What Biden Officials Wish They Had Done Differently in Gaza

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3:00Hi, David. Hello. Thanks so much for being here. It's my pleasure. You spoke with a number of former high-level Biden officials about the administration's failure to effectively influence Israel's military operations in Gaza. And many of these people were on the record when they spoke to you. Why do you think that they talked to you? And why now? Well, after an event like this, I think the people who are intimately involved start to have an interest in the historical record. You know, once things are over, it's a little bit easier to speak publicly and to try to clarify some things. That's the broad answer.

3:37The other answer is right now, the Democratic Party is clearly going through some convulsions over its relationship with Israel. Some of those convulsions are about the belief that Prime Minister Netanyahu led President Trump into a disastrous war right now. But some of them are also about the devastating consequences of the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza. and there have been a lot of recriminations against the most senior figures in the Biden administration over that. You know, it's no secret that the Democrats are now intensively debating the use of the word genocide, which I'm not going to get into.

4:17But I think that some of the people at the top of the Biden administration feel accused. And I know why, you know, that there's a lot of negative stuff going around about Biden and his closest advisors in Democratic Party circles. So I can see why those people might want to speak to those issues. That's David Kirkpatrick, who just wrote a deeply reported piece for The New Yorker about the Biden administration's mishandling of Israel's war in Gaza. David tells this story through the eyes of the people who were actually in the room, some of whom are publicly acknowledging missteps for the first time.

4:54Drawing on interviews with former senior Biden officials and previously undisclosed documents and revelations. He recounts the internal debates over how aggressively the U.S. should have pressed Israel to reduce civilian casualties and allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. Looking back, many of the officials he spoke with now express regret that the administration failed to use its leverage earlier and more forcefully, and most of their accounts suggest the warning signs of Israel's increasingly devastating campaign in Gaza were visible early on in the conflict. I wanted to talk with David about why the administration struggled to use its considerable leverage over one of its closest allies, how fears of a wider conflict with Iran influenced its choices, and why some members of Biden's national security team are now looking back on those decisions with regret.

5:39This is The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. So I want to start this conversation the way that you actually start your piece, which is with this confidential letter to Joe Biden from the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross. This is a letter that had been previously unreported. Can you talk about the significance of that letter and why it was important at the time, but also what the response to it tells us now? So I should say this is a letter from the International Committee of the Red Cross that was provided to me by a former U.S.

6:09official, not by the ICRC, which guards the confidentiality of their communications with heads of state very, very closely. It was important to me because the ICRC has a special role under the Geneva Conventions with helping governments avoid war crimes and violations of the laws of armed conflict. And they didn't lay out anything secret. They didn't have any inside intelligence. What they laid out in that letter was a kind of informed reading of the public record as of March 2024. And after you've read that letter, it's really hard not to believe that Israel was testing the limits of the laws of armed conflict at best, that there was a significant danger that Israel was killing more Palestinians and destroying more civilian infrastructure than could legitimately be justified.

7:10And to me, most telling is the fact, which no one disputes, that Israel, after October 7th, had announced they were no longer going to let the ICRC visit their Palestinian prisoners. You know, a lot of international humanitarian laws of armed conflict are pretty fuzzy, as I came to understand reporting this piece. But the part about you've got to let the Red Cross visit your prisoners is very cut and dry. And the fact that Israel basically just said, no, ICRC will not be able to visit any of our Palestinian prisoners from Gaza or the West Bank until Hamas releases their hostages or lets the ICRC visit their hostages, that statement showed a pretty blanket disregard for the Geneva Conventions.

7:56And it put in an unflattering context, frankly, a lot of those other murkier questions about distinguishing between civilian structures and military structures or making sure that civilian casualties were proportional to the military objective of any given attack. What would letting the ICRC visit have ostensibly led to? Like, what was the concern there with letting them visit, given, as you said, that it's pretty standard for that to happen in conflicts? So the stated rationale was, you know, Hamas has got hostages and they're not letting the ICRC visit those hostages. So we're not going to let the ICRC visit our Palestinian prisoners, which is troubling because the Geneva Conventions don't let you say, well, the other side did this and so I will.

8:46And it also erases the difference between Hamas and the rest of the Palestinians out there. So what Israel said is, you know, we're doing unto others here. the reason why the ICRC was especially concerned and any reader of that letter would have been especially concerned is the number of Palestinian detainees in Gaza and the West Bank had soared. And so had the number of reports of deaths in detention and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees. In particular, there had already been news reports, including an excellent report in the New York Times about Palestinian detainees who'd been released back into Gaza because the Israeli authorities concluded they had no military ties to Hamas.

9:33And nonetheless, many of those detainees reported abusive treatment, what a layperson would call torture. And yet, you know, what we normally hope is that the ICRC visits prisoners of war or prisoners taken in an occupation and can determine whether those people are or not being mistreated. That wasn't possible here because Israel had cut off the access completely. You describe in the piece the Biden administration's policy toward Israel as being defined by a pattern of credulous capitulation, despite the fact that the administration was publicly insisting that they were trying to hold Israel accountable in assuring that their mission to defeat Hamas and bring home the hostages was carried out quickly and with as few civilian deaths as possible.

10:15When do you see that pattern of capitulation beginning? Well, I should say that really the pattern represents a kind of public-private dichotomy. I think in private, President Biden and the people around him sincerely were trying their best to persuade Israel to fight the war differently. The problem is that in public, they were so committed to not showing any daylight between themselves and Israel that no one outside saw that. And I think the net effect of that public silence was a kind of permission. In terms of when this sort of pattern of credulous capitulation began, you know, right at the beginning, people around the administration began saying to themselves, look, the politics of Israel right now on left and right, whether Netanyahu or his opponents, is so demanding of retribution against Hamas and even the people of Gaza that there's nothing we can really do to hold them back.

11:13Now, that's not usually how the laws of armed conflict are supposed to work, and it's not usually how the U.S. treats other countries. You know, we don't really say, look, the population of country X is so angry that it's not reasonable for us to try to hold them to their commitments to the Geneva Conventions. That's unusual. The credulous capitulation extends throughout the conflict because as many of the top officials will tell you now, they were constantly hoping, expecting, believing that a ceasefire hostage release deal was just around the corner. I think it's sometimes the Israelis may even have led them to that belief.

11:52And in fact, it kept getting kicked down the road. And so you had a pattern where the U.S. was in a sense, The Biden administration was, in a sense, pulling its punches because it didn't want to blow up a ceasefire deal that seemed just around the corner. And in fact, it never was just around the corner. And that went on for months and months and months. How clear do you think it was from the beginning of Biden's presidency that he would take this kind of approach with Netanyahu and essentially capitulate or at least capitulate in the eyes of the public? Was this something that was always sort of part of his political persona?

12:32Or did he assert more strength and influence over Israel before October 7th? No, I don't think so. I mean, he campaigned on a promise never to condition military support for Israel. And actually, he moved away from that a little bit. You know, at one point, he withheld a shipment of 2 ,000-pound bombs. So he was always clear that he was going to be, you know, the most Zionist president, and that's consistent with his record. You know, in his mind, one of the lessons of the Obama administration when he was vice president is that, again, in his mind, the kind of public pressure that President Obama tried to put on Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli government was counterproductive.

13:18You know, the people in the White House had worked in the Obama administration, and they keenly remembered an earlier dispute with Hamas when Obama came out swinging, basically right from the get-go, was trying to pressure the Israelis to minimize civilian casualties, to avoid a ground invasion, to try to pull back, to accept a ceasefire, even unilaterally. None of that did any good. Netanyahu went ahead and waged a seven-week ground invasion, and there were a lot of casualties. In 2021, when there was an earlier fight with Hamas, the Biden team, led by the president, took a kind of no daylight approach.

13:57They just tried to talk to Netanyahu privately and say, let's try to wrap this up as soon as possible. And they felt that was successful. You know, that war was over in about 11 days with a lot fewer casualties. So in Biden's mind, you know, his instinct from the get go was, I want to stand with Israel. Israel is, you know, this embattled nation under fire, as it was when he first got to the Senate in the 1970s. And the experience of 2021 ratified that for him, confirmed to him that the way to approach this is quietly, behind the scenes, no public daylight. I mean, to what extent did the Biden administration actually draw red lines for Israel or make explicit demands or requests regarding the nature of their military action in Gaza privately?

14:41I think privately throughout. You know, I think from the very beginning, people at the very top of the administration, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, President Biden himself, were pressing the Israelis to better define the aims of their conflict, to talk about what Gaza would look like after the war was over. You know, as early as November 1st, Secretary of State Antony Blinken laid out a kind of public wish list of what the U.S. thought should happen after the war. And it included bringing in the Palestinian Authority to move towards a two-state solution that included Gaza and the West Bank.

15:18And it included a full Israeli pullout of Gaza and no forced evacuations. In retrospect, though, Prime Minister Netanyahu was already flouting all of those U.S. demands, and that persisted up through the end of the war. Can you talk a little bit about the tough love speech that Biden and his advisors were debating giving throughout this conflict? Yeah, early on, I'm not sure exactly how early on, but in the first months of the war, a proposal percolated up from the State Department that President Biden, who was very popular in Israel at the time because of his support after the immediate attack, that he should deliver a speech attempting to go over Netanyahu's head to speak directly to the Israeli public.

16:05And the idea was that he would lay out kind of two paths, if you will. You know, you could go down the path of continued all-out war that may not release the hostages. It is going to alienate the rest of the world. And it poses the risk of leaving Israeli Jews in kind of permanent custody of a large population of Palestinians under their control that they've got to manage. And that's going to be an ongoing security issue in perpetuity. The alternative path is a more narrow fight to try to go after Hamas, to try to better protect Palestinian civilians. That is going to win the approval of the world, acceptance from regional neighbors like Saudi Arabia, which was considering normalizing relations with Israel.

16:52And down the road, eventually, if you eliminate Hamas without killing so many Palestinian civilians, could pave the way to a two-state solution, which the United States has always held is the only way to keep Israel secure, democratic, and Jewish. So did we ever get that speech? I'm not remembering Biden giving it necessarily. No, we never did get that speech. The notion was kicked around right from the beginning. there was a point in May of 2024 when Biden decided, yes, I'm going to give that speech. I'm going to try to speak directly to the Israeli public. At that point, some of his popularity had already waned a little bit in Israel, but he was going to give the speech.

17:37And speechwriters went through several drafts. But as it was being prepared, word came from the Israeli leadership that they were considering a new ceasefire proposal, a proposal on the table for a ceasefire and hostage release deal. So the speech was thrown out and rewritten so that it was basically a take-the-deal speech. And in an extra twist to try to box in Netanyahu and pressure him, the deal was somewhat artfully portrayed as his own idea, right, as an Israeli proposal. It's an odd speech if you read it in retrospect because the tone is, please, please take the deal. And the deal is also, you know, portrayed as Netanyahu's own proposal.

18:22So it's sort of like, please take the deal that you've already proposed. But anyway, that was the gist of it. And that, so the tough speech became a kind of take the deal speech. So throughout all of this, how would you characterize Biden's relationship with his larger national security team? You know, after his disastrous debate with Trump, a lot of concerns came out. about his kind of cognitive decline, Biden's cognitive decline. And that led to lots of speculation, you know, that he wasn't really in control inside the White House. That's not what I heard. Certainly on this subject, he was very much the dominating force.

18:59You know, he had very strong ideas. He felt very confident in his own expertise in the region. He talked a lot about having visited Israel, you know, in the early 1970s when he was first a young senator. And he was even sometimes, I think, brusquely patronizing to his most senior advisors, you know, and that would include, you know, Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor who was, you know, the center of democratic foreign policy thinking for well over a decade. And even Anthony Blinken, who's been a close advisor to Biden himself, you know, for decades in the Senate, in the Obama White House.

19:39And as secretary of state, of course, Blinken had at his disposal all the wisdom of the U.S. foreign service, which is extensive. And those are experts who have lived for years in the region. But Biden, I think, was not shy about, you know, asserting his own views and imposing his own instincts around the shaping of policy towards the conflict in Gaza. Let's take a quick break, and then when we come back, I want to get into how Iran figured into the Biden administration's attempts to influence Israel. This is the political scene from The New Yorker.

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23:44So, David, most of your piece focuses on the Biden administration's failure to reign in Netanyahu during Israel's campaign in Gaza. But you also cover the acrimonious relationship between Israel and Iran, which almost reached a breaking point a few times during Biden's presidency. So I want to talk about that for a little bit since it's obviously relevant to the current war, which has been going on for nearly five months, and since we're now seeing this escalation following last month's ceasefire. Just to kick things off, based on your conversations with former Biden officials, if Biden had been able to reign in Netanyahu, either in Gaza or just in the Middle East more generally, do you think that the war in Iran still would have happened?

24:24Or was there a way to prevent that? Well, the Biden team will tell you, look, our number one priority was avoiding a regional conflict. What we set out to do most of all was avoid a situation where the conflict in Gaza escalated to a regional war between Israel and Iran. And they would say correctly that they succeeded while Biden was still on the job. You know, they wanted to avoid exactly what's happened, and they did until Biden left office. In retrospect, however, it's a complicated picture because throughout that conflict in Gaza, Netanyahu and the Israelis repeatedly surprised the White House with provocative actions towards Iran.

25:08They did things like attacking an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus or killing Hamas leader inside Tehran, assassinating the leader of Hezbollah. And some of these things drew Iranian retaliation against Israel itself for the first time. The Israelis knew, they were right, that the U.S. would feel compelled to defend them and did defend them. So in retrospect, you know, one former administration official observes that there was a kind of a moral hazard there, that at each step Netanyahu was seeing that he could provoke Iran and the U.S. would shoulder the cost of his defense. So there was upside and no downside for him.

25:54which is a, you know, that's an invitation to keep going. The other connection between those events and the current war is that in the process of those series of provocations and escalations, Israel eventually took out many of Iran's air defenses in October of 2024. That left Iran basically prone and an extremely tempting target. I was told that some departing Biden administration officials explicitly warned the incoming Trump team, you know, watch this space. This is not something that Netanyahu is going to be able to resist. He's going to want to go further. I mean, it's well known that Netanyahu had been asking for U.S.

26:35support to attack Iran for at least 15 years. And it was pretty clear that with Iran at its most vulnerable, he was going to want to do it again. And indeed, he did. And where Biden said no, Trump said yes. When it comes to the Middle East, you write that one of the more influential figures on Biden's national security team was Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East. Can you talk a little bit about what made him so influential and how exactly he was able to exert his influence? Yeah, I was told that what happened there was really that their instincts aligned. You know, the position that McGurk articulated inside the administration and has articulated publicly since then is basically Biden's own instincts.