On July 11, the New York Times Magazine ran a deeply reported piece on how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has prolonged the war in Gaza for political reasons. In addition to showing a prime minister so maniacally obsessed with maintaining his own governing coalition, and thereby avoiding jail, that he is willing to kill tens of thousands of Palestinians (and counting), sacrifice the lives of Israeli hostages, and turn his country into an international pariah, the piece serves as another exhibit in the prosecutorial brief against the Biden administration’s handling of the war. U.S. President Joe Biden is portrayed in turns as feckless and cranky, pushing Netanyahu to change course and believing him when he says he will and then getting mad when Netanyahu inevitably doesn’t. Over and over and over and over.
In the words of the great American poet George W. Bush, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me—can’t get fooled again.”
Even if Biden was fooled, he had no excuse to be. If he didn’t know exactly what was happening, then other senior members of his national security team certainly did. A few weeks ago, former State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller made some news by saying that it is “without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes” in Gaza. But anyone with a smartphone already knew this. No mass atrocity in history has ever been more exhaustively documented and broadcast in real time by both its victims and perpetrators. Still, it was notable coming from someone such as Miller, whose previous job had been to repeatedly deny that he had seen evidence of any of it.
The foundational lie upon which the Biden administration’s Gaza policy was based was that the enormous harm inflicted on civilians in Gaza was unintentional. The truth is that inflicting civilian harm is part of Israel’s strategy. As documented in South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice, a number of Israeli government officials have been quite open about their intentions in this regard.
In addition to the voluminous real-time reporting on this war, most importantly by Palestinians themselves, a recent New York magazine cover story by Suzy Hansen provides the most detailed account yet of what Biden administration officials knew and when they knew it. Along with Miller’s admission, it should put to rest any claim that administration officials were unaware that war crimes were being committed. And yet, they continued to supply weapons in violation of U.S. laws that prohibit doing so to militaries credibly accused of gross violations of human rights and restricting humanitarian aid.
It’s worth briefly addressing the main arguments that senior Biden administration officials used, and continue to use, to justify their role in this historic catastrophe. If you’ve caught any of former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s public appearances where he’s asked about this, you’ve probably seen him tick through them.
The first main argument is that Israel’s enemies could’ve interpreted a cutoff of U.S. arms as incentive to attack, which could lead to a regional escalation that the Biden administration wanted to avoid. This is questionable on two grounds. First, it’s clear that, to Hamas’s enormous disappointment, its putative allies Hezbollah and Iran had no interest in joining the war beyond a symbolic show of force. I’ve seen no evidence that Biden using the United States’ considerable leverage to end the war would’ve changed that calculation. Second, when the war eventually did escalate regionally, it was Israel that escalated it, with Biden’s support.
The other argument is that maintaining the supply of arms enabled a level of U.S. influence on Israeli policy that would’ve been lost if the arms had been halted. In addition to the fact that this clearly didn’t work, one of the reasons that I find this claim so weird is that some of the same people now making it previously rejected it.
In November 2018, 30 former Obama administration officials issued an open statement supporting the cutoff of arms to Saudi Arabia over its brutal intervention in the war in Yemen. The signatories explained that they had earlier supported the Saudis “in an effort to gain leverage to push the coalition to abide by international humanitarian law and support parallel diplomatic efforts,” but that this was, in retrospect, a mistake. Almost every one of the signers would go on to serve in the Biden administration. And some now justify their support for Israel’s Gaza war in precisely the terms that they regretted justifying support for Saudi Arabia’s Yemen war.
The officials who make this argument point out that they were, through great effort, occasionally able to get more aid into Gaza than Israel would have otherwise provided. While we should acknowledge that that aid certainly made a difference to those few people who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten it, that doesn’t come close to outweighing the cost of continuing to support Israel’s assault. I don’t think you should get much credit for occasionally tapping the brakes on genocide.
But here’s the thing: That’s all beside the point. Even if those justifications made sense, they didn’t require the Biden administration to continually mislead the country and the world about Israel’s conduct. The administration could’ve used statutory waiver authority to continue support, stating that while there was clear evidence of an Israeli policy of blocking humanitarian aid, U.S. security interests were best served by continuing to supply the weapons rather than cutting them off. That would’ve at least enabled an honest debate.
But they didn’t do that. They lied. Repeatedly. They claimed that they didn’t see evidence of systemic abuses. They resorted to strange formulations such as “too many Palestinians have been killed,” as if there was some acceptable number that had been exceeded. They said that Israel wasn’t “doing enough” to facilitate the provision of humanitarian aid, pretending that a policy problem was a logistics problem.
The Biden administration was so committed to obscuring the reality of Israel’s conduct that it created an entire new process for the purpose of sustaining the illusion. Issued by the Biden White House in February 2024, National Security Memorandum 20 directed the U.S. State Department to “obtain certain credible and reliable written assurances from foreign governments receiving [U.S.] defense articles and, as appropriate, defense services” that they will abide by U.S. and international law. Of course, as predicted, in the end, the administration provided Israel a clean bill of health, and the weapons continued flowing. NSM-20 purported to be a new tool for ensuring accountability. In reality it was simply another shield against it.
In the past few months, I’ve met with many former Biden administration officials, people who worked in the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon. Most of them don’t deny this. They acknowledge that Israel was deliberately harming civilians and that the administration knew this at every level. They insist that they were pushing back internally against the policy. My response to all of them has been the same: Speak up now and tell the truth about it.
But as of now, I don’t see them speaking up about it. With very few exceptions—such as Andrew Miller, the former deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs, and Ilan Goldenberg, a former White House special advisor—they aren’t engaging in any real public introspection, let alone any that grapples with the enormity of the atrocities that the Biden administration helped facilitate and the likely consequences for the country and the world, which are quite dire. Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent New York Times op-ed on President Donald Trump’s strike on Iran, while shamelessly positioning to take credit for any possible successes, mentioned the word “Gaza” once.
So, what should the United States’ political class and its voters do about this? This is an important question now that senior Biden administration officials are reintegrating into the foreign-policy establishment. While Matthew Miller’s admission that he chose to be the public face of his boss’s lie makes clear that he should never be treated as trustworthy again, we already knew that, and it’s important that he spoke up now, even if it’s late.
We need to hear from more of his colleagues about what they knew and when they knew it, and about how efforts to change the policy were repeatedly shut down by senior decision-makers. We need to welcome former officials who speak up, even if very belatedly, rather than attacking them for doing so. Part of preventing the alleged Gaza genocide from happening again—and that must be the overriding goal—is creating space for people to tell us what they know in order to speak to the historical record about what went wrong, and to do so sooner rather than later.
We should also recognize those officials and appointees who spoke up when it mattered and took a professional risk by publicly resigning. Josh Paul, Tariq Habash, Harrison Mann, Lily Greenberg Call, and Stacy Gilbert all showed us what it means to be an honorable public servant. They had the courage to say no. They are the kind of people our country needs in government.
The architects of Biden’s Gaza policy are not. Unlike more junior officials, whose candor might provide an eventual pathway back to government service, those most responsible for the catastrophe shouldn’t have a role in any future administration.
One of the arguments that I’ve heard from former administration colleagues and other Democrats is that we need to focus on the real threat of Trump and Trumpism and not fight within the Democratic coalition. This echoes the words of former President Barack Obama in 2009, when he decided not to seek legal accountability for Bush administration torturers: “Look forward as opposed to looking backward.”
But this misses two things. First, this is not simply “looking backward.” The Gaza genocide is ongoing. It is happening now. It is, if anything, intensifying. Accountability is necessary to prevent not just future crimes, but also to try to stop a current one.
Second, Obama’s decision may have made shrewd political sense in the moment, but, like the decision not to impose any consequences on the corporate executives who collapsed the economy in 2008, it reinforced a system of elite impunity that has corroded U.S. democracy. The reason that Trump gets traction when he says that “the system is rigged” is because the system is rigged. It’s rigged on behalf of rich people such as Trump. And it’s rigged on behalf of well-connected and influential people such as former senior government officials who face no consequences, legal, professional, or otherwise, for aiding and abetting the worst crimes imaginable.
If we are serious about rebuilding U.S. democracy, unrigging the system and ending that impunity is imperative. The fight for accountability for Gaza is inseparable from the fight against Trumpism.