Today, many former Biden Administration officials argue that their pressure on the Israelis prevented a famine from happening sooner. Over time, the officials contend, Biden’s efforts also slowed the killing: about twenty-five thousand Palestinians died in the first three months of the Gaza conflict, and it took twelve months for the death toll to double. (The Gaza Health Ministry, which tracks fatalities, does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.) In particular, Biden’s warnings about Rafah appear to have prompted Israel to do far more to evacuate civilians than it had done before levelling Gaza City and Khan Younis. A senior White House official told me that American pressure had made the destruction of Rafah “less horrific for civilians than it might have been,” even if Israel nonetheless “flattened it.” Several former officials noted to me with pride that after October 7th the Administration became the first to sanction violent West Bank settlers. Everyone in the Biden Administration blames Trump for allowing the war to continue until last October, for leaving Israeli forces occupying at least sixty per cent of Gaza, and for allowing the war to inflame the Middle East.
McGurk, the most hawkish voice around Biden, declined to be quoted for this article. But people close to him told me he believes that his warning proved true: the limited public pressure that the Biden Administration imposed on Israel to protect civilians actually extended the war. In an op-ed in the Washington Post last year, he argued that Hamas released the hostages because Israel had decimated its fighters while the “force of arms across the Middle East” by the U.S. and Israel crippled Iran and its proxies, leaving Hamas “isolated and no longer able to count on a multifront conflict.” Despite the war’s grim toll, he concluded, “there was no shortcut.”
Yet, with more than seventy thousand Palestinians dead, most of Gaza’s remaining population displaced, and the Israeli military occupying much of the territory, the conflict undermined the long-term U.S. interest that the Biden Administration claimed to have pursued: a democratic Jewish state coexisting peacefully with a Palestinian one. Among Israelis, the protracted ordeal of the hostages hardened opposition to the already fading prospect of Palestinian statehood. Settlement of the West Bank has accelerated steeply. Among Palestinians, the civilian death toll has only increased the appeal of Hamas-style armed resistance, just as Secretary Austin warned. And Hamas—which ended the war with about twenty thousand fighters, some recruited and trained during the war—controls the remainder of Gaza. Before October 7th, Israel and the U.S. estimated that Hamas had fewer than thirty thousand fighters. The ranks of Hamas decreased by around ten thousand; more than seventy thousand Palestinians were killed in the process. In the U.S., moreover, the death toll has severely damaged the historic American sympathy for the Jewish state. In congressional primaries, an acrimonious debate over continued U.S. support for Israel has riven the Democratic Party to an extent unimaginable just five years ago—and it threatens to divide Republicans as well. Jon Finer told me that the hallmark of the Gaza conflict has been that, for both Hamas and Israel, “civilian harm was not a side effect but part of the strategy.” The U.S., he said, “shouldn’t tolerate wars in which civilian harm is a goal, and shouldn’t allow our weapons to be used for that purpose.”
Blinken and Sullivan told me that they, too, felt remorse. Blinken said, “How can you not have regrets given the toll that this took on innocent men, women and children?” But he repeated a quote from Biden: “Question my judgments. Don’t question my motives.”
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