Front Burner - Inside Biden's Gaza policy

Episode Date: October 21, 2026

For more than a year, the Biden administration said it wanted to limit the destruction in Gaza, increase humanitarian aid and bring the war to an end. But as the humanitarian crisis accelerated, the U.S. continued to supply Israel with weapons and diplomatic protection.In his book 'Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel's War in Gaza' journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed draws on nearly 175 interviews to reconstruct the internal debates, political calculations and decisions that shaped the administration’s response. Akbar Shahid Ahmed is the diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Sun. He's our guest today.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts 

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This is a CBC podcast. Hey, everyone, I'm Jamie Poisson. For more than a year, the Biden administration so that it wanted to limit the destruction in Gaza, increased humanitarian aid, and bring the war to an end. But as conditions worsened, the U.S. continued to supply Israel with weapons and diplomatic protection.

Former President Joe Biden warned that certain Israeli actions would cross a red line. And when that red line was crossed, Washington struggled to turn its warnings into meaningful consequences. So what was happening inside the Biden White House? Journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed decided to find out. His new book is called Crossing the Red Line, Biden, his advisors, and Israel's War in Gaza.

In it, he draws a nearly 175 interviews to reconstruct the innermost workings of the Biden administration's response to the war in Gaza. His reporting reveals a small circle of advisors exercising extraordinary influence, internal warnings that struggle to gain traction in a widening gap between what officials understood privately and what their government was prepared to acknowledge publicly. Akbar is also the diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Sun. Akbar, thank you so much for making the time. It's really great to have you on the show. Thank you for having me, Tramie.

So your book reconstructs the Biden administration's response to the war in Gaza over the first 15 months, but also its approach to weapons, shipments, and the widening regional conflict. And we'll get to all of that. But I do want to begin with the small circle of advisors who, according to your reporting, exercised extraordinary influence over the administration's approach. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, Deputy National Security Advisor John Feiner, and Brett McGurk, who coordinated Middle East policy at the National Security Council. Just talk to me about these four men, the way that they worked in tandem to respond to this crisis in a particular way and just how insular. the circle of advisors was. So I came at this reporting after more than a decade of being a Washington-based correspondent.

And what was striking to me at the time covering this policy post-October 7th, 2020, and then even more so, as I went into the reporting for the book, was how abnormal this process was, even for people who had served in the U.S. government in nonpartisan roles and career roles, even for people who had worked with many of these same Biden advisors in the Obama administration, when many of them were also Democratic Party foreign policy experts. The way that Biden and these four men really ran the policy was not just insular, it was very often divorced from the advice of government lawyers, humanitarian experts, intelligence personnel, and there were all matter of factors for this, right?

there's the extreme political sensitivity around discussions of Israel in American politics, particularly in an election year, the fear among Biden and some of his domestic political advisors, people like Anita Dunn, Mike Donnellin, Steve Roshetti, that

criticizing Israel in any way might cost him re-election. There's also a really deep affinity between a lot of these advisors we're talking about, and of course President Biden himself, and these really state, and it's really government apparatus. They've worked closely with Israeli counterparts for years, right? They're treating this

very much from a place of empathy for Israeli trauma after the atrocities of October 7th. But as I chart in the book and with devastating consequences, this small circle of men eventually were disregarding the data out of Israel, Palestine, in a way that had just hugely horrific consequences for people in the region, for Palestinians, for Lebanese, for Syrians, for Israelis. and for American citizens. You also write that dissent inside the White House was often blamed on the different identities on their team, right? That so-called listening sessions were held for Muslim and Jewish staff

and Secretary of St. Blinken would repeatedly and without explanation bring the presidential envoy for combating anti-Semitism into meetings about the condition of the Palestinians. Just talk to me a bit more about this. Yeah, this is a factor that's also connected to the really jarring insularity of the Biden administration's policymaking on Gaza. This was an administration that coming after the first Donald Trump presidency, marked by xenophobia,

marked by Islamophobia, very proudly said we are the most diverse administration in history. I promised America, my administration would look for my community. The most diverse administration of all of history, attacking the full talent simulation. That's who we are. But when it came down to it, the people making decisions on Gaza were this small circle of around five white men. Most of them of a similar age, around 50 years old, for other officials in the administration then who would come out and say, look, based on our perspective, perhaps as people with family members in the region, or with expertise based on our backgrounds or based on what we've studied or where we've worked, where we're really disturbed by this policy, it was jarred. how often the response would not be taking into account.

They're really deep, strategic, moral, legal objections to the policy, but become about, well, we'll hear you out, right? You mentioned the different listening sessions for Muslim and Jewish appointees in the administration. Some folks actually asked and said, can we have a combined one? Why are we doing this differently? You know, why are we treating these as necessarily separate because of our backgrounds? Eventually, the administration did start having joint listening sessions for people from a range of backgrounds, but the sense of also a grading of those identities inside the administration, both for personnel and for how Israeli-versatility versus Palestinian life as treating was endemic for the entire period that the Biden administration remained in power.

And you saw it in the treatment, for instance, of Israeli-Americans after October 7th who were trying to leave the region versus Palestinian-Americans. the treatment of Palestinian Americans who were talked and killed by Israelis repeatedly without consequences from the US. And you saw it as well. You know, you talked about Secretary Blinken. You saw it in a lot of national security experts telling me in my reporting for the book that, for instance, they would go to Blinken and say, look, based on my understanding of these huge bombs, 2,000 pound bombs, there is no way to use them proportionately. That's what I'm telling you, based on my expertise, and the response being, thanks for registering your dissent, you have to understand the trauma of the Israelis. It wasn't a meaningful engagement with dissent, even when it

was rooted in the very reasons why the Biden administration hired these people. I'd like to go back to the early weeks of the war with you. You know, Biden at the time told reporters I'm sure innocence had been killed, and it's a price of waging a war. I think we should be administration official that you spoke to summarize the attitude of some colleagues towards Palestinian deaths as, quote, this is awful, but they did it to themselves. Just in the early days of the war in Gaza, how would you describe the attitude of those working on Team Biden? And what were their strategic priorities? So what I found really striking was that the tendencies, the playbook that the Biden administration immediately reached for after October 7th,

was a continuation of America's own response to the horrific attacks of 9-11, more than 20 years earlier. It was a connection between this idea of Hamas having led the October 7 attacks as an incomprehensible evil. I mean this literally when the pure unadolid evil is unleashed on this world. The people of Israel live through one such moment this weekend. This is terrorism. we stand with Israel. You saw language to this effect from President Biden, from Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor,

and this was a perception that for many, again, experts on the region missed the political and historical context, right, within which Hamas had grown as a Palestinian resistance movement, often using appalling tactics. But the point being that there was a story here. It wasn't just this evil came out of nowhere. But as the U.S., as U.S. officials in the Biden administration equated what happened to ISIS, you know, as they said, you saw Secretary of State Lincoln say that this was the equivalent of 9-11 occurring many times over. This is the equivalent of 10 9-11s.

That's how big and how devastating this attack has been. There was both a misunderstanding of the Palestinian side of this. A deep comfort level, again, echoing U.S. patterns on the war on terror with steep, steep, civilian casualties and acceptance of really intense military response and a kind of credulousness towards Israeli narratives right from the get-go, a kind of with us or against us approach that really marked those early days. There's no justification for terrorism. There's no excuse.

Hamas does not stand for the Palestinians people's right to dignity and self-determination. The state of purposes of the annihilation of the state of Israel on the murder of Jewish people. They use Palestinian civilians as human shields. So that becomes very clear, for instance, in the Biden administration, waving away warnings that people like UN Secretary of General Antonio Gutierrez were saying, right in the early days post-October 7 that, quote, the language of genocide is being used. Gutier has said that in reference to Israel,

telling more than a million Palestinians to evacuate Northern Gaza in about 24 hours. So those warning signals were very much being ignored. There was much debate at the time about, well, the credibility of casualty numbers published by the Gaza Health Ministry. You write about the fact that there were internal disagreements over how to interpret those casualty figures. And just what did you learn about how those figures were assessed inside the administration and whether public skepticism reflected what officials actually believed. So President Biden himself did the most to create doubt of people in the administration about those casualty figures.

You've previously asked Netanyahu to minimize civilian casualties. Do these numbers say to you that he is ignoring that message? What did they say to me is I have no notion that Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. And he did not say the Gaza Health Ministry. He said, I have no faith in the number. the Palestinians are using, a language which again speaks to this war and terrorist style equating of whole groups of people with specific atrocious actions or movements and to Biden's own

deep-seated, really, really fundamentally pro-Israel tendencies that the administration never broke from. All of that was in direct contrast to officials inside the State Department I was talking to at the time, and, you know, spoke with later. And intelligence and humanitarian officials on the U.S. side, who was saying the casualty members that, numbers that we are seeing from the Gaza Health Ministry are, as the UN and other bodies have said, consistent and quite regular, the State Department I revealed at the time, was regularly citing them without including caveats.

And intelligence and humanitarian officials later told me that they were aware Israel was getting a staggering number of civilians. civilians and their own internal data track that. So what's so concerning, and again, I think important to learn from about the Biden administration's record is that there was a sewing of doubt right from the very top that then was echoed not just by the president, but by his top advisors. This continues into, you know, I revealed that national security advisor, Chick-Sullivan and Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk, even five months into the war when there's clearly documented mass starvation among Palestinians were making.

statements like the Palestinians don't look that skinny in the photos. Are they really hungry? Who said that? That's Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, who's now very much positioning himself to advise a future Democratic presidential administration, and Brett McGurk, Biden's Middle East coordinator, a figure who has worked on American Middle East policy going back to the George W. Bush administration, which is a matter of concern for a lot of his colleagues, right? This idea of someone continuously being promoted and recruited to work on a region when the U.S.'s record has just been far from achieving its stated goals and has repeatedly sucked the U.S. into humanitarian and strategic disasters.

But very I should note has his own book out, which has a very selective representation of his role in the Biden administration. Well, just tell me a little bit more, like what would his view of this situation? How would it generally differ from your interpretation of it? I'd say there's two main patterns in that. In McGurk's telling, the Biden administration could not have done more to pressure Israel over its use of particular weapons or its use of tactics like really intensive age restrictions, right? Or huge bombing runs in extremely packed urban areas in Gaza, because doing so would have essentially given an opportunity to Hamas, to Iran, other US regional foes, and they would have become more southern, more recalcitrant in the negotiations

that the US was carrying out over the 251 hostages that Hamas and other Palestinian fighters captured on October 7th, among them American citizens. I would say that's that analysis really misses that extensive reporting in his. Israeli media and international media has shown that it was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was very often the obstacle to a deal to bring home the hostages. Also, that McGurk in his own book, notes Netanyahu was not prioritizing those Israeli hostages. That was clear to the Biden administration. And so it became clear to to McGurk and to many other officials around him that their policy of perpetuating the war was not only causing mass suffering for Palestinians, was putting those very

hostages at risk. And recent reporting from CNN has found, for instance, that over the course of the period when the hostages were held, 24 of the 40 who were killed died as a result of Israeli military action. Who do you hold responsible for your father's death? My government. The ones that are responsible for what happened to them, first of all, is Hamas. But for what happened later, my government. And that's because the Israeli prime minister often prioritized defeating Hamas over securing the release of the hostages. McGreg's telling also, and we see this as a pattern in broader efforts by Biden administration officials to rewrite history on Gaza, McGurk presents himself as really only playing a role

in the ceasefire diplomacy, because ultimately the Biden administration did, with a lot of help from Donald Trump, get a ceasefire in 2025. That's a really limited understanding of what McGirk actually did. As my book documents, McGurk was deeply involved in being, as one official described it, Israel's lawyer in U.S. government war crimes investigations, was very involved in sustaining Israeli aid restrictions and preventing the U.S. government from upholding the standards of international and American law around aid provision to a population and a conflict. You see very similar narratives coming out from Jake Sullivan, from Tony Blinken, saying, we, We wish, even former vice president, Kamala Harris, we wish we could have done more differently.

But there's not a lot in their records. Their records, in fact, show very often that they were actively enabling the Israelis and covering for them while they were publicly saying, our goals aren't being met in Gaza and we're upset about it. Right now, Canadians are choosing to support each other like we never have before. So shouldn't our website domains show that same strong support? Choosing a dot-CA domain does that and much, much more, because proceeds from dot-ca domain sales help support local projects

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For all of life's moments, we're here when it counts. Dejardin. I want to talk to you about the, Rafa red line. So, well, the so-called red line. In early 2024, with the death hole in Gaza at around 30,000, President Biden announced that a full-scale Israeli invasion of Rafa, where more than 100, or more than 1 million Palestinians were seeking shelter, would cross a red line. And that the U.S. would withhold certain offensive weapons and artillery shells if such an operation. were to occur. And as we know, the Israelis did indeed go forward with that operation and the humanitarian consequences were vast. And tell me more about this Biden red line and why the administration wasn't prepared to enforce it. President Biden unveiled his red line in 2024 on CNN. He said if these Israelis don't have a credible plan for how these 1.4 million Palestinians

and sheltering in Rafa will be treated and prove that they're not going to essentially level Rafa as they have so much of the rest of Gaza, I am going to cut off these weapons. They're going to Rafa. I'm not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafa, to deal with the cities, to deal with that problem.

And it's an important moment, Jamie, because by that point, in addition to the staggering Joel that had already sort of been an intricate on the ground, in Gaza, you had a real level of discontent inside the U.S. government and in the U.S. political scene, whether it was campus protests or protest votes in the Democratic presidential primary season. So it looked like all the factors were bubbling up for President Biden to make a change in course. And he also in this period pledged him to produce a report to Congress on how Israel was behaving.

And then, right before the Rafa red line was crossed, actually did take specific action to pressure Israel and saw results after the killing of seven workers working for the World Central Kitchen Aid Group in April 2024. So all of these factors meant that people, observers were looking at this and thinking this is going to be a real red line for Biden and he's going to choose to, for his own political fortunes, for moral and strategic reasons, reign in the Israelis. He also would help us in a weapon shipment for Israel in this period, the only one that he did throughout his presidency. However, when we think about why he didn't uphold that red line, it to me, after talking to these dozens of officials, points to a degree of real cowardice and a real failure of public servants, frankly, because Biden's establishment of the red line, his withholding of some bombs, his pressuring of Israel over the world's central kitchen killing, these were all ad hoc processes.

They weren't linked to the legal deliberations that had been happening among officials. They weren't linked to any clear edict to Israel. And there was always a political fear that was still lurking in the back of the White House's mind. So when Prime Minister Netanyahu did cross Biden's red line at the beginning of May and started to really challenge the US for withholding that one shipment of bombs,

President Biden, in the words of one of his former colleagues, Ben Rhodes and advisor of Barack Obama, Rhodes said to me, Biden folded like a tent. And very quickly, the administration went from saying, we're concerned about Rafa, we want to see this treated differently, to actually stunningly and so disappointingly for many people inside the administration, many Democrats, the Biden team was saying, oh, we're providing cover for what these release are doing in Rafa. They actually are heeding our advice or heeding our requests, even when it was very clear they were not. And of course, the predictable, massive additional humanitarian crisis that was created. by that raffa red line being crossed, was very clear by the summer of 2024.

Just back to this idea of the U.S. withholding weapons to the Israelis, this is, of course, one of the key demands made by elements of the American left and also parts of the right. And on this point, you detail two significant attempts to challenge this policy from within Congress. Senator Chris Coons publicly considered conditioning weapons shipments to Israel and Bernie Sanders was preparing to force a vote to block certain arms transfers. You report that Biden personally intervened with Sanders, leading him to believe the administration was preparing to sanction Israel's Minister of National Security, Etemar Ben-Givir, a move that actually did not materialize. And just can you tell me what the Biden White House did to ultimately stop these two individuals?

attempts and generally how they look to kind of manage and contain dissent. You just mentioned, like, you know, disappointment within the administration and within the ranks. And so glad you highlight this, because it's a pattern again that as we see is creating discord on the U.S. left and the right. And it's another part of how the Biden administration was treating policy in this period with a very post-9-11 white house style of the lobbying optional, right? Ultimately, these questions around should giant bombs be used in urban areas are not just a matter of presidential discretion. There are legal bases here. What the Biden administration did to many of its allies and not just people who are politically unhappy,

but to their own lawyers, would indicate they weren't going to take a firm line on this. I document the Coons and the Sanders efforts because they represent two of the wings of the party. Coons is a moderate, very close to Biden, from his same state. Coons and figures like former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, by April 2024, we're talking about cutting off a sense of weapons to Israel. Israel has the right, even the obligation, to defend its civilians against Hamas and to continue pursuing Hamas terrorists. But they have to balance that with their obligation to protect civilians and facilitate

humanitarian aid going into Gaza. And the Biden administration very quickly, as I documented my book, dispatched their own officials to Congress to really ramp down the congressional clamor over this and to essentially spread a narrative of trust us. But of course, what trusting the Biden White House on Gaza had had the effect of doing was leading to mass death and preventable atrocities among Palestinians on a continued war. And it's, of course, the same pattern that President Biden upheld in his interactions with Sanders, who he'd known for a long time, saying, don't hold his vote on weapons.

I'm going to apply these sanctions. We don't need it. Repeatedly the Biden administration undercut elements of their own democratic coalition. And very interestingly, actually worked with former Senator Lindsey Graham, not deceased, but very much seeing him as an ally and partner in their Middle East policy. And then as I document in the book, even once the administration lost the election to Donald Trump in November, they spent their last few months in office effectively working as a handmaiden to that Trump administration to enable Trump's assault on the ICCC, which we see is still growing today, and Trump-era sees fires in Gaza and Lebanon that proved really shaky and didn't lead to significant improvements for the Lebanese

or for Palestinians. I would like to zoom in on Kamala, Harris with you. Because the final months of the Biden administration, you know, it became a test of whether the Democratic Party could sufficiently change or moderate its approach to Israel and Gaza. That was one of the issues. And Harris had not necessarily been central to the administration's policy on Gaza. And when Biden withdrew from the presidential race, I know that there was some hope among people who opposed the war that a new candidate might also mean a new approach. and there is some suggestion that Kamala was moved by details coming out of Gaza,

that she listened, for example, to a recording of the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian child, Hindra Job. What do you know about Harris' own views on Gaza during this period? Was there evidence that she wanted a different policy? Harris was not generationally inclined to give Israel the kind of credence that Biden did just because she was 22 years younger, she was a half-black, half-south Asian woman, very different background, a very international background, had people in her own family, like her stepdaughter, L.M. Hoth, who raised funds for UNRWA in this period. So had people raising concern for Palestinians. My reporting found that her advisors were concerned about the

shape of policy pretty early, even by November of 2023 and kind of pushing Biden's more senior rates to go in a different direction. What's interesting and I think important as Harris now positions herself for a 2028 presidential run is that I didn't find evidence through those nearly 175 interviews that Vice President Harris, from a policy perspective, pushed really hard for any significant change. She pushed for some rhetorical shifts. She urged Biden, for instance, to include language about Islamophobia in some of his statements. She urged the administration to speak more about Palestinian suffering. But when it came to questions like, would she, for instance, choose to apply the sanctions that U.S. law suggests should have been applied to various Israeli military

units over the great human rights abuses, something that no president has done. But Biden came quite close to doing at the advice of any of his officials. Harris hasn't told us, would she, as a lawyer herself, see the International Court of Justice ruling and the international criminal court proceedings as, you know, more valuable or more valid than the Biden administration did. The Biden administration repeatedly attacked both of those processes. We simply don't know. I've asked her team repeatedly for more transparency on her thinking, and she's played it very carefully. Part of that, I think, comes from this ongoing battle in the Democratic Party, not just in the base and not just among the lawmakers whose names we know, the public officials whose names we know, but the donors

who Harris and other presidential candidates, including Biden, are always so attuned to. And those are donors who, you know, obviously folks might be familiar. There's a lot of talk around APAC, the kind of hardline pro-Israel group that for a long time has been a major force in American politics. And those quite firmly, ardently pro-Israel donors are a factor. But there's a whole broader universe of donors who broadly don't want to see big shifts in U.S. foreign policy, right? Or I report on advice that is given to Harris that as a woman,

she might be seen as weak if she talked about questioning Israel or limiting U.S. military support or weapons. So there's that kind of approach, too. There's a traditional democratic and left approach of worrying about Republicans saying that they're empowering threats like Hamas, like Iran. So that's an ongoing fight among people who shape the thinking of these politicians. The backlash against the Vietnam War helped reshape democratic politics and opposition to the Iraq War helped Barack Obama distinguish himself in the 2008 presidential primary. But Obama's victory did not, by any means, kind of displaced the foreign policy establishment, right? He appointed Joe Biden, who had supported the Iraq War as his vice president and Hillary Clinton and other supporter of the war as Secretary of State. and I suppose in many ways it was Obama's appointments

that created the conditions for the American response to October 7th. I just looking back at American wars like Vietnam and Iraq, what do you think that the lesson is there? You know, how a party can lose public trust over a war and a new candidate can rise up by opposing it without, I guess, necessarily changing the people or assumptions that govern American foreign policy? It's really valuable history, right?

because as we see a new crop of candidates talk about Israel and Palestine in ways that we haven't seen on the American political stage, there's a real difference in how they're doing it. There are candidates like Milat Kiroz in Denver, Tarializa Shivalry in New York, Abdul Sadi, who are really calling for an overhaul going as far as calling for sanctions on Israel or a real questioning of U.S. military deployments abroad, Pentagon spending. I'm opposed to unconditional military aid for any country. That is Israel, yes, but that's also Egypt where my family immigrated from. That's Pakistan, that's Saudi Arabia, that's YIE. And that's not because of a focus on what's happening anywhere, except for a focus of what's happening here. We've got communities in my state where the median income is $14,000.

And I believe they have a right to their tax dollars. Then you have folks like Aram Emanuel, former Chief of Staff to Obama, who's catching the public mutants saying, cut off military from Israel at a time when Americans are facing rising costs, worried about spending abroad. I said it before we should end at long last American taxpayer subsidy of Israel's defense budget. Your economy is strong. Your defense budget exceeds $45 billion. We in America would continue to ensure that the IDF maintains its qualitative edge. But Israel should be able to buy American arms under the same

financial terms, the same restrictions, and the same requirements as every other trusted ally that abides by America's laws. But isn't tackling that broader foreign policy of continued militarism, that not only is corrosive to support for one political party, Jamie, but I would really argue in my reporting on how Congress has worked, on how the public has reacted through elections, it's corrosive to small D democracy. I mean, people really don't feel that this foreign policy matches public sentiment, whether on Israel, Palestine, or on questions about what the Pentagon budget should be, whether the US should be so deeply involved abroad. And it creates the sense of, is there a difference, really,

Democrats or Republicans, bipartisan continuity, that can breed a lot of cynicism. It can breed a turn to conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, all manner of concerning trends. So I think we don't know if it's going to be a repeat of some of what you said with Obama's limited ambition in overhauling foreign policy, even though there was a lot of hope. I will say what I think is interesting now is after the U.S. has elected Donald Trump twice, seen a lot of its traditional allies be really concerned about this actions on the world stage. I think the fixation on American primacy is being questioned in a way that it wasn't. You know, I report in the book that, for instance, Jake Sullivan, who had been an advisor to Hillary Clinton, then advised Biden, when told

that the global South was getting upset about the U.S. position on Gaza, specifically South Africa was raised, used the curse word about South Africa. I essentially said, I don't care. And in reference to that, pointed to South Africa's opposition to the U.S. intervention in Libya in 2011, really now seen as a mistake. I don't think that those patterns of actions by American officials are that sustainable anymore. And there is a growing understanding. standing off that, even in Washington's national security establishment. Akbar, thank you so much for this. This is really interesting. It was great to talk to you. Thank you so much.

All right. That is all for it today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.