There’s a 23-year-old quote from Benjamin Netanyahu in The New York Times that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Reached on the evening of September 11, 2001, the then-former prime minister was asked what the terrorist attacks that brought down the Twin Towers and killed almost 3,000 people meant for relations between the United States and Israel. “It’s very good,” he said. Then he quickly edited himself: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.”
He may have been rude and insensitive, but he was also being uncharacteristically honest. Like any demagogue, Netanyahu knew instinctively that enormous pain could be easily transformed into permission.
In addition to providing Israel’s then–Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a freer hand in crushing the second intifada, Netanyahu also saw America’s trauma as an opportunity to achieve a wider set of regional security goals. As Congress was considering the Iraq invasion, he came to the United States to lend his support. “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” he assured a congressional committee in September 2002.
It didn’t.
Obviously, the U.S. didn’t invade Iraq because Netanyahu told it to. He was one of many self-styled foreign policy experts who supported it, a list that includes our current president, who to this day has never adequately accounted for his own key role as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in enabling the war, sheltering behind the transparently nonsensical claim that he was misled by President George W. Bush.
The Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, were an abominable crime. The Israeli government had both the right and responsibility to protect its people. Biden was right to respond with support and solidarity.
It was also right to expect him, at some point over the last year, to pivot to real pressure to end the war and save human lives.
He never did.
It’s unclear yet whether the consequences of Israel’s post–October 7 war will be as bad as the Iraq War. They very well might, but one thing already clear is that both catastrophes were enabled in part by a U.S. president with strong ideological biases, a confidence in his own judgment as unshakeable as it was unjustified, advisers unwilling or unable to push back effectively, and an elite media establishment with an overtly militarist bent and a shockingly callous disregard for Arab lives, far more interested in editorializing about college student chants than about sitting U.S. senators—that is, people with actual power—urging Israel to “flatten” Gaza. (It’s hard to imagine a better demonstration of the bigotry still underlying our foreign policy discourse that, amid the flood of anti-Palestinian invective issuing from members of Congress, the only censure the U.S. House managed to pass was of its one Palestinian American member.)
It was obvious from early on in this war that Biden administration officials either did not understand, or just refused to acknowledge, what they were dealing with. As the public statements from Israeli leaders (collected as evidence in South Africa’s brief charging Israel with the crime of genocide), combined with the staggering amount of destruction being poured onto the 2.3 million people trapped within an area about twice the size of Washington, D.C., show, Israel’s concept of “self-defense” includes the intentional infliction of civilian suffering.
A memo from a defense attaché at the Dutch Embassy in Tel Aviv from November made this clear barely a month into the war. Israel’s strategy, the attaché wrote, is “deliberately causing massive destruction to the infrastructure and civilian centers” in Gaza, targeting houses, bridges, and roads, and causing massive civilian casualties. Israel’s approach, he concluded, clearly violated “international treaties and laws of war.” Israeli military conduct over the past year has repeatedly and consistently proven that analysis correct.
And the people in this administration know it. Early this year a senior official described to me the administration’s efforts to convince the Israeli government to loosen its onerous aid restrictions into Gaza. The Israeli public was still in a vengeful mood and felt that all Gazans should be made to suffer, he said, and the Israeli government, deeply embarrassed by its failure to prevent the worst attack in Israel’s history and frantic to direct the public’s anger elsewhere, was still very happy to oblige.
“It’s a kind of sickness,” he said.
In late September, ProPublica reported that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had overruled the determinations of USAID and the State Department’s own refugees bureau—the two divisions of the U.S. government most directly responsible for assessing such situations, both of which had concluded that Israel was restricting humanitarian aid, which under U.S. law should trigger a suspension of military aid. Seeking to downplay the story, Blinken told an interviewer the following day that it was “actually pretty typical” to look at different reports then “put out our own report,” an impressively disingenuous answer that requires one to ignore that the American reports of violations agreed with analyses by virtually every humanitarian aid agency and human rights organization in the world. What was typical was the administration’s decision to overrule them in favor of the voices advocating for the seemingly easier political path of just continuing to send the bombs.
In public the Biden administration seemed to be watching a completely different war, pretending not to see the mounting atrocities that everyone in the world with a smartphone could plainly see, offering occasional kind words for international law and the protection of civilians with all the heft of the “thoughts and prayers” offered by Republican members of Congress after school shootings. On the ground, Biden deferred to Israeli preferences and practices in almost all cases, no matter the clear humanitarian impact. The mass killing and displacement of civilians, which would be condemned in the harshest possible terms were it being done by an adversary, and in fact has been so condemned when done by Russia in Ukraine, has been treated like the weather. Simply nothing to be done. Pass the ammunition.
In retrospect, the most honest and accurate rendering of Biden’s policy was found in his remarks to donors last December, in which he assured them that, while his administration would continue seeking to build a broader regional security architecture, “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process. Not a single thing.” If he was willing to constrain Israel at all, it was mainly in preventing the war from spreading beyond Gaza. This was perhaps his true and only red line for many months. Israel would be free to turn Gaza into a killing field, provided it didn’t escalate regionally. Yet today, Netanyahu is rolling over that red line too in Lebanon, and possibly soon in Iran, to the exultation of all of those who have been most stupendously and consistently wrong about the region over the past 20 years.
And why shouldn’t he? By taking the option of suspending military aid off the table, Biden signaled from the outset that his red lines were meaningless. His stubborn refusal to impose any costs on Netanyahu (except for a token suspension of a few shipments of bombs that was quickly superseded by massive deliveries of new weapons) is what all but ensured that his May cease-fire proposal would wither and die. The story that is now being crafted through friendly journalists is that Biden tried his best but his effort to bring the war to an end was ultimately frustrated by Netanyahu’s shenanigans. But Biden wasn’t hoodwinked by Netanyahu any more than he was by George W. Bush when he chose to back the Iraq War. He chose this path, and stayed on it despite constant warnings of exactly where it was leading. Having done so, when he exits the White House, he and his team will leave this world a more dangerous and lawless place, America’s credibility more broken, the so-called “rules-based order” even more “so-called” than when he entered.
“The costs of these new rules of war” that Biden has co-authored in Gaza, wrote Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, “will be paid with the blood of civilians worldwide for generations to come, and the U.S. responsibility for enabling, defending, and normalizing these new rules, and their horrific, dehumanizing consequences will not be forgotten.”
Making sure this is not forgotten is part of the task now. The architects of this policy will tell themselves, each other, and us that they did their best, that they made the least bad of the bad choices that confronted them. Those of us who work in this community don’t have to believe that. Over the past year, so many of my colleagues both inside and outside government have regularly confessed private anger with Biden’s policy. We’ve been at conferences and workshops together. Gaza has come up repeatedly, the bone in the throat of any discussion we try to have about America’s future role in the world. At one recent such gathering, participants were asked an open-ended question of what specific actions we would recommend a Harris administration take in the first 100 days. Variations on “Stop sending arms to Israel” were an overwhelming favorite. This should not be surprising, as polls show a near supermajority of Democrats share this view.
It’s not easy for foreign policy professionals to acknowledge any of this, given that many are carefully positioning themselves for jobs in a new administration. There’s probably no more abused word in this city than accountability, but it’s one we must consider amid this still-unfolding disaster. The support that Washington’s policy community has given to this catastrophic war is a symptom of our own sickness. We get to decide if we want to be part of the cure.
Matthew Duss @mattduss is executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders.
