Israel has repeatedly crossed the Biden administration’s human rights red lines. But the U.S. continued to send weapons. Exclusive records and interviews reveal what happened inside the State Department.
www.propublica.org
damning article about the Biden administration
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Weeks before, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration delivered their most explicit ultimatum yet to Israel, demanding the Israel Defense Forces allow hundreds more trucksloads of food and medicine into Gaza every day — or else. In the month that followed, the IDF was accused of roundly defying the U.S., its most important ally.
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But the decision had already been made. Sullivan said the deadline would likely pass without action and Biden would continue sending shipments of bombs uninterrupted, according to two people who were in the meeting.
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Government officials worry Biden’s record of empty threats have given the Israelis a sense of impunity.
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Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.
“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on U.S. policy in the region. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”
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“The media that is presenting a pro-Hamas perspective is out instantaneously telling a story,” Lew said. “It tells a story that is, over time, shown not to be completely accurate. ‘Thirty-five children were killed.’ Well, it wasn’t 35 children. It was many fewer.”
“The children who were killed,” he added, “turned out to have been the children of Hamas fighters.”
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In late May, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop its assault on the city, citing the Geneva Conventions. Behind the scenes, State Department lawyers scrambled to come up with a legal basis on which Israel could continue smaller attacks in Rafah.
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“The State Department has a whole raft of highly paid, very good lawyers to explain, ‘Actually this is not illegal,’ when in fact it is,” said Ari Tolany, an arms trade authority and director at the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think tank. “Rules for thee and not for me.”