LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Nearly three years since the start of the war in Gaza in response to a devastating Hamas attack on Israel, journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed has written an account detailing the period, October 7, 2023, to January of 2025. It's focused on the Biden administration's decisions in that time. And it's called "Crossing The Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, And Israel's War In Gaza."
AKBAR SHAHID AHMED: For posterity, it's really important to understand how and why officials were making the decisions that have led to the outcomes we still see in Gaza today.
FADEL: His writings are based on interviews with more than 150 officials and others involved. It paints the Biden administration as unwilling to rein in Israel's devastating response in Gaza as evidence mounted of possible war crimes, starvation and indiscriminate killing in Gaza.
AHMED: The really clear pattern that was never really broken was insularity, this kind of sense that this circle of four or five men, including President Biden, just weren't necessarily listening to other government experts, even at the highest level. Biden, of course, having been a foreign policy expert in his own telling, having worked on this for decades and knowing Netanyahu for decades, feeling he could manage Netanyahu.
FADEL: Did President Biden have a red line?
AHMED: President Biden made clear that Israel's treatment of the town of Rafah, where by that point 1.4 million Palestinians were sheltering, would represent a red line. He said it repeatedly, arguing that if Israel treated Rafah the way it had other parts of Gaza, he would cut off some level of American weaponry. Very quickly, as Israel openly, flagrantly violated Biden's red line, the administration not only didn't chastise them, they started to support the Israeli narrative that the red line wasn't being crossed.
FADEL: Why did the policy play out this way?
AHMED: The impact of careerism in Washington, D.C., on this policy just can't be overstated. So I think about, for instance, a State Department lawyer who I talked to involved in multiple war crimes investigations, who said to me, we had all worked together in the Obama administration. We are working together now in the Biden. We will probably work together again in the future, so no one wanted to be the person to rock the boat. Of course, there's other factors like the president's own doubting of the Palestinian experience. We saw this when he came out and talked about not trusting the Palestinian death toll.
FADEL: Was there ever a turning point for the administration where they felt that actually this bloodshed in Gaza is getting out of control?
AHMED: Actually, after the 2024 presidential election, there were very high-level discussions among officials right up to President Biden about whether the U.S. itself was, in their view, complicit in these apparent war crimes. Of course, Israel denies committing war crimes and says it investigates them. But there were these discussions, including members of the cabinet, including figures like Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk, including the U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew. One official described it to me as, quote, "herd impunity," right? The idea that everyone is in the clear if no one says, yes, this one instance was a war crime.
FADEL: What would you say to somebody like Brett McGurk and others who will say, this book doesn't take into account the level of Hamas' culpability here?
AHMED: Look, certainly, Hamas has repeatedly, by human rights organizations, been found to have violated the laws of war, international law, in its treatment of fighters, military equipment, Israelis, civilians and military personnel.
FADEL: Right. And it's accused of war crimes on October 7 at the minimum.
AHMED: Absolutely, including hostage taking. All of that said, of course, the U.S. doesn't arm Hamas, right? The U.S. arms Israel. And none of this kind of Israeli offensive would have been possible without that constant pipeline of American weaponry. So if we think about this question of, Hamas has created a situation in which mass civilian casualties are happening, you also have to think about President Biden's own warning to the Israelis not to fuel mass violence and potential backlash. So I'd say that that's really about holding the U.S. and Israel to their own stated standards of the laws of war and of accurate investigations.
FADEL: People you interviewed talk about this, that maybe the administration didn't see the suffering of Palestinians as equal to the suffering of Israelis.
AHMED: I reveal in this book for the first time that National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan personally questioned whether Palestinians were starving in Gaza. His spokesperson has denied that. I also report that I was told by a senior State Department official that at this period in the Biden era, there were fewer than five U.S. officials who were regularly in contact with Palestinians.
FADEL: I'm thinking of a line that you had kind of near the end of your book. And you wrote, in less than two years, Joe Biden irreversibly changed America's role in Israel-Palestine and may have permanently altered America's approach to foreign affairs. Say more.
AHMED: The Biden administration's Gaza policy created a more dangerous world for us all. It's a period that reshapes the standards of warfare. It becomes a question not only of danger and influence globally, but a question of democratic accountability to what Americans want their country to be doing on the world stage.
FADEL: Right, because all of the leading officials that were involved are still successfully employed.
AHMED: And positioning themselves for future administrations. A lot of these officials are now saying, well, in retrospect, I would've done things differently, but under President Biden, it wasn't possible. My book makes the argument and offers significant evidence that we shouldn't let that line be sufficient, that we actually should hold these officials responsible for their choices at junctures where they could have saved Palestinian lives and also Israeli lives - and gotten us off a path, I really feel, a path from enabling Israeli escalation in Gaza, consistent escalation then into Lebanon, into now the Iran war and real risk to American lives and many others.
FADEL: Akbar Shahid Ahmed. His book is "Crossing The Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, And Israel's War In Gaza." Thank you for your time and speaking with me.
AHMED: Thank you so much, Leila.
FADEL: Former President Joe Biden and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew did not respond to a request for comment. The former Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk declined to comment. And a spokesperson for the former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that he's on the record saying there were starving people in Gaza. The spokeswoman added that Sullivan told lawyers to make sure the administration was following U.S. law and to call it like they saw it. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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