The next administration: Accountability must include Palestine

A senior Israeli defense official recently admitted that at least 70,000 human beings were slaughtered in the Gaza Strip. Some 3-4 percent of the population died violent deaths in the first 16 months of war, a study published in the Lancet medical journal confirmed, including more than 42,000 women, children and elderly people.

There is a term for this deliberate attempt to exterminate civilians who are viewed as a demographic threat: per a United Nations commission, it is "genocide," and it transpired while Israel enjoyed the full military and diplomatic support of the U.S. government — a liberal Democrat facilitating mass murder by a far-right regime.

For a time, it was possible, if not historically advisable, to believe the rhetoric from Washington. Nearly 1,200 civilians were massacred in a Hamas-led terror attack on Oct. 7, 2023; Israel was always going to respond with its own deadly force, but by embracing its ally (the "bear hug"), the United States could better ensure this response was proportional.

But even the stated logic of that strategy raised questions. If the Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had to be treated with the same delicacy as an enraged drunk who insists they can still drive, were they really the kind of friend anyone should keep around? Further, the U.S. never took away the keys — it handed them over.

Under former President Joe Biden, the executive branch disregarded a law prohibiting the transfer of weapons to governments known to be willfully violating human rights; publicly denied its own internal assessments that Israel was violating the laws of war; and attacked the International Criminal Court over its decision to indict Netanyahu for crimes against humanity ("outrageous," the American president said).

"They saw their job as ... justifying a political decision," a former U.S. official, discussing their colleagues in the Biden administration, told Reuters last year. "Even when the evidence clearly pointed to war crimes," another said, "the Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card was proving intent."

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted that such behavior is not just immoral and illegal, but self-defeating.

"Whether it is threatening our allies to colonize Greenland [or] looking the other way in a genocide, hypocrisies are vulnerabilities and they threaten democracies globally," the New York Democrat said, adding that she opposed providing "completely unconditional aid" to governments that violate human rights.

"I think it enabled a genocide in Gaza, and I think that we have thousands of women and children dead," she continued. "That was completely avoidable."

It was also a conscious and indefensible decision, not just a matter of "looking the other way." The Biden administration did not simply avert its eyes from an ally's wanton criminality, but deliberately provided cover for its crimes and the means to carry them out, diverting weapons from the defense of Ukraine to use in the Israeli offensive on the Palestinian territory.

In February 2024, some four months after the Oct. 7 terror attack, President Biden himself acknowledged that his continued support for Israel came at what was by then an undeniable cost. Israel was not just attacking Hamas but destroying the ability for anyone to live in Gaza. There "are a lot of innocent people who are starving," Biden admitted, and "a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and it's got to stop."

It did not end, and neither did U.S. support. Biden's remarks turned out to be little more than public relations, the American president playing the "good" cop to Netanyahu's "bad" in an apparent effort to assure Israel's liberal critics — ahead of an election — that their president was sympathetic and doing his best to prevent further bloodshed.

That was a lie.

"Time and again," ProPublica's Brett Murphy observed, "Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way." Even as Israel continued to deny aid shipments from entering Gaza, Biden officials conspired to keep the weapons flowing, openly flouting their legal commitments. This continued until the very end: In a November 2024 meeting, national security adviser Jake Sullivan fielded concern from diplomatic staff that Israel was flouting a U.S. deadline to allow aid or risk a suspension of weapon shipments.

"Don't our law, policy and morals demand it?" one attendee, speaking of the need to suspend weapons shipments, told ProPublica. But Sullivan informed attendees that "the decision had already been made" and "the deadline would likely pass without action and Biden would continue sending shipments of bombs uninterrupted."

That is just what happened. As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency put it in a headline at the time: "US takes no action as deadline passes for Israel to meet Gaza’s humanitarian needs." Less than two weeks before Biden left office, and after tens of thousands had already been bombed and starved to death, the White House announced plans to send another $8 billion in missiles, bombs and artillery shells — on top of the $20 billion in military hardware approved for sale just months earlier.

"It's hard to avoid the conclusion," Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University, told ProPublica, "that the red lines have all just been smokescreens."

What makes it all the more unconscionable is that no one who enabled this can claim ignorance. Internally, and early on, staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development described bones littering the streets of Gaza in what they described as an "Apocalyptic Wasteland," where "catastrophic human needs" were being unmet, intentionally.

Biden's ambassador to Israel, Jacob Lew, blocked the report from being released, claiming "it lacked balance." To tell the truth, in public, people of conscience were permitted one option: resign.

"America's diplomatic cover for, and continuous flow of arms to, Israel has ensured our undeniable complicity in the killings and forced starvation of a besieged Palestinian population in Gaza," wrote a dozen U.S. officials, in July 2024, who quit over Biden's enabling of genocide. They described American policy as "morally reprehensible and in clear violation of international humanitarian law and U.S. laws."

Why does this matter today, when another president is facilitating the depopulation of Gaza? Because we should always care about the truth and speak it freely, particularly if we wish to be viewed as credible voices when condemning future transgressions. We know this to be true when we see the hypocrisy in others and discount their crocodile tears accordingly, including those allies of Palestine who excused the evils of Syria's Bashar al-Assad or defend the present Iranian regime. In 2024, this was not entirely possible, at least in the United States and among rank-and-file Democrats: facing the threat of Donald Trump returning to the White House, many did not feel they could be completely honest about their side's heinous and active facilitation of an actual genocide.

Already, there is talk of 2028 and the inevitable compromises that voters must accept in order to save what's left of liberal democracy. This is a product, in part, of a vapid and contracting news industry that prefers clickable gossip to boring substance, and also justifiable concerns about what could happen if the Democratic base is demoralized by uncomfortable truths. But it — the pivot to the next election and the need to be a self-censoring team player, for democracy — is also a reflection of partisans choosing the comfort of moral relativism (a citizen's duty to support the least-evil but viable option on the ballot) over the threatening moral clarity with which some speak of Israel and Palestine.

If not now, though, when? Can we not spare some time to tell the truth — and show that our righteous outrage is not cynical in nature, reserved only for the crimes committed by one side? As Ocasio-Cortez observed in Munich, there is a pragmatic benefit to maintaining principles: people are more likely to believe you.

Since January 2025, criminality in the White House has increased exponentially — the dismantling of USAID alone will likely kill hundreds of thousands — and along with it demands that any future Democratic administration ruthlessly pursue accountability.

But it's not enough to insist that Republicans, and Republicans alone, be made to answer for their abuses of power and violations of law. Real justice, deserving of the name, requires confronting the past without fear or favor. We cannot just look the other way.