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Photo: Isa Terli/Anadolu Agency (Satterfield), Andrew Harnik/Getty Images (Sullivan), Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP (Lew), Takashi Aoyama/Getty Images (Blinken)

Tariq Habash could not eat, and later he could not sleep. It was October 7, 2023, and like many Palestinian Americans, his horror at the violence committed by Hamas that day was quickly met by fear — frenetic and queasy — about Israel’s certain retaliation. Collective punishment had been the country’s de facto policy in Gaza for years; now it had suffered the greatest loss of civilian life since its founding, and its belligerent leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, had been humiliated. Habash kept asking himself, What is about to happen? But he knew.

On Monday, he went to work — at the United States Department of Education — the lone Palestinian appointee in the agency. He’d spent the previous three years working 12-hour days trying to make American education more affordable. Over the next few weeks, he watched as Israel bombed every university in Gaza and most of its schools. He checked in as often as he could with his extended family in the West Bank and scoured the names of the dead. “I saw countless Tariqs on that list,” he says. “I’d met like five Tariqs in my entire life.” He attended listening sessions hosted by the White House and asked whether any move by Israel could shift U.S. policy; in return, he was offered counseling. “No, I don’t need a counselor,” he recalls thinking. “I need my government to stop bombing my people.”

In January 2024, Habash became the second Biden official, and the first political appointee, to resign in protest over the administration’s Gaza policy. A year and a half later, as famine has gripped the enclave, top Biden officials have finally begun to acknowledge the catastrophe — but not their own role in its orchestration.

Some, such as former State Department spokesman Matt Miller, say they were previously hamstrung in what they could admit in public. “When you’re at the podium, you’re not expressing your personal opinion,” Miller said in June. He now says Israel has committed war crimes and in August blamed Netanyahu for sabotaging cease-fire negotiations.

While Miller acknowledges the Biden administration could have done more to ensure humane conditions in Gaza, most who have recently come forward accept no fault and assert that American support for the war was justifiable until the second Trump term. In an August essay in Foreign Affairs, Jacob Lew, Biden’s ambassador to Israel, and David Satterfield, his special envoy on humanitarian issues in Gaza, blamed Israel for the famine and said there was no evidence that Hamas had substantially diverted humanitarian aid, directly contradicting the story repeatedly put forward under Biden. Former national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who has now indicated his support for an arms embargo of Israel, says the facts on ground have simply changed: “The case for withholding weapons from Israel today is much stronger than it was one year ago.”

For Habash, this is cold comfort. Though the about-face could do some good — making it more difficult for lawmakers, at least Democrats, to continue to support the war — “you also have to say the thing that you won’t say. ‘We fucked up.’”

As world leaders convene in New York for the United Nations General Assembly this month, the global spotlight will be on Gaza. The U.S. has continued to veto cease-fire resolutions on the Security Council and to provide an unending stream of weapons to Israel. Under Trump, this is unlikely to change.

In August and early September, I spoke with several of the 15 people who ultimately resigned from the Biden administration, having seen this disaster in the making. All described a whiplash akin to what Habash experienced as they watch their former superiors — people they say ignored them, refused to act, and lied — join the opposition to the war and attempt to convince the public that they are blameless. If those officials are successful, the resigners say, they will end up back in power.

Josh Paul, who worked for more than a decade in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, calls the recent statements “cynical repositioning.” He quit on October 18, 2023, when he realized his bosses expected him to approve arms transfers to Israel with zero oversight. It’s true, he says, that the situation in Gaza is “worse now than it has ever been,” but the road to this point was clear. He describes Israel’s “absolute disregard for civilian life” as undeniable from the start.

Paul’s first reaction to Sullivan’s change of heart “probably isn’t printable,” he tells me. “The tool kit to restrain Israel was always available when Sullivan was national security adviser.” Without any admission of wrongdoing, Sullivan and other newly vocal figures are engaging in “legacy burnishing.” “They don’t want to go down in history as the people who facilitated either a genocide or the pathway to a genocide,” he says; they want jobs in the next White House.

Hala Rharrit, a U.S. diplomat for 18 years, resigned from her role as an Arab-language spokesperson for the State Department after refusing to repeat what she calls Biden-administration lies about the war. Like Paul, she says top officials are trying to “rewrite history” and cautions that it would be a mistake to read their statements as a moral awakening: “It’s all been calculated the entire time, then and now. It’s all for their own political power and greed.”

Stacy Gilbert, who worked on humanitarian and refugee issues for the State Department for more than 20 years before resigning in May 2024, has bitter words for the revisionists. “Good for you, Jake Sullivan. But there’s actually no difference between what Israel is doing now and what they were doing when you had the power to do something about it — except time and about 20,000 more people who’ve died.”

At the outset of the war, Gilbert was encouraged that Secretary of State Antony Blinken, whom she’d long admired as a dedicated humanitarian, would be responsible for diplomacy. In February 2024, she was one of several experts tasked with investigating whether Israel was blocking humanitarian assistance from entering Gaza. “I’ve written so many reports that are just crap that no one would read,” she says. “This mattered.” If Israel was blocking aid, U.S. law required the halt of arms transfers. Consulting with her counterparts in USAID and other agencies, Gilbert made a firm and definitive case that it was.

But several weeks before the report was set to be released, State Department brass locked Gilbert and her collaborators out of the draft. When she read the final version, she was shocked: It effectively absolved Israel. “I wasn’t sure I read it correctly,” she says. “I walked my dog around the block, came back, and read it again. Then I sent the email that I would resign.” The same day, Blinken repeated the findings of the edited report to Congress. (Compared with officials who have at least expressed belated concern, Blinken, Gilbert says, is in a “different circle of hell.”)

Gilbert now intends to take every opportunity to remind the public of the Biden administration’s “criminal” failures, formally rebutting officials’ claims of innocence and briefing lawmakers on the origins of the humanitarian crisis. “I feel like a zombie hunter,” she says. The architects of the Gaza policy “should not come back into public life. If people understood their role in this, they would not be allowed back.”

Habash and Paul, who together have founded an advocacy group pushing for an Israel-Palestine policy that prioritizes human rights, are measured. “We’re not sort of tear-it-down revolutionaries,” Paul tells me. Both say they would be willing to work with the officials now coming out against the war provided they were honest about their mistakes and expressed real regret. Neither believe this is likely. “We need to make sure that there is space for people to change their minds,” Habash says, “but we can’t allow this revisionist history.”

The Spin on Gaza

The Spin on Gaza