Efforts Grow to Hold 'Complicit' Biden Officials Accountable for Gaza -
Three years after the October 7 attacks, progressive advocacy groups are organizing to keep former Biden administration officials they blame for the carnage in Gaza out of future Democratic administrations.
"Being complicit in genocide should be enough to stop you from being a part of the foreign policy establishment again in the future, but that's just not the way it works right now," said Kristina Biyad, director of the American Committee for Middle East Rights.
After the midterm elections, Biyad's group plans to launch ONRECORD, a database featuring report cards on former U.S. officials who oversaw Middle East policy, while #DroptheGenocide20 – which seeks to ostracize 20 former Biden appointees – debuted last month.
Kevin Martin, president of Peace Action, endorsed #DroptheGenocide20 and said part of the goal was to send a message to Democratic candidates for the 2028 presidential nomination. "We don't want Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and friends – the 'Biden bros' – anywhere near your foreign policy if and when you become president," Martin said in an interview. "Don't you dare let these guys back in."
The efforts remain in their early stages, and #DroptheGenocide20 has been endorsed by only a handful of organizations: the Democratic Socialists of America, Track AIPAC, the Palestinian Youth Movement, Peace Action and About Face, a progressive veterans group.
The campaign does not specify how it selected the officials on its list, and a website footnote acknowledges that selecting 20 individuals was "inherently arbitrary." Most entries offer only a brief summary of what the organizers view as objectionable actions related to the Israel-Hamas war.
The American Committee for Middle East Rights is hiring a part-time researcher to help prepare report cards on former officials, and Biyad said that her organization also planned to create a list of foreign policy experts who could help staff a future Democratic administration.
The campaigns seek to turn anger over Gaza into professional consequences for former U.S. officials. But the #DroptheGenocide20 list, which includes officials who have acknowledged mistakes alongside those who remain unapologetic, also raises the question of whether any acknowledgment could justify their return to government.
Brett McGurk, Biden's point person on negotiations between Israel and Hamas, has struck an unapologetic tone while on tour for his new memoir about the war.
Blinken, Biden's secretary of state, has sought to defend his record while acknowledging some mistakes. "How can you not have regrets given the toll that this took on innocent men, women and children?" he told the New Yorker in July. And Jon Finer, who served as Biden's deputy national security adviser, has been more willing than some to admit fault. During Biden's reelection campaign, Finer told Arab and Muslim leaders in Michigan that "we are very well aware that we have misstepped in the course of responding to this crisis." Recently, he told leftist intellectual Peter Beinart that he believed civilian harm was part of Israel's strategy in Gaza.
These kinds of statements reflect a sea change in Democratic attitudes toward Israel since October 7. But Finer is nevertheless listed alongside McGurk, Blinken and Sullivan, his former boss on the National Security Council, among the "Genocide 20" whom organizers describe as "most responsible for promoting, lying about, and covering up the Gaza genocide."
Harrison Mann, who resigned from the Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East center over the Gaza war, argued that admissions of culpability by former U.S. officials did not justify their return to government. In a May op-ed in Zeteo, he wrote that "Biden's genocide squad must be stopped before they strike again."
"Of course there's a qualitative difference between these people," Mann told Haaretz. "I am willing to believe there are some ex-officials who do feel bad about what they did – but that's not a reason they should get a second chance."
Pro-Israel advocates have already criticized the effort. Brian Romick, CEO of Democratic Majority for Israel, argued that #DroptheGenocide20 "will not move a truck of aid into Gaza, rebuild a single home there, or change one Israeli government policy."
"We have just watched the Trump Administration select its national security officials by political loyalty rather than competence," Romick said in a statement. "Democrats should not adopt the same method and call it principle."
Both Biyad and Martin, with Peace Action, said their goals go beyond changing the U.S.-Israel relationship and include promoting a U.S. foreign policy more focused on humanitarian concerns. But they acknowledged that Gaza has brought unusual scrutiny to American diplomats. "It comes from more than just anger," Biyad said. "But there is a lot of anger."
Akbar Shahid Ahmed, diplomatic correspondent at the Washington Sun who recently published a book on the Biden administration's approach to Gaza, said he had noticed growing interest in figures like McGurk, who had served in national security roles since the George W. Bush administration while attracting little public attention until recently.
Other once-obscure posts have also become the source of controversy. For example, there was a progressive outcry after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries named Rep. Jared Moskowitz, one of the most pro-Israel Democrats in the House, as ranking member of the Middle East subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in August.
But Ahmed argued that focusing on individual officials – and whether they have sufficiently acknowledged their mistakes – could obscure the systems that shaped the policies those officials carried out.
"It was systems and processes that created an environment in the Biden administration that failed by all of their own stated goals," Ahmed said in an interview. "Those systems weren't based on how Jake Sullivan feels now."