There was a moment, several months into the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, when I briefly thought that then-President Joe Biden and his aides finally recognized their power.
It was just after Israel killed a group of World Central Kitchen aid workers who were trying to feed Palestinians in the besieged enclave. Biden and his team condemned the strike in unusually tough terms and held a pointed call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. If Israel didn’t let more aid into Gaza, where thousands of Palestinians had already died, “there’ll be changes to our policy,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned.
The pressure worked. The number of aid trucks Israel let inside Gaza suddenly jumped, disproving Israel’s claims that it already was doing its best on that front.
But over time, the numbers fell again, and the humanitarian crisis deepened.
I have been thinking a lot about the World Central Kitchen episode lately, as a growing number of top Biden aides have gone public with reflections on how they handled the war. In op-eds, podcasts and other venues, several have offered takes that range from “we did the best we could” to “we could have done better.” It’s not quite a reckoning — people are still processing what happened and trying to figure out where they land. But it gives us an early window into how Team Biden hopes (or fears) its actions on Gaza will be judged by history.
As I’ve followed the commentary, I’ve reached one key conclusion: From the start, the Biden team approached the conflict as if America was weak instead of strong.
The most powerful country in the world constrained itself. This was due to multiple factors, including Biden’s deep commitment to Israel; worries about how the war would affect Democrats’ election prospects; and a belief that Israel would do what it wanted, even if the U.S. went so far as to cut off its weapons supply. These concerns amounted to self-imposed limits that affected nearly every move Biden and his team made and the expectations they set. It may have helped prolong the war.
“We did not act like a superpower,” Andrew Miller, a former State Department official who dealt with the region under Biden, told me. “Instead of beginning from the proposition that these were problems we could solve, we persuaded ourselves that there was little we could do to move our regional ally, Israel.”
Many Biden aides say they’re speaking out now because, under President Donald Trump, the situation in Gaza has grown far more dire, with famine taking hold. Unlike Biden or other modern presidents, Trump has seemingly no limit on how far he’ll take his executive power. But, perhaps because Israel retains widespread GOP support, Trump has been largely hands-off on the Gaza conflict.
The Biden aides hope to push Trump to do more to end the war, even if it means drawing attention to their own missteps. Some skeptics see another reason for the Biden aides’ new outspokenness: That these are people who want to protect their job prospects in a Democratic Party where support for Israel is falling.
I spoke to several former Biden administration officials to understand their thinking on how they handled the Israel-Hamas war. Most declined to be cited, even anonymously — a sign of how carefully they are trying to curate their narratives.
Jack Lew, Biden’s ambassador to Israel, and David Satterfield, his envoy who focused on Gaza humanitarian issues, perhaps inadvertently articulated the Biden team’s weak-handed approach best in an August essay in Foreign Affairs. The pair admit many shortcomings in the nuanced piece, but they also illustrate how low they’d set the bar for success.
“The efforts we led in the Biden administration to keep Gaza open for humanitarian relief prevented famine,” they wrote. “The fact remains that through the first year and a half of relentless war, Gazans did not face mass starvation because humanitarian assistance was reaching them.”
People will suffer in war. But not-quite-famine is not quite an accomplishment.
Jon Finer and Philip Gordon are the two Biden officials who appear to have gone the furthest in saying “we could have done better.”
Finer, who served as principal deputy national security adviser, wrote in The Atlantic that while the Biden team was right to back Israel immediately after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, their administration “did far too little, far too late to limit the truly catastrophic civilian harm that Israel’s response inflicted.”
Gordon, Vice President Kamala Harris’ national security adviser, told a Foreign Affairs podcast that, on the humanitarian aid front, “It was a policy failure. You can’t conclude anything else. Not enough food and humanitarian assistance got to people.”
The pair have co-authored a POLITICO Magazine column that published this morning in which they call on the U.S. to significantly restrict arms sales to Israel in part because the Israeli government appears unwilling to stop the fight.
They even hint that significant restrictions should have been imposed under Biden. The former president did withhold some large bombs from Israel, but argued that holding back more weapons would make Israel too vulnerable to attacks from Iran and its proxies. That argument has become “far less compelling over time, including while we were still in office,” Finer and Gordon write, “and especially as the threat from Hamas declined — undermining Israel’s case for perpetuating the war — and the humanitarian situation in Gaza became unconscionable.”
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, has also been arguing for restricting arms to Israel now. But he’s defended the choice not to do so during the Biden years, when, among other reasons, Israel still faced acute regional threats. “The case for withholding weapons from Israel today is much stronger than it was one year ago,” Sullivan told The Bulwark podcast in August.
Matthew Miller, the former State Department spokesperson, lies somewhere between Sullivan and the Finer-Gordon duo. He now says he believes Israel has committed war crimes. He never said so from the podium, but he has noted that he was speaking for the Biden administration then, not himself.
Other Biden-era officials, such as Ilan Goldenberg, whose roles included working for Harris, have written about what they saw as missed opportunities in ways that show frustration if not outright remorse. Goldenberg wonders whether Biden should have heaped pressure on Netanyahu in December 2023 or January 2024 to end the war, even to the point of cracking the Israeli leader’s far-right government.
Others continue to fully back the decisions made, chief among them Brett McGurk, a senior National Security Council official under Biden who was a key player in ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas. He has suggested in various forums that Hamas was the more difficult party in the talks and stressed the danger Israel faced at the time from regional actors such as Iran.
There’s some truth to all of it.
Israel is a close U.S. partner, and its actions in Gaza are shaped in part by the trauma Hamas inflicted when it sparked this war. Hamas hides among Gaza’s civilians and in underground tunnels. U.S. criticism of Israel led Hamas to take a harder line in truce talks and often the group wasn’t interested in a deal at all. And Israel did, from the start, face threats from Iran and others.
The Biden team also took significant action on Gaza: negotiating ceasefires that helped free many Israeli hostages; withholding some military aid to Israel; successfully pressuring Israel to abandon some of its tougher battlefield tactics; and even building an ill-fated pier to get more aid to Gazans. That sort of engagement led to more humanitarian aid reaching Palestinians than Israel likely wanted.
Biden aides are also human beings who faced a complex, evolving situation. One Biden official cried as they described to me the day-to-day grind. When I asked why they didn’t write publicly about the emotional aspects, they said it would be inappropriate given what Gazans and Israelis, especially the hostages, endure.
I am struck by how Biden aides aren’t publicly and directly blaming the president for a misshapen policy. He was, after all, the person in charge of all the pieces.
Some officials will blame Biden in private, gently, and if you read between the lines of their public commentary, it’s implied.
Lew, for instance, told The New Yorker that the entire Gaza policy had to factor in Biden’s commitment to Israel’s security, “It was something that is deep inside him — his commitment to supporting Israel in a legitimate, just fight was clear, and that had to coexist with pressing them on these humanitarian issues,” Lew said.
Biden’s love of Israel was so strong that, according to his vice president, he struggled to show empathy for Palestinians. “I had pleaded with Joe, when he spoke publicly on this issue, to extend the same empathy he showed to the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of innocent Gazan civilians,” Harris writes in her new book, “107 Days.” “But he couldn’t do it: While he could passionately state, ‘I am a Zionist,’ his remarks about innocent Palestinians came off as inadequate and forced.”
When I asked some Biden administration officials if the president, and they, ultimately ranked Israeli lives above Palestinian lives, they furiously denied it.
“That is a wholly unfair statement,” one former senior U.S. official shot back, having been granted anonymity because the discussion covered several sensitive issues. “Joe Biden believed strongly, viscerally, that Israel was in the right to be able to conduct the campaign. And he believed the humanitarian effort had to match the vigor of the kinetic campaign, which it never did.” A Biden spokesperson declined to provide immediate comment.
I asked the Biden aides why they didn’t halt all weapons to Israel instead of just some. Didn’t the arms flow give Israel, especially the far-right, an incentive to prolong the war?
The responses fell along two lines: Doing so would have emboldened Israel’s enemies, including Hamas and Iran; and Israel had enough stockpiles to keep fighting for a long time even without U.S. help.
A defiant Israel also would make the U.S. look weak. “If there’s any strong-willed country able and willing to buck the U.S., it’s Israel,” a former State Department official said.
Many Biden-era officials cling to these arguments. But they arguably underestimate how much Israel needs America’s military aid and battlefield blessing.
When I pointed to the World Central Kitchen case as evidence the U.S. could have done more to pressure Israel on aid, the former senior U.S. official said that incident was unique. According to this person, Netanyahu had a vision — probably unrealistic — that World Central Kitchen could help replace United Nations aid operations in Gaza in the long term, so the Israeli leader was eager to make amends. (An Israeli spokesperson did not immediately offer comment in response to my question on this subject.)
Biden administration officials are dismayed that the war continues nearly two years later, but they primarily blame Trump’s hands-off approach, not their own actions, noting that a ceasefire was agreed to upon their departure.
Still, there’s obviously a great deal of soul-searching happening now. My recommendation is that the search continue.
