Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza, by Akbar Shahid Ahmed. W.W. Norton & Company, 368 pages

When confronted with warnings that famine was spreading across northern Gaza in early 2024, members of President Joe Biden’s foreign policy team could not believe what they were being told. The alarming reports came from U.S. agencies and respected international humanitarian groups, but they starkly contradicted Israel’s version of events. 

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk doubted Palestinians were going hungry amid mountains of rubble and corpses because the “people in photographs from Gaza did not look skinny,” reports the investigative journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed, based on accounts from his anonymous sources.

Not only were staggering numbers of Palestinians desperate for food. They lacked clean drinking water, medicine, and shelter. They were being torn to pieces—in many cases by U.S.-manufactured bombs—as the Israeli military  kept up its relentless offensive. Yet the president and his top aides failed to meaningfully exert their influence to alleviate the suffering. Instead, their response was shaped by credulous deference to the Netanyahu government and disregard for both U.S. and international law.

“Biden’s stubbornness was one of his trademarks; Sullivan and others closest to him began to behave similarly, such as questioning the Palestinian casualty counts, even as they received more and more information from intelligence and humanitarian officials that showed how their policy had failed to ensure that aid reached Gazans,” writes Ahmed in Crossing the Red Line, his must-read reportage on the Biden administration’s refusal to restrain Israel from perpetrating what a growing consensus of scholars, jurists, human rights groups, and an independent U.N. commission now consider a genocide.

A diplomatic correspondent at The Washington Sun, Ahmed made his name during twelve years working at HuffPost, where he won awards for his Mideast coverage. The book draws on this prior work, augmented by interviews with dozens of former officials and a careful review of the documentary evidence.

The result is a meticulously reported, damning portrayal of a president and his tiny clique of decision-makers who, despite their pledge to uphold the “rules-based order,” found themselves enabling Israel to wage war against a civilian population and destabilize the region. Future historians will rely on Ahmed’s account, which reveals how highly credentialed, intelligent officials can close their eyes to what’s in front of them and make policy for an alternative reality.

Among Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s staff, for example, a culture of what one official called “herd impunity” enabled the near-automatic approval of weapons transfers as veteran diplomats discouraged internal dissent. Ahmed reports that Blinken never asked the intelligence community to assess whether Israel was committing war crimes, and officials repeatedly slowed down or subverted internal inquiries. The resulting lack of information allowed the administration to claim, quite conveniently, that it lacked sufficient evidence to cut Israel off from U.S. weapons.

Ahmed’s rendering of Biden’s team evokes nothing so much as President Lyndon Johnson and the “best and the brightest” who sank the United States ever deeper into the Vietnam War. Yet Biden faced an easier task than withdrawing hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops from an unwinnable war. The tools he needed were right in front of him. But time and again he refused to withhold weapons from Israel despite convincing evidence the IDF was indiscriminately leveling entire neighborhoods—even targeting schools, hospitals, and aid stations—in illegal acts of collective punishment. Moreover, Biden provided diplomatic cover for Israel at the UN, shielding Netanyahu from international consequences.

Why did the Biden administration choose this course? Ahmed does not depict U.S. decision-makers as bloodthirsty monsters; rather, one gets the impression they simply wanted to ignore what was happening. Unlike their Israeli counterparts, who publicly declared their intention to render Gaza unlivable, top White House officials displayed callousness, ignorance, myopia, or the all-too-human instinct to blame others rather than oneself. As a consequence, they gaslit the country while licensing ever more Israeli violence. 

Widening the historical lens, Ahmed underscores the importance of U.S. support for Israel and the casual dehumanization of Palestinians going back decades. Thus, after the October 7 horrors inflicted by Hamas, a president was ready to give Israel carte blanche.

Biden’s Gaza policy also flowed from the disastrous experience of the Global War on Terror and “a refusal among policy elites to reckon with its flaws,” says Ahmed, which fostered “comfort with jaw-dropping atrocities and dehumanizing of people in the region.” “Within America’s system of checks and balances,” he writes, this “limited scrutiny of presidents and their aides, reversing progress toward transparency… while holding few liable for abuses or crimes committed in the name of U.S. national security.” 

Biden’s approach was myopic, of course. He believed Netanyahu would repay his goodwill with restraint if asked. Instead, the Israeli prime minister bullied and humiliated him whenever a glint of daylight appeared between their governments. Beyond some tough talk, Biden rarely used the United States' considerable leverage to curb his partner’s excesses.

The exceptions proved the rule. It was easy to ignore the killings of hundreds of nameless, faceless Palestinian aid workers — or simply blame Hamas for every IDF misstep. But on April 1, 2024, Israeli drones incinerated an aid convoy belonging to the celebrity chef Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen. Seven people, including a U.S.-Canadian citizen, were killed. This could not be ignored. The next day, “USAID experts privately made their most serious assessment yet of Palestinian suffering… famine was likely occurring in Gaza, the humanitarian analysts wrote in a message sent to the White House and U.S. diplomats globally,” Ahmed tells us. “The rapid spread of hunger was ‘unprecedented in modern history.’”

On April 4, Biden called Netanyahu and demanded Israel let more aid into Gaza. For the first time in six months of war, the administration strictly adhered to the international standard that food, water, and medicine must be provided to civilians. Ahmed notes that the president’s newly stiffened spine encouraged “his aides to be more proactive about advice from experts they had discounted for months” out of fear of annoying the president and the Israelis. It worked: Israel opened new routes for supplies to enter Gaza, and as the mere talk of “either Biden or Congress restricting weapons continued… more changes in Israel’s behavior followed.” More trucks were suddenly allowed into Gaza, undermining past claims that aid wasn’t being deliberately restricted.

But such episodes of moral courage were rare. Cowardice usually ruled the day; and indeed, the administration failed its next major test. After drawing a red line against an Israeli invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, the Biden administration undercut its credibility and botched a pause on shipments of some 2,000-lb. bombs. Says Ahmed:

They retreated to their pattern of sending more U.S. weapons to Israel as it committed apparent war crimes, and claiming Netanyahu would accept an American-brokered ceasefire — though his defiance of Biden and disregard for Palestinian survival were at their peak.

For all their professed expertise and political skill, Biden and his circle failed to truly grasp that the Israeli political establishment had no interest in a peace deal that might somehow lead to a Palestinian state. “Focusing on Netanyahu as the source of Israeli obstinacy misread his country’s politics and the effect of decades-old norms in U.S.-Israeli relations,” Ahmed writes.

Netanyahu and the fanatics in his coalition were bent on conquest and ethnic cleansing—and not in Gaza alone. They eventually expanded their war to southern Lebanon, while also giving free rein to rampaging settlers in the West Bank. Herein lies another disastrous Biden legacy. His failure to restrain Israel in 2023-24 dramatically accelerated the regional instability the increasingly enfeebled president said he and he alone was qualified to prevent. Put another way, Biden’s “ghastly and self-defeating Gaza policy” paved the road to Trump’s war, on behalf of Israel, against Iran. 

There’s another galling continuity to consider here, too: the lack of accountability. When it comes to foreign policy, being colossally wrong rarely threatens one’s career. McGurk now opines about national security on CNN. Blinken and Sullivan hold positions at prestigious universities. But thanks to Akbar Shahid Ahmed, their failures will not remain hidden from history. What’s left to be uncovered are the bodies of thousands of Palestinians, buried under Gaza’s rubble, whom they did so little to protect.