Ben Rhodes Keeps Getting It Wildly Wrong on Israel and Gaza

By Brett Schaefer & Danielle Pletka

Monday, December 08, 2025

 

Fresh off the Thanksgiving holiday, the New York Times gave an unprecedented half-page over to Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama, for a frothing screed. Titled “This Is the Story of How the Democrats Blew It on Gaza,” the essay is a series of mischaracterizations about the conflict in Gaza and Israel’s conduct clothed as a serious policy autopsy. It is most accurately summed up as a plea for the Democratic Party to turn its back on Israel. 

 

This should come as no surprise, considering Rhodes was so critical of Israel during his White House tenure that he earned the nickname “Hamas.” Yet the claims in the article deserve refutation. 

 

First is the ridiculous notion that the Biden administration provided unconditional support to Israel after the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas. This may have been the case in the early going, but within months, the Biden administration was delaying delivery of munitions and backseat driving on strategy, humanitarian delivery, civilian displacement, and military activity in Rafah and other areas.  

 

Second is the implication that Israel is the sole impediment to a Palestinian state. Rhodes glosses over the fact that Israel agreed to recognize a Palestinian state in multiple negotiations over the decades, starting with the 1947 partition plan endorsed by the U.N. Security Council in Resolution 181. In each instance, it was the Palestinians who rejected peace and recognition as insufficient because it would require them to recognize the State of Israel.  

 

Third is the assertion that support for Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, put Biden on the wrong side in the “battle between democracy and autocracy” because civil society, independent media, and Israeli courts were under assault. The fact that all three were free to protest, criticize, and check the Israeli government over the past two years puts the lie to this claim, favored only by the furthest left fringes of Israeli society. 

 

Fourth is echoing false claims of famine and genocide, asserting that “no one can deny” that Israel prevented aid from reaching Gaza and “used force beyond the laws of war.” He points to humanitarian organizations and the United Nations for evidence even though those groups have been shown to be manipulated by Hamas. Indeed, subsequent evidence shows decisively that famine never occurred in Gaza — something even U.N. agencies now admit — and experts in urban warfare praise Israel for setting a new standard for that kind of warfare and avoiding unnecessary civilian casualties.   

 

On the back of these misrepresentations, Rhodes, who came to the Obama administration with degrees in English, political science, and creative writing but no experience in foreign policy, calls for the U.S. to deny military assistance to Israel, which has “committed war crimes,” and oppose any annexation of the West Bank while investing in an “alternative Palestinian leadership from Hamas that can ultimately govern a Palestinian state.” Oh, and support the International Criminal Court (ICC) in its investigations, which potentially could include cases against Americans. 

 

This is not reality; frankly, it is bonkers. Worryingly, these views are becoming the rule, not the exception, on the American left. Rhodes points to polls showing that supporting Israel “alienated” the Democratic base, particularly younger voters. To the extent that he is correct, in that support for an American ally and a fellow democracy is anathema to voters on the left, it is an ignominy that should be confronted and corrected. 

 

That Republicans have been slow to police their own extremists is no excuse. It simply illustrates that the problem is bipartisan, not that it should be appeased. 

 

The notion that these perspectives might guide future U.S. policy is alarming. It is neither immoral nor criminal for a nation to respond decisively to an attack, even if it might result in civilian casualties — especially so when the adversary uses innocents as shields as Hamas has done for years. Doing otherwise is a recipe for inaction or such restrained response as to invite defeat. As noted by urban warfare expert John Spencer, “It is frightening to read such naïve beliefs from someone who once served as a deputy national security advisor to the President.” 

 

Indeed, the notion that it is incumbent on a nation responding to a brutal and unprovoked attack to feed and succor enemy civilians is virtually unheard of in America’s own wars. As World War II was raging, did President Franklin Roosevelt fret about nutrition levels and upper arm measurements in the Japanese population? Were American and British bombers jetting food parcels into Dresden? Not to speak of the fact that no international body was calling for them to do so. 

 

Even more concerning is that Rhodes’s perspective is increasingly spreading beyond hostility toward Israel and becoming hostility toward America, its founding principles, and its role on the world stage. In this worldview, the use of American power is intrinsically malign, even in the defense of democratic values. Thus Obama, advised by Rhodes and others, would refuse to arm Ukraine in response to Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea. And thus Biden, advised by Rhodes’s colleague, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, would slow-roll and condition lethal support to Kyiv, denying Ukraine a potential victory against Russia in the early months of the 2022 war.

 

This anti-Americanism and its attendant Israel hatred have venerable roots on the European left, with Germany’s Greens once opposed to NATO, and its Social Democrats more comfortable in Moscow’s orbit than Washington’s. And while Germans are understandably less brazen about Jew-hatred, Jeremy Corbyn’s U.K. Labour Party more than carried the cause for the European left. But in the face of growing threats from Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran, even Europe’s socialist nostalgics have moderated their hostility to the transatlantic alliance and America, if less to Israel, as Jew-hatred remains a central feature of the Red-Green alliance. 

 

The Democratic Party in the United States is at the beginning of the road Europe has already traveled. There are similarly dangerous voices on the right that welcome both isolationism and antisemitism, but they remain largely on the margins, still distant from the halls of power. 

 

That the New York Times saw fit to publish Rhodes’s screed speaks volumes about the evolution of the American left. Make no mistake: Israel is the canary in the coal mine, the harbinger of the rise of dangerous ideological extremism. The sole benefit of Rhodes’s sloppy sophistry is that it has been placed front and center for scrutiny.