The secretary of state reflects the broader disaster of Biden’s Middle Eastern policy.
Partners in crime: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken shakes hand with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) in West Jerusalem on February 7, 2024.(Photo by GPO / Handout / Anadolu via Getty Images)
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in the hot seat after a damning ProPublica report documented that he willfully sidelined and disregarded the findings of his own agencies that the Israeli government was deliberately creating a famine in Gaza. In doing so, Blinken was also flouting American laws regulating the sale of arms to human rights abusers. According to ProPublica,
The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.
The details of the ProPublica report are unsettling. USAID concluded that what was happening in Gaza was “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.” Stacy Gilbert, a former senior civil military adviser in the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, resigned because she was disgusted by Blinken’s presenting a flagrantly dishonest report to Congress. According to Gilbert, “That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”
Writing in The New Republic, Yousef Munayyer, the head of the Palestine/Israel program at Washington’s Arab Center, noted,
When the history of the Israeli war on Gaza is written, there will be no shortage of words dedicated to American villains in this story, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be near the top of this list. Blinken, we learned this week, had an opportunity to alter the course of this war, save countless lives, and do so merely by following U.S. law. But he chose to skirt the law and to deceive Congress and the American public, all to ensure bombs continued to flow to Israel as massacre after massacre was being committed in Gaza.
Representative Rashida Tlaib has called on Blinken to resign. This is an eminently reasonable demand, but it is worth underscoring why it won’t be heeded. In fact, Tlaib’s criticism of Blinken will resonate with no more than a handful of members of Congress—all among the left wing of the Democratic Party. The sad truth is that Blinken was merely reflecting a bipartisan American foreign policy that prioritizes America’s relationship with Israel far above Palestinian human rights. To be sure, the suffering of Palestinians is occasionally mentioned in piously mournful terms by political leaders such as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but all available evidence makes clear that Palestinian lives never factor into policy decisions.
The true depravity of Joe Biden’s foreign policy, which Blinken was merely executing, was made clear in a feature article by Franklin Foer just published by The Atlantic. Both the author and the place of publication are significant. Foer is the author of The Last Politician (2023), an extremely sympathetic account of Biden’s presidency, based on deep access to the White House. The same access to top sources is evident in his latest article. The Atlantic is one of America’s most ardently Zionist publications, edited as it is by Jeffrey Goldberg, a former prison guard for the Israel Defense Force.
Given the source, it’s not surprising that Foer’s article has the whiff of apologia to it. At times, it reads like a defense attorney’s brief for an flagrantly guilty client. The burden of the argument is that the Biden White House sincerely worked for peace but got constantly sideswiped by circumstances of an “impossible situation.”
Yet Foer is an honest writer, and the picture he paints, whether this was his intent or not, is ultimately as damning as the ProPublica report.
On the matter of Israel’s man-made famine, Foer provides an interesting corroborating detail. In early April, national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with Israeli officials in the Situation Room and was prepared to tell them, “You’re about to be responsible for the third famine of the 21st century.” Sullivan never got to make his speech, because the Israelis sprang a new crisis on the White House by telling Sullivan they had just bombed an Iranian consulate in Syria, killing prominent Iranian military leaders.
This is emblematic of the story Foer tells: a White House trying to do the right thing but being overmastered by events and Israeli recklessness.
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But there’s another way to read the evidence Foer provides: The White House has allowed itself to be constantly outsmarted by Israel (and also Saudi Arabia) because of Biden’s overwhelming commitment to creating a regional alliance system that tightly binds the United States to the Jewish state and the oil-rich Sunni autocracies.
Foer sums up Biden’s agenda as ensuring unwavering support of Israel combined with these other goals:
It wanted to avert a regional war that might ensnare the United States. It aspired to broker an end to the conflict, and to liberate the estimated 251 hostages that Hamas had kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip. It sought a Gaza free from Hamas’s rule, and the dismantlement of the group’s military capabilities. And despite the scale of those tasks, it accelerated its pursuit of the Saudi normalization deal.
By Foer’s own account, the balance sheet does not look good:
The administration faced an impossible situation, and for nearly a year, it has somehow managed to forestall a regional expansion of the war. But it has yet to find a way to release the hostages, bring the fighting to a halt, or put a broader peace process back on track. That makes this history an anatomy of a failure—the story of an overextended superpower and its aging president, unable to exert themselves decisively in a moment of crisis.
Amid the escalating Israeli assault on Lebanon, there is no reason to believe a regional war has in fact been averted. To the extent the crisis hasn’t gotten worse, credit has to be given not to the Biden administration but to the restraint of the Iranian regime—whose forbearance Israel continues to test. In other words, there’s little positive about the Biden legacy.
According to Foer, by March 9,
Biden was feeling hoodwinked. First, the Israelis had said the war would be over by Christmas; then they’d said it would be over by February. Now they said they wanted to invade Rafah, which would extend the war for several more months.
But the Israelis didn’t fool Biden—he allowed himself to be fooled, because his foreign policy rested on delusions.
Antony Blinken’s unwillingness to be honest about the famine in Gaza is a particularly glaring example of Biden’s delusional and dishonest foreign policy. Blinken’s resignation would be welcome, but would achieve little. Positive change might come if Kamala Harris wins the election and replaces Biden’s foreign policy team wholesale. But she would also need to reject the delusional commitment to a Saudi-Israeli alliance that is the root problem. However desirable, this scenario remains unlikely unless there is a much wider public opposition to the bipartisan foreign policy consensus.
Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.