blinken had on his desk recommendations to sanction two Israeli military units that he never acted on.Instead the Biden administration chose to be a kind of handmaiden to the incoming Trump administration. They had different reasons for doing so. Brett McGurk was actively seeking a job in the second Trump presidency, having worked for the first one. In this period, he saw a line of total continuity between what he had worked on under Trump’s first term and his approach during the Biden administration.Having worked on the Abraham Accords under Trump, he was the person who repeatedly made the idea of a grand strategic deal expanding the accords to cover Saudi Arabia the central issue, rather than aid or peace. He was the one who effectively behaved as Israel’s lawyer in internal discussions, as many people told me.For others, there’s such a fixation in Washington with projecting bipartisan comity. There’s an idea that it’s great to think that politics stops at the water’s edge. It’s a staggering approach, when you think that the Biden administration a couple of days prior had been saying that Trump was a threat to everything they held dear, and they were very scared of what was going to happen.I think about a moment where Jake Sullivan appeared with Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor at the US Institute of Peace a couple of days before the handover, and the message was very much, “Isn’t it great that we’re sitting here together? Be assured that the United States is not vulnerable.” Of course, the Trump administration shut down that institute a couple of days afterward.It was very clear that their approach to foreign policy was going to throw out these liberal values and do even more damage to a deliberative and professional process than the Biden administration had already done. What the outgoing officials chose to do was to treat these very shaky ceasefires in Lebanon and in Gaza as huge triumphs and try to take a lot of credit for them.They also took credit for the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, which they did not predict, and they tried to go out on a narrative of humungous success. They would argue, “Look, we got out those hostages at the end, and we got Palestinian prisoners released.” But of course, they also paved the way for Netanyahu to unilaterally reignite the war in Gaza in March 2025.For instance, the Biden administration vetoed internal recommendations to have a new UN Security Council resolution to try to enshrine the Gaza ceasefire. There were also moments when McGurk was joking about claims that there were violations of the ceasefire in Lebanon. The Biden administration chose not to even symbolically apply pressure and say, “We see the situation as it is, and let’s be frank about the law here.”Daniel FinnWhat is your impression of how the various protagonists now see their role in all of this? I’m thinking not just of people who were directly involved in the Biden administration, but also more broadly figures in the congressional leadership of the Democratic Party who had a significant role to play in this?Akbar Shahid AhmedThere’s a real fight among senior Democrats in the apparatus of the party, people who are in fundraising roles, about whether Gaza will matter. There’s a hope among many figures who have had positions of power going back to the Clinton era that this will prove to be a blip. Of course, the rise of Melat Kiros in Denver, where I’m speaking from, or Zohran Mamdani in New York suggests that there’s a serious move to make this a constant fixture in Democratic politics.There are officials from the Biden era who badly want future jobs and future influence. Blinken is on the board of the Center for American Progress, a key think tank in the Democratic Party’s evolution. Jon Finer and Jake Sullivan are very much in the public discourse. Samantha Power, who was United States Agency for International Development chief at the time, is very active in discussions about the future of humanitarian aid, as is Jack Lew, the US ambassador to Israel under Biden, and a deeply controversial figure about whom there’s a lot in my book.I think some figures do have some deep regret. Power, for instance, spoke to me on the record about concerns she had on the inside, about what she witnessed, and about how she felt the Biden administration was missing the forest for the trees in its dealings with the Israelis, with horrific humanitarian consequences for Palestinians and eventually for the Lebanese.But there’s still a culture of Washington shielding its own. Power refused to criticize specific decisions by her colleagues. McGurk, who’s out now with his new book, is being feted in the Atlantic and the New York Times and on CBS as a sage national security expert.It’s surreal to see how he’s being allowed to push the line that the Biden administration prevented war with Iran, when they were responsible for many of the Israeli escalations that crossed red lines and made a conflict easier. They were also responsible for the US military buildup and planning that enabled Trump’s war on Iran.But there’s a desire to lauder the reputations of these figures. Although some of them will express regret, like Jon Finer or some of those figures around Kamala Harris, it still avoids a direct reckoning. Finer said in an interview, “If only the lawyers had brought us firm conclusions.” But I talked earlier about the environment that was created and how, as one lawyer put it to me, “If they wanted us to find a war crime, we could have done so.”What’s bizarre to me, as I do this book tour and try to shine a light on all these figures, is the way that reputation management is still happening. Earlier this week, I received texts from two separate Biden administration figures, both quite senior, saying, “You were too harsh on this figure, and this one deserved more attention, and also, you should represent me differently in the following ways.”It’s a question of personal hubris and careerism rather than a real look at Gaza through the same lens that many of us see it, as a man-made nightmare that has made the world more dangerous for us all. It’s still much more — and especially in Washington, because of how the culture operates — a question of who can we deflect the blame to: Is it Hamas? Is it Biden as he fades from the scene? How can we obscure the patterns of decision-making?That’s what I hope Crossing The Red Line highlights: individuals do matter, but the processes that made this possible and that made Trump’s more damaging policies possible, are what really needs to be understood.