We’re Still Drowning in Myths About the Gaza War

In the weeks following the October 7, 2023 pogrom, President Joe Biden was in full solidarity with the target, Israel. He surged arms shipments and rallied the world against Hamas, the authors of that heinous crime. Among the lower ranks of Biden’s administration, though, an insurrection was brewing. Like the demonstrators on college campuses in the fall of 2023, the anonymous aides, assistants, and bureaucrats inside the federal government wanted the president to restrain the victims of the attack in their defensive war.

“Ahmed’s book is not an objective assessment or fair history of the Biden administration’s policy debates,“ writes Eli Lake (via W.W. Norton & Company)

In the final year of the Biden presidency, the crowd that wanted Israel cut off from American weapons was largely stymied by the president and his senior staff. Now with the Democrats out of power, the dissidents of 2023 and 2024 are taking their revenge. And their tale is told in the new book Crossing the Red Line, by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, senior diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Sun.

Ahmed’s book is not an objective assessment or fair history of the Biden administration’s policy debates. It is rather a prosecutor’s brief against the senior foreign policy officials the American left wants to purge from the Democratic Party. Ahmed does not call Israel’s war against Hamas a “genocide,” but his sources clearly believe it was. And for the crime of enabling that genocide, the book blames former secretary of state Antony Blinken, former national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and former Middle East and North Africa coordinator Brett McGurk.