The Shift: Blinken’s disturbing exit interview

Biden’s time in office is coming to an end, but not before a parting gift for Israel.

The State Department recently announced that it would notify Congress about another massive arms deal, this one worth $8 billion. It includes medium-range air-to-air missiles, Hellfire missiles, 500-pound bombs, and more.

The announcement comes amid a deluge of dire news out of Gaza. Flood. Famine. Extreme cold. Israel killed more than 234 Palestinians during the first 4 days of 2025. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International recently published reports saying Israel is committing genocide.

These kinds of developments have never prompted the Biden administration to stop the carnage or even slow down its support for the assault.

Just one day before the State Department announcement the New York Times ran a lengthy interview with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, reflecting on the last four years. As usual, he comes off as a man gripped by delusion.

When confronted about the destruction of Gaza, Blinken acknowledges the suffering but dutifully repeats the standard talking points about Israel’s right to defense. He consistently attempts to pivot the conversation toward this repeated claim that the administration is working hard to achieve a ceasefire. He denies that Netanyahu tanked an agreement that would freed the Israeli hostages last July and puts all the blame on Hamas in that regard.

“One of the things that I found a little astounding throughout is that for all of the understandable criticism of the way Israel has conducted itself in Gaza, you hear virtually nothing from anyone since Oct. 7 about Hamas,” says Blinken at one point. “Why there hasn’t been a unanimous chorus around the world for Hamas to put down its weapons, to give up the hostages, to surrender — I don’t know what the answer is to that. Israel, on various occasions has offered safe passage to Hamas’s leadership and fighters out of Gaza.”

“Where is the world?,” he continues. “Where is the world, saying, Yeah, do that! End this! Stop the suffering of people that you brought on! Now, again, that doesn’t absolve Israel of its actions in conducting the war. But I do have to question how it is that we haven’t seen a greater sustained condemnation and pressure on Hamas to stop what it started and to end the suffering of people that it initiated.”

There is one very interesting part of the interview where Blinken essentially admits that most of Israeli society supports the genocidal destruction of Gaza.

“The very first trip that I made to Israel five days after Oct. 7, I spent with my team nine hours in the I.D.F.’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, six stories underground with the Israeli government, including the prime minister, including arguing for hours on end about the basic proposition that the humanitarian assistance needed to get to Palestinians in Gaza,” he told NYT reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro. “And that was an argument that took place because you had in Israel in the days after Oct. 7 a totally traumatized society. This wasn’t just the prime minister or a given leader in Israel. This was an entire society that didn’t want any assistance getting to a single Palestinian in Gaza.”

Blinken is accidentally drawing attention to a potential war crime here. After Garcia-Navarro presses him on the issue, he makes sure to correct himself.

“There’s a big difference between intent and result, whether it’s under the law or under any one standard,” he explains. “The results that we were seeing were grossly insufficient. That is, the results in getting people the assistance they needed. Just as making sure that people are protected, I think has been insufficient. There’s a very different question about what was the intent.”

Asked directly about whether Israel is committing genocide, he denies the claim and suggests things might be looking up for Palestinians soon.

“No. It’s not, first of all,” says Blinken. “Second, as to how the world sees it, I can’t fully answer to that. But everyone has to look at the facts and draw their own conclusions from those facts. And my conclusions are clear. I think as well, there is, in the wake of this horrific suffering — the traumatization of the Israeli population, the Palestinian population and many others — there’s also a light that one can see that offers the prospect of a much different and much better future.”

Interestingly, the early days of January also saw the Biden Administration announce new sanctions on Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces after the U.S. government concluded the group was committing genocide. According to the United Nations 150,000 people have been killed since fighting began in April 2023 and more than 11 million people have been forced to flee their homes.

The NYT report on the announcement contains this amazing paragraph:

The genocide determination followed months of deliberation inside the U.S. government, as lawyers and intelligence officials evaluated the merits of the case, said the two senior U.S. officials. Some officials hesitated to support the determination because they feared it might draw further criticism of the Biden administration over its refusal to declare Israel’s campaign in the Gaza Strip a genocide against Palestinians, the officials said.

Greenblatt in Israel

On January 7 a group of U.S. Jewish leaders addressed the Israeli Knesset’s Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs to talk about antisemitism.

One of the speakers was Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who recently declared that antisemitism has increased by 900% over the past decade.

As you have probably already guessed, Greenblatt’s remarks didn’t actually focus on antisemitism, but anti-Zionism. Greenblatt warned lawmakers that pro-Palestine sentiment is spreading across social media platforms and compared this to a missile attack.

“Capturing TikTok might seem less meaningful than holding on to Mount Hermon. Libelous tweets certainly might seem less deadly than missiles from Yemen,” said Greenblatt. “But this is urgent because the next war will be decided based on how Israel and its allies perform online as much as offline. Make no mistake, it’s real.”

Greenblatt called on U.S. and Israeli NGOs to start thinking outside the box by invoking the Israeli pager attack on Lebanon and the Israeli raid of an Iranian missile factory:

So starting with ADL and the rest of the NGO sector in the U.S. and around the world, we’ve got to start doing things differently. And the same goes here in Israel. This means that the problem won’t be solved by yet another new Knesset task force. It won’t be solved by the government just throwing money at the problem. It won’t be solved by the IDF spokesperson’s unit issuing updated talking points or suddenly using TikTok. Like us in America, you need to adopt new strategies to experiment with creative tactics to study the results and scale what works,” he said.  “We need the kind of genius that manufactured Apollo Gold Pagers and infiltrated Hezbollah for over a decade to prepare for this battle. We need the kind of courage that executed Operation Deep Layer inside Syria and destroyed Iranian missile manufacturing capabilities to undertake this mission. This is the kind of ingenuity and inventiveness that have always been a hallmark of the State of Israel, that have always been a characteristic of the Jewish people. I know we can do it.”

Greenblatt expanded on these topics in an interview with Jewish Insider that ran the day after his testimony. Again, he compared anti-Palestine posting to war, specifically Netanyahu’s vision of a 7 front war against Israel’s enemies.

“I think the info sphere is a front in this war. And so there may be seven fronts to the terrestrial war, you know, as the Israeli government has talked about. But there are multiple fronts to this information war,” said Greenblatt. “In the information sphere, Wikipedia is a front. Video games are a front. Social media is a front. These messaging services are a front, and we need to understand that as well. So that’s why we monitor video games. That’s why we are being very robust and taking on Wikipedia. That’s why we are so actively engaging with the social media platforms, and we’ll continue to do that.”

Last month I spoke with a number of educators who are sounding the alarm about the ADL’s presence in schools. They all noted that the organization is generally perceived as an apolitical civil rights organization, not a group committed to defending Israeli atrocities in what it sees as a global information war.

Odds & Ends

🇮🇱 Biden administration plans one last $8 billion arms sale to Israel

🇺🇸 The US is manufacturing doubt about Gaza’s famine

🇵🇸 The Biden administration’s shameful weaponization of food aid

📺 Lawmakers and media outlets are reviving the ‘War on Terror’ just in time for Trump

🇨🇦 Fadi Kattan’s new Toronto restaurant offers a welcome to Palestine

👨‍⚖️ Counterpunch: Genocidal President, Genocidal Politics

⚕️ KQED: Bay Area Health Care Workers Protest Israel’s Attacks on Gaza Hospitals

🫤 Reuters: Blinken calls for push to get Gaza truce deal over ‘finish line’

⚖️ Jewish Insider: Can ICC sanctions get to 60 votes in the Senate?

🐘 Common Dreams: What the Palestinian Rights Movement Must Do as Trump Returns

📚 Truthout: American Historical Association Overwhelmingly Condemns Scholasticide in Gaza

📰 AFSC: New York Times rejects Quaker ad for calling Israel’s actions “genocide”

🏫 Legal Insurrection: Distinguished Law Faculty Call on ABA to Reconsider Resolution Defining Antisemitism It Pulled Under Activist Pressure

🐻 National SJP on Twitter: “Last year, UCLA canceled classes within minutes of a student building occupation. Now, with fires intensifying, they cherry-pick air quality stats to stay open. Apparently, student dissent is a bigger “crisis” than an unprecedented climate emergency.”

💰 Jezebel: The 119th Congress, Brought to You by Record Spending From the Israel Lobby

Stay safe out there,