Three years into the genocide, Gaza’s Health Ministry says 74,245 Palestinians have been killed by Israel. 1,462 have been killed since a “ceasefire” was declared one year ago.
The genocide has permanently destroyed the country’s reputation among a sizable portion of the U.S. population and made the work of domestic pro-Israel organizations much more challenging.
“The price that AIPAC and the Lobby have had to pay to be competitive. It’s gone up,” investigative journalist and Quincy Institute senior advisor Eli Clifton recently told me. “They have to spend an enormous amount of money in order to plausibly have a chance at winning a race, not necessarily winning it even but just being competitive enough to tell their donors that they had a good chance of swinging an outcome.”
Israel’s PR shield has also fallen apart across popular culture.
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft successfully ousted rapper Macklemore from Ed Sheeran’s tour, but the move didn’t go as he’d planned, and both he and Sheeran were widely criticized.
“Normally news stories about billionaires trying to stamp out free speech are depressing. But watching Kraft’s intimidation attempts backfire on him and his little buddy Ed has been an absolute joy to watch,” wrote Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. “It seems Kraft didn’t realize that, for some people, morality is more important than money. It seems he didn’t foresee that all of Sheeran’s opening acts and his live band would withdraw in solidarity with Macklemore and Palestine, amplifying the pro-Palestinian statements that he was so desperate to quash. “I cannot stand by and allow billionaires to use their position of power to silence the rightful voices of those who speak up against Israeli genocide and who highlight the savage murder of children,” the Irish singer Aaron Rowe said in a statement announcing his departure from the tour.”
“In 1985, Artists United Against Apartheid’s Sun City campaign turned the tide, making it increasingly damaging to artists’ reputations and careers,” wrote Ali Abunimah in the Electronic Intifada. “It has taken a long time for Palestine to reach this South Africa moment – too long considering we are three years into Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
But it is cause for celebration that the billions spent by the Zionist lobby can no longer hold back the tide of global solidarity.
Days later, the country singer Zach Bryan broke the attendance record at Kraft’s Gillette Stadium while wearing a “Free Palestine” shirt.
A recent Pew survey found that 60% of U.S. adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53% in 2025. The number of people with a “very unfavorable” view of the country has tripled since 2022.
These shifts haven’t led to tangible political results, as most U.S. lawmakers lag behind their constituents on the issue. Yes, it’s true that more and more politicians are adopting rhetoric that’s critical of Israel, but do we see any wider rethinking of the U.S./Israel relationship?
“The only actions Democrats have, at scale, taken to ‘break from Israel’ is recent spattering of Congressional votes over the past year designed to signal disapproval but change nothing of substance,” writes media critic Adam Johnson at The Real News Network.
Additionally, no U.S. officials have faced consequences for their complicity in the genocide.
In fact, many Biden officials have spent the past month rewriting history, passing the buck, insisting that they acted with the best intentions, and claiming they somehow lacked the leverage to influence the Netanyahu government.
Chief among them is Brett McGurk, the former National Security Council coordinator who is currently promoting his book, Brink: Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages.
McGurk, who emerges as one of the genocide’s major figures in Akbar Shahid Ahmad’s newly published Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza, has constructed a narrative where Biden was on the verge of cutting off weapons to Netanyahu before intelligence allegedly revealed that Iran was planning an attack on Israel.
Even the New York Times sees through this one. Here’s some of Fintan O’Toole’s Brink review in the paper:
A little over a week after the Hamas attacks, Biden embraced Netanyahu in Tel Aviv. McGurk reveals that he himself thought Biden’s suggestion that he fly to Israel while the overall situation was still unclear so “preposterous” that he “thought Biden might be joking.”
McGurk interprets Biden’s determination to go as being motivated by his belief that he could “slow Bibi down” and prevent him from launching a wider regional war. However decent this motivation may have been, the embrace seemed to signal that Biden was effectively signing a blank check for the war on Gaza.
McGurk thus had no real leverage over Netanyahu in the hostage negotiations or the conduct of the war: “I remained hopeful that we might somehow convince Israel not to mount a ground attack, not because Israel lacked the legitimacy to destroy Hamas as a military organization, but because we still lacked a conceivable program for reducing civilian harm in the path of the advance.”
This reads as though the United States was merely a benign outsider, hoping for the best but powerless to prevent the worst. “Biden,” as McGurk concedes, “could not credibly explain how the war might end.” With no American vision of a decent solution, there is still no sense of an ending, just a pulverized population and an Israel whose international standing lies in the dust.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who might have presidential aspirations and a desire to become the Democratic Senate Leader, dutifully promoted the book on social media, calling McGurk, “one of the nation’s great experts on the Middle East.”
“I’m really looking forward to reading Brink and learning from his firsthand account of the extraordinary efforts to free the hostages, and confront the extraordinary challenges of the region,” wrote Booker.
Former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who made $560,000 speaking at private equity firms and corporate events last year, says that he now opposes withholding weapons from Israel because things on the ground have changed under Trump.
“The thing that we were grappling with throughout all of 2024, which is not the case today, is that Israel was under attack from multiple fronts,” Sullivan told The Bulwark podcast in August. “It was under attack from Hezbollah, from the Houthis, from Syria, from Iraq, obviously from Hamas and from Iran itself. So the idea of saying ‘Israel, we’re not going to give you a whole set of military tools,’ in that context, was challenging.”
Jack Lew, who served as Biden’s U.S. ambassador to Israel after October 7, is now saying that Israeli leaders didn’t prioritize the safety of the hostages, in contrast to U.S. officials.
“There was no obligation that was greater for an American diplomat than worrying about Americans,” he told the crowd at a recent event. “While the issue of the hostages was right at the top of my concerns, it was nowhere near the top of the concerns of the interlocutors I had in the government.”
Again, it’s claimed that nothing could be done to pressure the Israelis on such issues, and the idea of severing the “special relationship” is regarded as a subject too farcical to dwell on for more than half a second.
“Unless you’re willing to say, ‘Do it our way or we’re going to be leaving you on your own,’ you didn’t have the leverage to make the kind of difference that you would have liked,” said Lew, who added that Biden, “wasn’t going to abandon Israel – there was no credible scenario in which he was going to abandon Israel and I think that was taken advantage of.”
This partnership has continued to decimate the region beyond Biden’s tenure.
Last week, Drop Site News published a deep investigation into the U.S. bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh children’s school in Minab, the opening attack in the Israel/U.S. war on Iran. The February 28 bombing killed at least 156 people, including 120 kids.
“This is one of the single gravest war crimes that I’m aware of since Vietnam,” Jeremy Scahill, the lead author of the report told Democracy Now. “It’s akin to the Amariyah shelter bombing in Baghdad, Iraq, in the 1991 Gulf War, when the U.S. dropped a bomb, a bunker buster bomb, ripped open a hole in a bunker where hundreds of civilians were, and then dropped another 2,000-pound bomb directly, incinerating more than 400 people. It rises to the level of gravity of that crime.
“And it’s really just shocking that there isn’t more outcry from the American public and the U.S. Congress. This is one of the most severe war crimes. And it’s not like, you know, the tone under Obama, where he says, ‘Oh, oops, we tortured some folks,’ or they said, you know, ‘We regret this.’ Trump’s people are defiant about this. And the Democrats, you know, they’re not in control of the Congress right now, but this should be front and center of foreign policy questions toward Donald Trump. If the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives, they should go after them for this. These are war crimes.”
October 7, 2023, isn’t the only notable anniversary in the Middle East.
October 7, 2001, was the day that the Bush administration launched the “War on Terror.” According to the Costs of War project, at least 4.5 million people have died in post 9/11 war zones.
The central architects of these policies have largely remained unscathed, and their crimes continue without a hitch.
Odds & Ends
- Mondoweiss: The Gaza genocide permanently diminished the power of pro-Israel propaganda
- Mondoweiss: Mahmoud Khalil book event moved amid pro-Israel backlash
- Mondoweiss: J Street is trying to rescue Zionism in the battle over Israel’s future in the Democratic Party
- The New Republic: Trump Tries to Deport Hasidic Jew Who Protested Israel
- Counterpunch: Saudis and the 9/11 Attacks
- Responsible Statecraft: Is China Trump’s only hope for ending the Iran war?
- Drop Site News: Why Bagram Air Base Remains a Target Five Years After U.S. Exited Afghanistan
- The Intercept: Antisemitism Law Helped Get a Professor Fired for Free Speech, Lawsuit Says
- The Nation: Gaza and Elite Accountability
- Electronic Intifada: How Hamas hid 7 October plans in plain sight
- Common Dreams: Senator Says Hegseth Barred Him From Gulf Base to ‘Cover Up the True Cost’ of Iran War
- Truthout: Report: Trump Used Grok to Help Talk Him Into Illegal Invasion of Venezuela
- Zeteo: Israel Is More Isolated Than Ever. Is It Enough to End the Gaza Genocide?
- Politico: Mamdani draws bipartisan backlash for criticizing Israel on Oct. 7 anniversary
- New York Times: For Mamdani, Oct. 7 Anniversary Sets Off Anger and Bitterness
- CBS News: Mamdani criticized by fellow Democrats for statement mourning Oct. 7 attacks while condemning Israel
