Thread by @BrettMmurphy

There is a ceasefire deal, so I want to share this story from my past year reporting inside the State Dept. trying to answer the central question of Biden’s foreign policy:

How did the U.S. let Israel get away with widespread horrors in Gaza? 1/

2/ Since Oct. 7, 2023, Biden and Secretary of State Blinken repeatedly drew lines on humanitarian grounds that the Israelis ostensibly couldn’t cross.

The IDF crossed them anyway.

And each time, there were no real consequences. propublica.org/article/biden-…

3/ Using leaked documents and interviews, we pieced together scenes from inside the government as diplomats and experts repeatedly tried — and failed — to change the policy of not holding Israel to account.

4/ “This is the human rights atrocity of our time,” one senior official at State told me. “I work for the department that’s responsible for this policy. I signed up for this. … I don’t deserve sympathy for it.”

5/ In November, State Dept human rights leaders met with one of Blinken’s top lieutenants and begged the administration to follow through on a threat to cut off arms to Israel for blocking humanitarian assistance.

Here's what happened

6/ All year, senior leaders repeatedly disregarded their own experts behind the scenes. They cracked down on leaks by threatening criminal investigations and classifying material that was critical of Israel.

7/ Some of the agency’s highest ranking Middle East diplomats complained in private that they were sidelined by Biden’s National Security Council. Here’s State’s top Palestinian affairs official on why he’s been largely absent from the public eye

8/ At another point, leadership passed out NSC’s list of banned words to government employees working on reports and presentations: You can’t say “Palestinian residents of Jerusalem,” for example, instead use “non-Israeli residents of Jerusalem.”

9/ We got records from an internal State Dept. panel showing how much deference the U.S. gives Israel, from the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh to kids who said they were abused in Israeli detention.

10/ Government human rights officials said the systems were designed to fail in many ways and that they weren’t allowed to even communicate with some of the Palestinian orgs that collect evidence of abuses.

11/ That’s because the Israelis designated some of those groups as terrorist organizations and essentially blacklisted them. “All these groups were essentially the premier human rights organizations, and we were not able to meet with them,” another embassy official told me.

12/ Look at what happened after a 15-year-old Palestinian boy said he was raped in custody: Israel raided the nonprofit that first collected his testimony and labeled it a terrorist org. That move effectively froze State.

13/ State has said it pressures Israel to take action against soldiers who have committed abuses and it denied a policy prohibiting officials from speaking to nonprofits or classifying documents for reasons other than national security. They also said Blinken welcomes dissent.

14/ I sent the Israeli government questions for our story and they told me the relationship between the U.S. and Israel depicted in our story is "not true to reality." Their full statement

15/ NSC leadership wouldn’t talk to us and didn’t respond to questions. But in a round of recent exit interviews with other outlets, they’ve defended Biden’s policy and said Israel needs U.S. arms to protect itself. Here’s Jake Sullivan with @ezraklein
nytimes.com/2025/01/14/opi…

16/ Something that struck me was this other explanation from Jack Lew, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, the other day. I hadn’t seen such a senior official make a case like this before timesofisrael.com/the-ambassador…

17/ Here’s our full story. I hope you'll read propublica.org/article/biden-…