Joe Biden’s Worst Decision Is Even More Stunning When You Know How He Made It

Politics Joe Biden’s Darkest Decision The inside story of why the former president helped Israel destroy Gaza. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Aymann Ismail? Oct 26, 202610:00 AM Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Nearly two years after leaving office, the officials who helped shape Joe Biden’s Gaza policy are beginning to tell their versions of what happened, often emphasizing what they tried to prevent rather than what they allowed to happen. Kamala Harris has 107 Days, Brett McGurk has Brink, and former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has Independent.But the consequences of their decisions, including the destruction of Gaza and the political fractures they left within the Democratic Party, have proved harder to escape. Public opinion has undergone a remarkable shift as Democratic voters now sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis by a ratio of nearly 4 to 1, and the issue has become consequential in many key 2026 races. Akbar Shahid Ahmed, a longtime foreign-policy journalist, has spent more than two years assembling a record of those decisions. His new book, Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza, draws on more than 150 interviews with government officials and extensive additional reporting. The result is a painstaking reconstruction of how Biden and a small circle of advisers repeatedly declined to use American leverage to restrain Israel, even as other officials warned of the consequences. I called Ahmed to ask what his reporting reveals about Biden’s personal responsibility and what Democrats can learn for the future. This interview has been edited and condensed clarity. Aymann Ismail: Your reporting suggests that Biden’s own advisers controlled much of what reached him and what didn’t, and that colored the inaction we saw during the early days of Gaza. Akbar Shahid Ahmed: I really document how the normal functions of government, everyone weighing in, ambassadors abroad weighing in to create a foreign policy, was not happening on Israel. What this means is that Biden was listening to a really small group of people, his foreign policy advisers, but also his political brain trust. These are people who have two defining characteristics: a real, bone-deep loyalty to Biden personally, and a quite dated view of the electorate and this fixation on the idea of questioning Israel as politically toxic. Biden is almost like a shadow or a ghost figure in this book. He looms over everything but is not actively pushing things in so many ways. They were making their own calculations way down the chain, very often without the president’s knowledge of what would get up to him and how. People who were involved in doing the president’s daily briefs—the intelligence, of course, went to Biden daily—felt that there was self-censorship and stifling. That’s not coming at the directive of the president. That’s coming from the environment in the administration. One of the officials in that small circle was Brett McGurk, who’s much less familiar to the public than Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, or Jake Sullivan, his national security adviser. McGurk just published a new book about his experience in the administration. What do you think of his account? Brett McGurk is extremely important to this story. He was the Middle East coordinator for Biden, with unprecedented power. Biden also had an Asia coordinator. He also had senior officials working on Europe. None of them were granted the kind of license to run their portfolio in the way that Biden and Jake Sullivan allowed Brett McGurk to dominate U.S. policy. I think sometimes people look at these policies and think some of these top officials are just deeply committed to Israel. McGurk had a broader commitment to American militarism and a commitment to, these are our partners, these are our guys, how dare you question them over human rights? My reporting shows this was his approach in the administration post–Oct. 7, in so many of the discussions about apparent atrocities by the Israelis. He is the person identified by other officials to me as Israel’s lawyer. He is a player in so many policies, and it’s interesting and kind of surreal to see him in his book pretend he was only part of the ceasefire and hostage diplomacy. That is absolutely not the case. He was a major player in the questioning of the data that humanitarian experts pushed up the chain, repeatedly saying the Palestinians don’t look skinny, sending a chilling effect further down the line. After Trump did win, McGurk was a major factor in the decision not to address new intelligence findings, which I reveal, that suggested both that the Israelis were knowingly committing war crimes and that American officials might be held personally liable for their complicity. It’s also about emotion. Biden repeatedly described him to people as a “surrogate son.” One fellow official told me they were “a father in search of a son and a son in search of a father.” But there’s a real sympathy and empathy there that, of course, is lacking in talking about Palestinians and Lebanese people. Was there a moment when Biden could have changed course, but didn’t? I think the moment is actually in the title. It’s that moment of the World Central Kitchen killings, because it’s a moment of possibility, and then a moment of total failure, and then dishonesty. That’s the moment I see as the moment of maximal possibility, because the evidence is there. Political willingness was there. This is the time at which even Nancy Pelosi is saying, Biden, let’s cut off offensive weapons to Israel. So had the Biden administration wanted to take that shift, they could have. The humanitarian and moral imperative, of course, was there too. And the choice not to do that, and then the choice to work hand-in-gloves with the Israelis to muddy Biden’s own expectations and statements, to me, is the most appalling moment. I don’t know how they could have gone back from there. But I think a phrase that I use and that was used in the New York Times review of McGurk’s book is that the Biden administration effectively became dominated by learned helplessness. You describe a Washington culture that extends beyond Biden. What do you think people still misunderstand about how these decisions were made? We have so normalized the imperial presidency in this post-9/11 moment. There’s still a public perception that this really came down to Biden, and he was limited politically because of the election and he had his clear mental decline. I really hope that people get a better understanding of all the kind of D.C. culture and processes that go into enabling atrocities like what happened to Gaza to happen. The fact that there are officials saying, “We’ve all worked together in the Obama administration, we’re working together now, we think in the future we’ll work together, so let’s not rock the boat by identifying a war crime.” The fact that no one questions the clear imbalance of people at the highest levels of the White House meeting with Israeli hostage families at least once or twice a month and never having similar humanizing contact with Palestinian or eventually Lebanese families, including those of American citizens—that’s process. That’s culture. If you look at that big New York Times story talking about David Milstein, a current aide to Trump’s ambassador in Israel, Mike Huckabee—the story outlines how Milstein changes U.S. government cables to downplay violence against Palestinians. He changes the language that the U.S. government is using internally. I’m so glad that reporting is out there. It also made my stomach drop, because these are the exact patterns we saw from an administration of a different party two years ago, one year ago. These are the patterns that we saw from then–U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew, and Sonali Korde, then the person at USAID running Gaza policy, downplaying what we were hearing out of Palestinian testimony, effectively not making it a question of the data. What I hope readers take away from this is that for a more effective and accountable U.S. foreign policy, it’s looking at that whole patchwork of decisions. Not making it just about the fact of who is president. Public opinion on Israel has shifted considerably. Can the Democratic foreign policy establishment change with it? I think you see a really interesting attempt by some Democrats to repackage themselves. All of that said, until you address patterns like the administration’s shunting aside congressional oversight of Israel policy, I’m wary that these polls will translate into change. There’s still this real desire in the foreign policy establishment to say: Foreign policy doesn’t matter to voters so we will do what we think is right. That remains the thinking no matter how much voters show that it can be a significant issue. That’s a function of them wanting to retain their influence. It’s also a function of the degree to which they’re captured—whether it’s by corporate interests, or whoever is funding their think tank—their desire to have a revolving-door job in the private sector. All of that said, it’s a matter of political willingness and courage. Even if we think about who might champion and tap into the public sentiment in office, the question is, can it translate into a lasting public demand for a shift? And, of course, there’s many people for whom a close U.S. relationship with Israel is still deeply important and will remain a priority. Can the shift in public opinion convince those people that change is how we make that relationship both sustainable and morally and strategically appropriate? Where does Kamala Harris fit into this? You found she was looking at this in a way that Biden wasn’t. Why didn’t she push harder? And could she credibly offer a different policy now? Kamala Harris, I reveal in the book, was seeing aspects of this that Joe Biden was not. So I write about how she listened to the recording of Hind Rajab, which is just chilling, and it’s so impactful and horrifying. She did say that allowing the Israelis to so-called salami-slice Gaza would be inappropriate and unwise. She was looking at it from moral and strategic angles that I didn’t find Biden did. To me, that makes her inaction and her refusal to outline and endorse different policy changes and steps even more disturbing. I didn’t find in my reporting that she ever pushed hard in the way that even some members of the Cabinet, or some of Biden’s advisers, did, to talk seriously about cutting off some weapons or pressure the Israelis in other ways. Now, would she have been taken seriously if she had? One senior official said to me she had absolutely no role whatsoever on Gaza. She wasn’t treated as a player on it. Right now, she doesn’t have that record of what she would have done. I expect she will tell us in a future speech. But in my reporting, talking to people who are in touch with her directly, it remains a rhetorical difference that she’s trying to emphasize. And I don’t think that meets the moment of a demand for a policy change that saves lives. Perhaps she’ll offer something more. It’s hard to know right now. Trump now blames Biden for the bloodshed he inherited. Is that fair? There are so many factors; Hamas’ choice to initiate this entire period by launching an attack on Oct. 7 and committing what are widely described as war crimes by taking 251 hostages among women, children, and civilians. There are other players—there are Arab and Muslim-majority countries that really chose not to use their influence over Israel as energy suppliers and business and intelligence partners. And of course, there’s a huge level of responsibility that lies with Benjamin Netanyahu and those in his government, and Israeli systems that long predate Oct. 7 that normalized extreme violence toward Palestinians and Lebanese without accountability or change. Trump said on the campaign trail, Look at the world. There’s so much chaos. So much bloodshed. I will change it. There was a lot of chaos and bloodshed on the Biden administration’s watch, much of it with American fingerprints on it. And I think we have to be honest about that for any hope of breaking out of any of these cycles of violence. To blame it solely on Biden is to obscure Trump’s own responsibility for deeply disproportionate moves on Israel-Palestine during his first presidency, like giving the Israelis much of what they had long wanted without securing any concessions in return for Palestinians. He recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. He shut down the Palestine Liberation Organization mission in Washington. He shut down the American consulate to the Palestinians. He cut off funding for UNRWA. Those are Trump policies. He too, like Biden, had a political coalition ready to support him to change policy on Israel-Palestine and has chosen not to tap that. So I don’t think President Trump can convincingly distance himself from this horror that we see continuing. Books Donald Trump Foreign Policy Israel Joe Biden Palestine