In his final press conference as US Secretary of State, on Thursday, January 16, Antony Blinken was given an open platform to answer journalists’ questions about the motives and reasons behind the US administration, his administration and his ministry issuing so many red lines to Israel, and then steadily backing down after these lines were crossed by Israel.

Blinken was asked at his press conference (on Thursday, during which two journalists were forcefully removed from the State Department briefing room for their loud questions about his “crimes”) about many things regarding US involvement and participation in the Israeli genocide that Israel has been and is practicing in Gaza, and instead of answering, he dodged and hid behind boring rhetorical phrases.

It is noteworthy that on October 13, 2024, Secretary of State Blinken, in partnership with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, (and the administration) presented Israel with their clearest ultimatum to date, demanding that the Israeli military allow hundreds of trucks loaded with food and medicine into Gaza each day, or the United States would embargo the supply of weapons to Israel since the law prohibits arms sales to countries that restrict humanitarian aid. Israel had 30 days to comply, which was November 12, 2024.

In the month that followed, the Israeli military was accused of defying the United States, Israel's patron and its military, as the Israeli military tightened its grip, continuing to restrict badly needed aid trucks, and displacing 100,000 Palestinians from northern Gaza, humanitarian groups found, worsening a crisis that was already "the worst point since the war began."

In early November, a small group of the United States’ top human rights diplomats met with a senior State Department official to deliver a final, crucial plea that the United States must keep its word. Several of those at the meeting, who help lead the State Department’s efforts to promote racial equality, religious freedom, and other noble principles of democracy, said that the United States’ international credibility had been severely damaged by Biden’s unstinting support for Israel.

“If there was ever a time to hold Israel accountable, it is now,” one of the ambassadors at the meeting told Tom Sullivan (brother of Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan), a State Department adviser and senior policy adviser to Blinken, ProPublica reported at the time, but the decision had apparently already been made. Sullivan said the deadline (November 12, 2024) was likely to pass without action and that Biden would continue to send the bombs uninterrupted, according to two people who attended the meeting.

It is noteworthy that shortly after, when the deadline passed after 30 days (12/11), Blinken officially announced that the Israelis had begun implementing most of the steps he laid out in his letter - all thanks to pressure from the United States.

This position was immediately called into question. On November 14, a UN panel said that Israel’s methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, were “consistent with genocide.” Amnesty International went further, concluding that genocide was underway (5/12/24). The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, (21/11/2024) for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations. (The US and Israeli governments have rejected the designation of Israel’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza as genocide, as well as the arrest warrants.)

It is noteworthy that the red line of October 13, 2024, was the last one set by Biden, but it was not the first. His administration issued multiple threats, warnings and rebukes to Israel over its behavior after October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched Operation Flood of Al-Aqsa, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed, including 311 soldiers on active duty, according to Israeli statements.

According to experts, Biden's record of empty threats gave the Israelis a sense of impunity.

It is noteworthy that President-elect Donald Trump, who has chosen a group to be his ministers who are the fiercest supporters of Israel and the most bitter enemies of the Palestinian cause, has made it clear that he wants to end the war in Gaza before he takes office, otherwise “hell will break out” in Gaza if Hamas does not release its hostages by then, which was considered a “red line” and a clear threat to the Palestinian movement.

On Wednesday, January 15, 2025, after months of negotiations, Hamas and Israel reached a ceasefire agreement. While it will become clear in the coming days and months exactly what the outlines of the agreement are, why it happened now, and who deserves the most credit, it is plausible that Trump’s impending ascension to the White House was some sort of red line for Israel as well. Early reports indicate that the deal appears similar to what has been on the table for months, raising the possibility that an agreement could have been reached earlier, and thousands of lives saved, had the Biden administration followed through on its tough words.

Experts in Washington believe Netanyahu's conclusion is that Biden doesn't have enough power to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him, and that Netanyahu learned that there is no cost to saying "no" to the current president.

It is noteworthy that the so-called red lines have long been a prominent foreign policy tool of the United States, the most powerful country in human history. These threats (and red lines) were communicated publicly in statements by senior officials and privately by envoys who repeatedly warned that it was possible to go this far but not beyond that.

Surrendering to Israel as it wages a brutal war on defenseless civilians in Gaza is likely to be seen as one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of Biden’s presidency, officials inside and outside the government say, one that will haunt him for days and years to come. It undermines America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East while “destroying the entire edifice of international law that was put in place after World War II,” Omer Bartov, a prominent Israeli-American genocide scholar, told ProPublica.

Biden’s warnings (with red lines) over the past year have also been explicit. Last spring, President Biden pledged to stop supplying Israel with offensive bombs if it launched a major invasion of the southern city of Rafah. He also told Netanyahu that the United States would reconsider support for the war unless he took new steps to protect civilians and aid workers after the Israeli military bombed a World Central Kitchen convoy. And Blinken has indicated that he would blacklist a notorious IDF unit over the killing of a Palestinian-American in the West Bank if the soldiers involved were not brought to justice.

Time and again, Israel has crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in any meaningful way, according to multiple press interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the United States has capitulated and continued to send lethal weapons to the Israeli military, approving more than $22 billion in military aid since late 2023 (according to Brown University), and the State Department told Congress this month about another proposed $8 billion sale of ammunition and artillery shells to Israel.

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines were just a smokescreen,” Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School and one of the leading experts on U.S. policy in the region, told reporters. “The Biden administration decided to be fully involved and just pretend to try to do something about it.”

In an interview this week with the New York Times, Blinken disagreed with Netanyahu, saying Netanyahu had listened to him by toning down Israel’s most aggressive tactics, including in Rafah. He also claimed there was a cost to even publicly questioning the IDF. “Every time there was public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure was mounting on Israel, Hamas backed away from agreeing to a ceasefire and releasing the hostages,” Blinken said, citing his involvement in the genocidal war. He acknowledged that humanitarian aid had not reached enough civilians and said the Israelis initially resisted the idea of allowing any food or medicine into Gaza — which would be a war crime — but Netanyahu relented in response to American pressure behind the scenes. Blinken later backtracked in the interview, suggesting that withholding aid was not Israeli policy.

Over the past 15 months, which have been a source of controversy inside the State Department, senior officials have repeatedly ignored what their experts were saying. They have cracked down on leaks by threatening criminal investigations and labeling material critical of Israel as “breach of duty,” Jerusalem has learned. Some of the White House’s top diplomats in the Middle East have privately complained that they are being sidelined by Biden’s National Security Council. The council has also distributed a list of forbidden phrases, including any version of “State of Palestine” that does not include the word “future” first. Two human rights officials told ProPublica they have been blocked from pursuing evidence of abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

Secretary of State Blinken was not available for selective press interviews, but State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement that Blinken welcomes internal dissent and incorporates it into policymaking. “The department continues to encourage individuals to speak out through appropriate channels,” he added. Miller denied that the department classified material for any reason other than national security.

Over the past year, the Jerusalem correspondent has raised documented reports of physical and sexual abuse in Israeli prisons, the use of Palestinians as human shields and the demolition of residential buildings and hospitals.

Early in the war, UNICEF said that an average of more than a dozen children needed limbs amputated each day. Israeli soldiers filmed themselves burning food supplies and looting homes. One IDF group reportedly said, “Our job is to destroy Gaza.” Israel’s defenders, including those on the U.S. National Security Council, acknowledge the devastating human toll but argue that U.S. weapons have helped Israel advance Western interests in the region and protect itself from other enemies.

Indeed, Netanyahu has succeeded in significantly reducing the influence of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, with Israel killing several of the groups’ leaders. Then, the Iranian “axis of resistance” suffered its most significant blow late last year when rebel groups (which were and remain on the U.S. terror list) ousted Assad from Syria.

But Israel has also been dealt a severe blow. US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew told The Times of Israel that he worries that a generation of young Americans will harbor anti-Israel sentiment in the future. “The media that presents a pro-Hamas viewpoint immediately comes out and tells a story,” said Lew, a Likud member and right-wing Zionist. “They tell a story that has been proven over time to be completely inaccurate.” “Thirty-five children killed…well, it wasn’t 35 children. It was much less,” he said. “The children who were killed turned out to be the children of Hamas fighters.”

The repercussions on the United States and the region are expected to continue for years to come. Protests have erupted outside U.S. embassies in Muslim-majority countries such as Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, while polls show that Arab Americans have become more hostile to their government in the United States and more influential in American elections.

Next week, Trump will inherit a demoralized State Department, part of the federal bureaucracy from which he has vowed to kill disloyal employees. Amid the near-daily images of carnage in Gaza, many officials across the U.S. government have grown disillusioned with the noble ideas they once thought it represented.

“These are the human rights atrocities that Israel is committing in our time,” a senior American diplomat told ProPublica. “I work in the department that is responsible for this policy. I signed off on this policy… and I don’t deserve sympathy for it.”

Immediately after the ICJ’s order on the Rafah invasion, officials in the State Department’s Middle East and communications divisions drafted a list of proposed public statements acknowledging the court’s importance and expressing concern for civilians in the city. But State Department spokesman Matthew Miller rejected nearly all of them. In a May 24 email, he told officials that members of the White House National Security Council “would not agree” to any acknowledgment of the ruling or criticism of Israel.

This was an early sign that the State Department was taking a back seat in shaping war policy. Instead, the National Security Council—led by Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk, and Amos Hochstein—was taking on a larger role. While the NSC grew dramatically in size and influence over the decades, the State Department was marginalized.