When the history of the Israeli war on Gaza is written, there will be no shortage of words dedicated to American villains in this story, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be near the top of this list. Blinken, we learned this week, had an opportunity to alter the course of this war, save countless lives, and do so merely by following U.S. law. But he chose to skirt the law and to deceive Congress and the American public, all to ensure bombs continued to flow to Israel as massacre after massacre was being committed in Gaza.
A ProPublica story, based on numerous email correspondences from inside the State Department, confirmed what has long been suspected about an episode from this spring. Blinken had to confirm that the Israelis were not blocking aid to Gaza lest it trigger a U.S. law that would halt arms to Israel, and he ultimately did so over the objections of State Department bureaus that concluded otherwise—that Israel had in fact deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine to people in Gaza. The story, as ProPublica puts it, reveals “new aspects of the striking split within the Biden administration and how the highest-ranking American diplomats have justified his policy of continuing to flood Israel with arms over the objections of their own experts.”
How many more people might be alive today in Gaza had Blinken not decided to overrule his own experts just to keep the taps of death machines open for Israel? Since the spring, cease-fire efforts have faltered despite an announcement of a cease-fire plan by Joe Biden. Hamas continues to say it accepts and will abide by Biden’s cease-fire outline, but Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s new demands continue to derail prospects for an agreement. Had the Biden administration actually demonstrated in the spring that it would follow U.S. law even if it meant stopping weapons to Israel, it might have put enough pressure on Netanyahu to force him to stop messing around and actually end this war.
Instead, Blinken’s move sent the opposite message; the political appointee’s commitment to arming Israel was so great, he was not only willing to override his own experts, he was also willing to mislead Congress in the process of violating U.S. law. With such a consistent green light from the top of the Biden administration, why would Netanyahu ever bother with a cease-fire?
Blinken’s decision was not only disastrous because of the death and destruction that it could have stopped but didn’t. It is also disastrous for the rule of law and confidence in the American government. The details of the ProPublica story make it clear that Blinken’s carefully worded statements to Congress on this matter were at minimum deliberately constructed to mislead if not simply tell a lie. Just days before Blinken told Congress that “we do not currently assess” that Israel is in violation of U.S. law for impeding aid, USAID and the Refugees Bureau communicated the opposite to the Secretary of State.
Misleading or lying to Congress over any issue should be a career killer, especially when the reason for it was to continue to fuel a genocide with more American arms. On any other issue, this would probably be a major scandal that embroils the Biden administration. Can you imagine the hay Republicans would make of such an opportunity had Blinken been lying in service of, say, sending weapons to Ukraine or frankly anything else? Can you imagine the Benghazi-style investigations and hearings that would ensue? Bipartisanship has long ago disappeared in Washington, D.C., except for one issue: letting Israel get away with war crimes. So much for the rules-based order we keep hearing about.
The American people deserve better than a government that is misleading them over the enforcement of their own laws, especially when a majority of the American public opposes continued weapons to Israel and supports aid to Palestinians in Gaza. The State Department should be compelled to release a thorough accounting of exactly how the decision to continue green-lighting bombs to Israel was made, the legal advice that was sought around the wording of Blinken’s misleading statements to Congress, and who made the ultimate call to ignore the State Department’s experts and U.S. law. The very minimum the government owes the American people is the truth.
