The New Yorker’s account of Biden administration officials’ dealings with Israel after Oct. 7, 2023, leaves one key “takeaway” — they lacked the guts or integrity to stop the Zionist terror machine.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on Oct. 12, 2023. (State Department, Chuck Kennedy, Public Domain)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
It didn’t have to come to this, but you knew it would.
You just knew those doing Joe Biden’s thinking for him were eventually going to explain away how it was the Biden regime actively participated in Israel’s campaign of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. There are memoirs to be written, the historians await with beckoning fingers and… and we meant well.
The indiscriminate daily bombing, the systematic starvation, the sniper killings of small children, the murder of aid workers and journalists: There were reasons for all of it if only people would understand. And now we are to understand.
“How Biden Enabled Israel’s Aggression in Gaza —and Iran” lays out the regime’s case, the grand apologia — the obscene apologia, as I may as well say straightaway — in the July 27 edition of The New Yorker. The digital version of this lengthy, revealing piece appeared Monday and is here.
Let’s have a takeaway, just as the big boys in corporate media have them — five takeaways, seven takeaways, four takeaways. Here is mine, just one: The Biden White House and the Blinken State Department could quickly have stopped the Zionist terror machine within two days of the events of Oct. 7, 2023, but they never had the guts or the integrity to face up to this responsibility.
They spent the remainder of Biden’s time in office dissembling in public, counting the weapons shipments and the casualty counts while professing their powerlessness to stop the Israelis’ Nazieqsue campaign to erase an entire population.
I wrote “two days” just above with good reason. It was on Oct. 9, 2023, that Yoav Gallant, defense minister in the Netanyahu cabinet at the time, ordered “a complete siege” in Gaza. You may remember the savagery in Gallant’s imperative. “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel—everything will be closed,” he asserted very publicly. “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”
All the crossings into Gaza were shut down by then — an open breach of the laws of armed conflict. The Israelis had already blocked the Red Cross from entry into Gaza — another breach of the Geneva Conventions.
“There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals.”
said Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. pic.twitter.com/7kXsATH7Ho
— NoComment (@nocomment) October 10, 2023
Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state and a key figure in the United States’ sustained complicity in Israel’s incessant crimes, flew to Israel a few days after Gallant spoke to confer with him and Bibi Netanyahu.
He got nowhere with either of them, and there is no surprise here: This was Blinken’s “I come as a Jew” journey, as readers may recall. Netanyahu more or less ignored him when he threatened to cancel a visit President Biden had in the works if the Israeli military did not moderate, at least cosmetically.
There was no moderation and Biden made the visit. “As he left,” according to The New Yorker’s account, “Netanyahu bragged publicly that he’d defied the president. He declared that Israel ‘will not allow humanitarian assistance’ from ‘our territory into the Gaza Strip.’”
This is how it went for the duration of Biden’s term in office — Bibi’s defiance, his calculated insults, his constant blindsiding, more chutzpah than Alan Dershowitz ever dreamed of, and all along the Biden people took it supinely while keeping the weapons flow going smoothly.
“White House officials described themselves to me as almost powerless in the face of Israel’s emotional response to October 7th,” David Kirkpatrick reports. You read this again and again, indeed. “The administration gradually came to believe that it could not persuade Israel to alter its approach in Gaza,” Kirkpatrick reports later in his piece.
Extravagant Self-Deceptions
Biden and Netanyahu meeting in Tel Aviv on Oct. 18, 2023. (White House, Cameron Smith)
You read this, and then you read that the Biden regime authorized $20 billion in arms sales after Oct. 7 and that, all in, the United States supplies 70 percent of Israel’s war matériel and almost all of its military aircraft, bombs and missiles.
And then you stop to marvel at the extravagant self-deceptions in which this regime indulged to dodge its duty to the Palestinians, to humanity altogether, to law — international and domestic.
Kirkpatrick, for whom I have a certain amount of time, is very good at capturing this pitiful story in considerable granularity.
Parenthetically, it was as The New York Times’ bureau chief in Cairo during the Arab Spring that Kirkpatrick (and he alone) reported the telephone call during which Susan Rice, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, authorized the July 2013 coup against Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s freely elected president. Blinken was Rice’s deputy at the time.
There were endless debates and daily handwringing within the Biden regime’s counsels as to what to do as the Israelis prosecuted their campaign of terror, and Kirkpatrick gets deeper into these than anyone else I’ve read on the topic.
Nobody in the administration could quite believe what they were seeing. Here is an impressively “inside” passage in Kirkpatrick’s piece:
“Alarms about potential war crimes began ringing inside the Biden Administration soon after Israel began its counterattack on Gaza. … Israeli jets were conducting as many as eight hundred strikes a day on northern Gaza, and Administration officials who were closely tracking the war told me that Israeli military planners could not possibly have preselected or so quickly identified that many legitimate military targets, such as tunnel entrances, rocket launchers, and Hamas leaders.
Nor could the Israelis have carefully weighed whether the risk to civilian lives and infrastructure was proportionate to the military value of each target. Startlingly, the strikes appeared to move in a geographical line from the northeast to the southwest, flattening whole neighborhoods in a way that suggested little differentiation between civilian and military structures.
Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, anxiously asked his staff how Israel could justify this scale of destruction. A senior State Department official told me, ‘We were all shocked at how aggressive and deadly it was, and asking, “What the fuck are they doing?” ‘ “
It is a good question, of course. As I have argued severally in this space and elsewhere, Bibi Netanyahu and his cabinet of Zionist freaks are by a sound definition clinically psychotic.
But it is when we turn the “what the fuck” question around that it is still more revealing. “Whether and how to use America’s military support as leverage to restrain the Israeli operation was debated for months inside the White House,” Kirkpatrick reports.
And believe it or not, this is the argument that won out: We must continue to supply the Zionist regime with weapons as they prosecute their genocide against Palestinians because that way we can force them to stop their genocide against Palestinians.
What the fuck are they doing? is precisely the question. This is sheer schizophrenia.
Regrets, Remorse, Etc.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, on right, joining Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for a press briefing on Oct. 1, 2024, at the White House. (White House /Oliver Contreras)
As the months went by the Biden people descended into “grudging acceptance” of Israeli conduct, and “credulous capitulation.”
These are Kirkpatrick’s phrases — good but not strong enough, given he also reports Biden was up on Capitol Hill whenever needed to sell Congress on this or that new package of weaponry.
As to the White House’s repeated threats to insist on restraint, Kirkpatrick gives us this neat summation: “Biden’s bluster toward Israel, it turned out, was less fierce than it seemed.”
And so to the regrets, the remorse, the self-justifications and self-defenses that are to put the minds of liberals at ease and the historians are supposed to read:
From Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser:
“When you look back at it in the cold light of day, the trap in that kind of thinking is easier to recognize. I will say straightforwardly — we should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach.”
From Amos Hochstein, a Biden adviser (with dual American–Israeli citizenship):
“We tried, but we had no chance of success, in retrospect, because Netanyahu wasn’t talking to us — he was talking to his own public.”
A few more takeaways, if I may.
I cannot get over the ineptitude on display in Kirkpatrick’s account of the Biden regime’s gross mismanagement of the Gaza criss from the day it began until Biden left office.
There is the shallowness of these people’s minds and understanding. No word seems ever to have been spoken of the true nature of Hamas, the various role it plays in Palestinian society, its intentions beyond the ridiculous propaganda casting it as “a terrorist organization.”
Nothing. Hamas, like all Palestinians, is a gathering of stick figures.
What comes first, the policy paralysis or the cowardice? Both together help account for the Biden regime’s refusal to make that single phone call to Bibi Netanyahu so many have mentioned — the phone call that would have ended the savagery in a day.
Such a phone call would have required, if we think about it, courage, imagination, a willingness to strike new directions in policy. Not on, not remotely.
Given the hand of the Zionist lobbies, and all the money Biden took from them, prevarication was the best they could do.
Again, did the decades-long sclerosis among the policy cliques come first, or was it the gutlessness, the absence of any serious commitment to integrity?
Legal Loopholes & Talking Points
An aerial view showing destruction in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, after Israeli forces withdrawal, Jan. 21, 2025. (UNRWA/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0)
Once the capitulation and grudging acceptance set in, Biden’s people turned to lawyers to parse the legal loopholes through which they could slither. How many civilian casualties could be counted “proportionate” to justify a given attack?
How genuinely did the Israelis distinguish between military and civilian targets? “That line could be blurry,” Kirkpatrick writes. And blur was the point, of course.
Craven. Kirkpatrick’s piece confirms my judgment here, either way: If the Nuremberg principles applied, these people would be tried and, based on the available evidence, hung.
What damage the Biden regime did with all its equivocation and weakness and its “pretzels of logic,” as Kirkpatrick terms its incessant flinching.
Israel is now fully licensed to proceed on its rampage — indiscriminate bombing of civilians, etc. — elsewhere in West Asia; West Bank settlements and settler violence have escalated to sickening levels.
On the other side of the ledger (so far as I am concerned, in any case) Hamas’ credibility — and I read most of its fighting force — has survived; sympathy for Israel across the world is understood as sympathy for the devil.
The taker of the cake here is what the lawyers did after Biden was out of power and Kamala Harris defeated at the polls.
Here is Kirkpatrick’s account of these roaring mice:
“A working group of Administration lawyers disseminated a forceful new set of talking points for U.S. officials to raise with their Israeli counterparts. Many of the points could have been written any time since the spring of 2024:
‘In light of the extensive destruction and damage in Gaza, as well as our understanding that Hamas has been devastated as an operational force . . . we in the U.S. Government do not see a clear military imperative for continued operations.’
Under the heading ‘Forced Displacement,’ the lawyers noted that ‘the displacement seems increasingly both clear and purposeful.’
Under ‘Starvation of Civilians,’ they wrote that ‘the facts on the ground’ raised ‘grave concerns’ about ‘intentional starvation of civilians to drive them from the area,’ and that aid restrictions by Israel were harming Palestinian civilians ‘well in excess of any further anticipated military advantage.’ ”
Etc.
As Kirkpatrick nicely concludes,
“The talking points called for follow-up, within ‘days not weeks,’ about ‘plans for improvement.’ But by then surely nobody was listening. Trump was on his way back to the White House.”
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being censored.
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The West has had a barely concealed enthusiasm for fascism since its founding. The Dems can feign being caught off guard or ineffectual after October 7, but they are very much part of the strategy of the ruling class to bring about their fever dream of total control of humanity. That is the greater Israel project.
I’m confused about how the system works. We give the Zionist $5 billion a year and then they kick back $100 million or so in political contributions out of the $5 billion, or is it that Zionist invest $100 million in US politicians and then they receive in return from the US treasury $5 billion a year? Way too complicated for me to understand. I have more respect for Trump et. al than Biden-Blinken. Trump at least makes no pretense of being anything other than a conscience-lessness self-centered narcissist. Biden-Blinken, drenched in human blood, believe they are members of decent society when in fact, they are the sickest of sick fucks. You never heard Adolf going around saying he should have been nicer. it’s all pretty simple. The Zionist are God’s chosen people and the rest of us, including the Palestinians, otherwise known as the unchosen, should stop taking up space and breathing air that could so much better be used by messianic Zionists. The Jews, being the chosen by God, tells you much more about the nature of god than about the Jews. The greatest threat to the United States is not Donald Trump, not billionaires, not unbridled capitalism, not big tech, not the Republican Party. The greatest threat to the United States and our cherished freedoms are the Zionist hands around the throat of our country.
By way of stark contrast:
“…in August 1982, when Israeli forces advanced beyond southern Lebanon and began shelling the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Beirut, Reagan responded with an angry call to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, demanding a halt to the operation.”
See: “Ronald Reagan wasn’t afraid to use leverage to hold Israel to task:
In fact, GOP presidents were much tougher on Tel Aviv in the wake of its aggression against neighbours, settlements, and civilian attacks.”
(Responsible Statecraft article by Lawrence Korb, 24 May 2001).
Excellent article outlining what many of us imagined was happening – knew in our hearts was happening – the hideous excesses of Biden/Blinken/Mileikowsky (aka Netanyahu) Zionists. And lots of excellent responses here, too, PL, below your essay. I have just reviewed an excellent and prizewinning memoir/search for her Palestinian family as it was dispersed by the 1948 Naqba to Canada, the US, Australia, etc – some still in Palestine – by Australian-born Palestinian Micaela Sahhar: “Find Me At The Jaffa Gate”. Fragments of stories, the ephemera of documents, letters, photos she recovers and pieces together to build a family fabric – many of her informants nearing the end of their lives as she visits. Most chilling are her accounts of her own Israel-Palestine border crossings. A Lvov/Lwiw-born friend – now deceased – a noted oral historian – in Melbourne – described her own Bundist and non-Zionist family background – June Factor (1936-2024)…
If Joe Biden were pictured in the opening photograph, it could be titled:
Winken, Blinken and Nod.
This same metaphorical ‘policy’ would/will continue unabated, whether it was Harris, The Chump, or whomever was next chosen by the Global Zionist/Capitalist cabal.
Their militaries have already merged to become the state of USRAEL.
“Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence. –Thomas Szasz”
US politician complicity is not due to cowardice, but to the funding of US DemReps by your tax money dumped on Israel and fed back to the political parties and election campaigns. These are the channels that elect the anti-constitutional tyrants of our corruptocracy. Only amendments to prohibit funding of US elections and mass media except by limited and registered individual contributions can restore democracy, and such tyrants will never pass such amendments, because they would never be reelected.
They are not concerned about foreign influence upon US elections, only about Other foreign influence. We would actually be better off if China or Russia ran our elections and mass media, so they should get going.
The despicable character, Emil Hahn, in Judgment of Nuremberg states before sentencing:
I do not evade the responsibility for my actions. On the contrary. I stand by them before the entire world. But I will not follow the policy of others. I will not say of our policy today that it was wrong when yesterday I say it was right. Germany was fighting for its life. Certain measures were needed to protect it from its enemies. I cannot say I am sorry we applied those measures.
We can see clearly the Israeli leaders acting in lockstep with the likes of Hahn, while our complicit leaders seek to put on a false act of being helpless actors now crying in their beer. Sickening.
A little hand-wringing from The New Yorker does not make up for its general support of U.S. imperialism disguised as liberalism.
US Imperialism is liberalism. Liberals are in lockstep with finance capitalism’s attempted conquest of the globe.
The jacket, the dress, and the shoes in the photo of Karine Jean-Pierre accompanying this article illustrate what is important to the figures responsible for this obscenity and why they choose to participate in the morally depraved business of big-money politics.
You must come equipped with a serious set of balls to stand up to the Jewish supremacists. The ONLY thing they listen to or respond to is force and violence, that’s it, period. Niceties and proper decorum will never work with these sadistic hegemonic savages.
When dealing with Pax Judaica, which is basically an international organized crime ring headquartered in Manhattan and the artificial state of Israel, nothing suffices but an earnest threat that has raw muscle behind it. The mobsters understood this quite well.
Well and bravely put.
Really, it’s the Dems wot dunnit? No, not buying that. The Americans and the Germans provided ordnance for nearly four years. Suck it up. You who work for war machines, while Gaza is ongoing mass murder, are all war criminals. Not to mention deluded.
This, and Steinbok’s piece, are the perfect antidote to “It’s all Trump’s fault.” Liberal copout.
What we are witnessing is as American as apple pie.
And even that pie comes from stolen goods, since apples came from Kazakhstan.
And we can forget Harris’s support for Israel, which handed Trump the presidency.
It’s impossible to believe this did not happen without full, if not enthusiastic/fanatical consent from Biden Co and Congress. No way to slither out, they had the power to stop it, and thousands of times over chose to prop the most heinous of evil committed in Gaza. At the end of the day, they did it because they wanted to because they don’t see Palestinians as human, their struggle legitimate, and have neither legal or moral qualms against Crimes Against Humanity. Indeed, one can infer a high degree of sadism and revelry in their commitment to genocide. The scenario described by Kirkpatrick is as exonerating and forgiving as anyone could concoct, and it still should lead to Nuremberg gallows.
They didn’t slither out because they are beholden to AIPAC
Exactly my thoughts. This is merely a smokescreen to try to put the best (or least bad) spin on the Biden administration’s full and total support of the genocide. All deserve to be put on trial at Nuremberg II.
Methinks “pure gutlessness” hid secret Zionist ambition in Blinken and Sullivan and the rest of the “poor helpless little ol’ me’s knowing el jefe Biden’s AIPAC cash made him owe –the Israeli’s in Israel and the Israeli soaked Zionist USA Fat Money Fraternity –Big Time. A completely bought man to unquestioningly service his jefe. The “oh, poor me, I should but am too weak to break the oh so powerfully relentless domineering (Zionist white supremacist savior of Greater Israel) Netanyahu” fraughtness designed to outwardly look sympathetic good helplessness. These poor excuses for human beings, much less as the inhabitants of presidential advisory office ought be hung by Nuremberg principles in the eviscerated shambles and ground of bombed Palestinians now corpses under Gazan soil. Their behavior is utterly despicable. It “set” the long term grievous pattern repeating today with our feckless morality-free Executive gold plated hollow suited maniacally wicked liars vis a vis Iran. Morality-free is a theme today. Not one Epstein Fraternity member has been prosecuted in the USA.Teflon made in the USA and tailored specifically for Stay Out of Jail Big Rich (in)Justice. Karma isn’t a silly nothing.
You underestimate this lot. From “I am a Zionist” Joe Biden to Anthony Blinken’s “I come as a Jew,” there is little or no distance with Zionism’s Greater Israel project. However, as liberal Americans, the lot must have faced severe cognitive dissonance when faced with an actual, Nazi-aligned genocide. Thus the paralysis and incompetence.
Excellent article.
I suspect my ancestors were more likey to be defined as BUND than ZIONIST.
At 86 I have thought deeply about 1948 history.
The way you mention the Bund makes me think you’d greatly appreciate a new book that came out only 3 months ago. It’s called “Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund,” by one Molly Crabapple (that’s a pen name, not her birth name). It’s thrilling and courageous, IMO, and a great tonic for those who can no longer bear hearing Zionist drivel.
hxxps://www.amazon.com/Here-Where-Live-Our-Country/dp/B0FKVKSB73/ref=sr_1_1
I think Biden, a Machiavellian figure, made an agreement with Israel behind the scenes to support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, which probably turned out bloodier then they expected. Lets recall that gas deposits had been found off the Gaza coast that they surely coveted. At that time, Blinken sent a memo around the State department that no criticism of the Gaza policy would be allowed. The State Department was full of zionists. How bad did Blinken expect the carnage in Gaza to be that he thought even the mostly zionist staff of the State Department would be upset?