Biden’s Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew on the current situation with Israel (as of January 12)

I don’t claim to be familiar with the Byzantine nuances of Ambassadorial rhetoric even in situations far less tangled than US-Israeli relations. But the following sounds to me a lot like Joe Biden’s US Ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, giving the Israeli government hasbara (propaganda) marketing ideas to sell its policies – in this case including literal genocide – to the American public:

He also lamented Israel’s failure to provide real-time responses to unfolding events in Gaza, saying he and others have urged their Israeli counterparts in vain, “on many, many, many occasions, often in the middle of the night: If you want to frame this story, get information out there more quickly, because you know there’s going to be a report out there that you think is inaccurate.”

“America has been fed a media coverage of this war that Israel has just not done an effective job countering,” Lew said. “And there’s only so much you can do through diplomatic channels to fix that.”

Public opinion in America “is still largely pro-Israel,” he noted. But “what I’ve told people here that they have to worry about when this war is over is that the generational memory doesn’t go back to the founding of the state or the Six Day War, or the Yom Kippur War, or to the intifada even. It starts with this war, and you can’t ignore the impact of this war on future policymakers — not the people making the decisions today, but the people who are 25, 35, 45 today and who will be the leaders for the next 30 years, 40 years.” [my emphasis] (1)

Lew is a former Secretary of the Treasury (2013-2017) who also served as Obama’s Chief of Staff (2012-2013) and as Director of the Office of Management and Budget (2010-2012). . So he’s been around.

Ambassador Jack Lew

I guess I missed the fact that FOX News, CBS, and nearly every major US newspaper and other news outlets were feeding the American public a relentlessly critical view of Israel’s vicious war in Gaza. The New York Times, for instance, provided relentlessly critical reporting and never passed on unfounded hasbara propaganda stories … oh, wait:

The fear among [New York] Times staffers who have been critical of the paper’s Gaza coverage is that [filmmaker Nat] Schwartz will become a scapegoat for what is a much deeper failure. She may harbor animosity toward Palestinians, lack the experience with investigative journalism, and feel conflicting pressures between being a supporter of Israel’s war effort and a Times reporter, but Schwartz did not commission herself and [Adam] Sella to report one of the most consequential [and badly flawed] stories of the war. Senior leadership at the New York Times did. (2)

Lew wants everyone to know, in his words:

I’ve spent a lot of the time that I’m here encouraging, on the military side, to do things in a careful, targeted way; encouraging, on the humanitarian assistance side, to make a bureaucratic system and a security system work so you don’t cross over into famine or malnutrition. ...

There are some things that, depending on what circumstance you’re in, look very different. In terms of the military operations, we have urged that Israel think hard about whether the value of [certain] military operations is worth the civilian risk. I’ve spent a lot of time with military leaders trying to understand how they think about that. [my emphasis]

Ambassador Lew, I think that advice was a monumental failure.

And all the advice in the world did nothing to restrain the Netanyahu government. Only credible threats of military aid reduction – and actual implementation of it – would have restrained Netanyahu’s actions. And Lew’s boss in the White House did nothing of the sort, with the one notable exception of withholding some 2000-lb. bombs from Israel last summer. If that itself was anything more than a PR stunt. As Reuter reported at the time:

The Biden administration has sent to Israel large numbers of munitions, including more than 10,000 highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs and thousands of Hellfire missiles, since the start of the war in Gaza, said two U.S. officials briefed on an updated list of weapons shipments.

While the officials didn't give a timeline for the shipments, the totals suggest there has been no significant drop-off in U.S. military support for its ally, despite international calls to limit weapons supplies and a recent administration decision to pause a shipment of powerful bombs.

Experts said the contents of the shipments appear consistent with what Israel would need to replenish supplies used in this eight-month intense military campaign in Gaza, which it launched after the Oct. 7 attack by Palestinian Hamas militants who killed 1,200 people and took 250 others hostage, according to Israeli tallies. [my emphasis] (3)

Nauseating rhetoric about how mass killing of civilians was somehow tragically necessary is unfortunately a routine part of war propaganda. It doesn’t make it any less sickening.

“The message we’ve stuck to, with quite a bit of discipline, is: Free the hostages, ceasefire, pathway to end the war,” Lew says. Obviously, serious pressure on Israel to stop war crimes and withholding of weapons that would have reduced Israel’s ability to carry out a genocide were not part of that undoubtedly disciplined message.

Lew is evidently very proud of the role the US played:

If you look at the military action in Rafah, there are places for people to move back to in Rafah, because it was a targeted and intelligence-driven military action. You have not heard a word of criticism from the White House, the State Department, the Defense Department, from the United States, of the operation in Rafah. It’s a mistake when people say, as they sometimes do, “You told us not to, and we did.” It was done in a way that limited or really eliminated the friction between the United States and Israel, but also led to a much better outcome. [my emphasis]

Lew apparently lets his message discipline slip a bit at one point and admits, “We [the US] are probably the only country in the world now that gives Israel the benefit of the doubt.”

On Biden, Lew makes a comment that he apparently intends as praise, though not everyone would consider it praiseworthy: “given the personal support that the president has shown [for Netanyahu’s war], and not just shown — the president’s personal support is not four years in the making, it’s 50 years in the making. It comes from his heart.”

Notes:

(1) Horovitz, David (2025): The ambassador’s farewell warning: You can’t ignore the impact of this war on future US policymakers. The Times of Israel 01/12/2025. <https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-ambassadors-farewell-warning-you-cant-ignore-the-impact-of-this-war-on-future-us-policymakers/> (Accessed: 2025-19-01). The text of the interview with Lew is unusually long for this kind of newspaper report, so it provides a snapshot of official US positions at the moment. The full article prints out to 44 pages.

(2) Scahill, Jeremy & Grim, Ryan & Boguslaw, Daniel (2024): “Between the Hammer and the Anvil”: The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé. The Intercept 02/28/2024. <https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/> (Accessed: 2025-19-01).

(3) Pamuk, Humeyra & Stone, Mike (2024): Exclusive: US has sent Israel thousands of 2,000-pound bombs since Oct. 7 Reuters 11/29/2024. <https://www.reuters.com/world/us-has-sent-israel-thousands-2000-pound-bombs-since-oct-7-2024-06-28/> (Accessed: 2025-19-01).