The way US Secretary of State Antony Blinken began his swan-song interview with The New York Times some three weeks before leaving office was predictable: that the Biden administration he served left America better placed around the world than when it came into office.
“Today, as I sit with you, I think we hand over an America in a much, much stronger position, having come through the economic crisis, having come through the health crisis, and having changed much for the better our position around the world because we made those investments in alliances and partnerships,” he said in a message approximating what every secretary of state says when they leave office.
But his comments in the interview Saturday were not all that predictable when nearly 20 minutes of the 50-minute conversation turned toward Israel, Hamas, and Gaza.
Here are some key takeaways:
Netanyahu not to blame for no hostage deal
Among certain segments of the Israeli public, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the reason the hostages are still languishing in Hamas’ tunnels, and that if he only really wanted their freedom, they would be released.
Yair Golan, chairman of the Democrats party, gave voice to this sentiment in a Kan Bet interview Sunday morning. “Israel does not want an agreement; the prime minister of Israel does not want an agreement,” he said.
“Netanyahu could have reached an agreement three or four times for sure; he dismissed this, he lies to the press, he leaks reports to Bild. All kinds of shameful tricks and games. He should stand up before the citizens of Israel and say, ‘I don’t want to free the hostages, I have political pressure, I can’t do it.’ He should tell the truth for a change.”
Ah, the truth.
In a situation where secret negotiations are ongoing for months, it is difficult to say what the “truth” is.
But Blinken, who has been closely involved in the negotiations, probably has a pretty good idea. And here is what he said when asked by the interviewer whether Netanyahu blocked a cease-fire deal in July that would have led to the hostages’ release.
“No, that’s not accurate,” he said. “What we’ve seen time and again is Hamas not concluding a deal that it should have concluded.”
Blinken said that there have been times, such as when Israel killed Hamas head Yahya Sinwar, that Israeli actions have made getting to a conclusion of a deal more difficult, but unlike Golan, he clearly placed the onus not on Netanyahu, but on Hamas.
Daylight between Israel and the US is not good
In a meeting with Jewish leaders at the beginning of his presidency in 2009, then-president Barack Obama famously rejected the premise put forward by Malcolm Hoenlein, then the head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, who said that for Israel to take risks, its leaders “must know that the United States is right next to them.”
“Look at the past eight years,” Obama reportedly said. “During those eight years, there was no space between us and Israel, and what did we get from that? When there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states.”
As if to show the world that daylight, Obama went on a tour of the Mideast a month earlier that brought him to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but not to Israel. You want daylight? That was daylight. In this way, Obama was putting into practice policy many presidents before him believed as well: that the way to get closer to the Arab states is to distance America from Israel.
Blinken, who served at the time as then-vice president Joe Biden’s national security advisor, told The New York Times in the interview that perceived daylight between Israel and the US emboldened Hamas and made the possibility of a hostage deal more distant.
Blinken said there were two main impediments to Hamas reaching an agreement to free the hostages. One impediment, he said, was when there was public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure on Israel was was growing. “We’ve seen it: Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a cease-fire and the release of hostages.”
As a result, there were times — Blinken said — that what the US said in private to Israel was not what it said in public so that Hamas would not get the wrong idea. Daylight, he said, meant that “the prospects of getting the hostage and cease-fire deal over the finish line become more distant.”
The other main impediment to Hamas making a deal was their belief and hope that there would be a much wider conflict: “that Hezbollah would attack Israel, that Iran would attack Israel, that other actors would attack Israel, and that Israel would have its hands full and Hamas could continue what it was doing.”
Even the secretary of state is frustrated at how the world has lost the thread on Gaza
The Times’ journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro, who interviewed Blinken, began the section on Gaza with a perfunctory acknowledgment that Hamas’ October 7 attack led to “horrific results, which we saw.”
Then she said Israel’s response has been “extreme,” quoted as gospel the UN figures of the Palestinian death toll at 45,000 without saying those figures are based on Hamas numbers and do not differentiate between combatants and non-combatants, said the population is starving, all hospitals have been destroyed, the destruction of Gaza has been “fairly indiscriminate,” and wondered whether Blinken worried that perhaps he presided over “what the world will see as genocide.”
To his credit, Blinken flatly refuted the genocide canard, saying, “It’s not, first of all.”
None of the responsibility for the evil Garcia-Navarro listed did she place at Hamas’ doorstep.
Blinken, again to his credit, flagged this, though not specifically referring to her.
“Look, one of the things that I found a little astounding throughout is that for all of the understandable criticism of the way Israel has conducted itself in Gaza, you hear virtually nothing from anyone since Oct. 7 about Hamas,” he said.
“Why there hasn’t been a unanimous chorus around the world for Hamas to put down its weapons, to give up the hostages, to surrender — I don’t know what the answer is to that.
“Israel, on various occasions, has offered safe passage to Hamas’ leadership and fighters out of Gaza. Where is the world? Where is the world, saying, Yeah, do that! End this! Stop the suffering of people that you brought on! Now, again, that doesn’t absolve Israel of its actions in conducting the war. But I do have to question how it is that we haven’t seen a greater sustained condemnation and pressure on Hamas to stop what it started and to end the suffering of people that it initiated.”
And what was Garcia-Navarro’s very next question? Asking for a response to a State Department employee’s gripe about how the department “frequently rolled over for Israel, that no one would read his reports on civilian casualties.”
An agreement with the Saudis is not dead … but it means a pathway to a Palestinian state
Blinken revealed that he was originally scheduled to go to Saudi Arabia and to Israel on October 10 to pursue normalization and “work on the Palestinian component of any normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel.”
“Obviously, that didn’t happen,” he said.
Nevertheless, he added later in the interview, normalization with Saudi Arabia still “can happen tomorrow” based on the work the administration has done and “once there is an end to the conflict in Gaza and an agreement on a credible path forward for the Palestinians.”
According to Blinken, the prospect exists of a totally different region “with normalized relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and many other countries, Israel integrated into the security architecture of the region, and because it will be a requirement of any such normalization agreement, a real pathway to a Palestinian state.”
UN reports and Moshe Ya’alon do Israel damage abroad
Most Israelis pay little attention to UN reports concerning it, or off-the-wall comments by embittered ex-politicians and former generals and prime ministers carrying a bellyful of grievances against Netanyahu. So when a UN agency says that Israel is committing genocide, or former chief of staff and defense minister Moshe Ya’alon makes outlandish claims of genocide and war crimes, they dismiss them given the context: the UN agencies are implacably anti-Israel and Ya’alon’s hatred of Netanyahu has clouded his judgment.
But the world doesn’t see things in the same way, and when UN agencies determine that Israel’s actions border on genocide or Ya’alon says that Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing or war crimes, it enters the broader narrative that shapes the conversations.
Blinken did not refer to either the UN or Ya’alon, but his interviewer did, quoting UN figures on the Palestinian death toll, a UN committee report that found Israel’s warfare practices were “consistent with the characteristics of genocide,” and Ya’alon’s statement.
The latter, especially, was used as evidence of Israel’s wrongdoing. “This is internal criticism. This is not external. So I guess I would repeat the question and ask you, has Israel respected the rules of war in Gaza,?” she asked Blinken.
In other words, when a former Israeli defense minister accuses his own country of war crimes or a UN committee throws around the term genocide, it doesn’t stay inside the bubble of local politics — it shapes the way the world sees Israel. These claims, no matter how biased or politically driven, don’t just get brushed aside; they become part of the broader conversation. That, too, came out clearly in this interview.
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