How Biden's Gaza Policy Reverberates Today

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Mina Kim (0:58)

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Diplomats from around the world walked out on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday as he stood at the lectern at the UN General Assembly, preparing to give his speech. Outside, protesters marched and chanted for an end to genocide and the US arming of Israel and Netanyahu's arrest. He's accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court for the military campaign launched after Hamas' brutal October 7 attacks that caused mass killings and a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

Now, a new book by journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed takes a critical look at the US's role in enabling Israel's offensive. It's called Crossing the Red Line, Biden, His Advisors and Israel's War in Gaza.

Shahid Ahmed is diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Sun. Akbar, welcome to Forum.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed (1:50)

Thanks so much for having me.

Mina Kim (1:52)

So talk to me first about your intent for this book. Why you wanted to go back over the Biden administration's Gaza policies now?

Akbar Shahid Ahmed (2:00)

Having been already by the time this offensive began, a diplomatic correspondent in DC for about a decade, I'd seen how through Obama into Trump, into Biden, a lot of the same foreign policy patterns and personnel that were not delivering stability or delivering a US commitment to its stated values of championing human rights and international law, how that was just being ignored and there wasn't a reckoning happening.

All of that said, my reporting around and after October 7th, was really informed by my sources inside the US government, who expressed even more than that an unprecedented degree of alarm about how decisions on Gaza were being made. It became clear to me by the spring of 2024, that this was a period that really had to be recorded for a more humane foreign policy going forward and because if we don't have these specifics, we don't have any way to empower the public, to empower journalists to ask, can we have a more humane foreign policy that doesn't, as you described, implicate Americans in thousands of apparent war crimes.

Mina Kim (3:10)

So tell me, how you went about reporting this book then? How many people did you talk to and at what levels of government?

Akbar Shahid Ahmed (3:18)

I conducted nearly 175 interviews for this book over the course of more than two and a half years. Many of these people were longtime sources. Many of them were new sources.

I spoke with almost every member of President Biden's inner decision-making circle.

I spoke with people at the Pentagon, in the intelligence community, in the humanitarian community, USA, the State Department and also governments of other countries and humanitarian groups outside actors who were dealing with the US. What I'm proudest of in this book is the number of people who have never talked to a reporter before, but looking at what they were being asked to do as public servants bound to follow the Constitution and to follow a certain set of laws and principles felt we need to raise the alarm. We're not being heard inside this Biden administration. We're watching what we're enabling in terms of the flow of US bombs, and who do we talk to? I chased some people right up until just before we went to the press, which wasn't thrilling for my editor, but I had to meet people in, it was really old school journalism. I had to meet people in far off suburban parking lots and wherever they felt they wouldn't be seen, which also really speaks to the culture of fear around being seen as criticizing really powerful players in the foreign policy establishment. That's why the book is called Biden and His Advisors and Israel's War in Gaza, because it's not just about a fear of reprisal from President Biden for these officials speaking out. The vast majority of my sources did ask for remain anonymous. It's also fear of people like Jake Sullivan, who was Biden's National Security Advisor, others who remain really influential and a real sense of, if we sort of blow the whistle on them, what will they do to our careers going forward?