The former President’s support for Israel abetted a humanitarian catastrophe. But Jacob Lew, who served as U.S. Ambassador to the country, still thinks that the Trump White House could learn from its predecessor.

But supporting the government in power is a little different than saying we’re going to help this government try to survive.

We didn’t do that, Isaac. We never took a position one way or another on what the government should be. There were people in the government who thought we wanted it to fall. There were people outside of the government who thought we weren’t doing enough. We work to make policy with the government that’s in place. In the essay, you write, “Given the tensions within the government, it took active and consistent U.S. engagement to manage the internal Israeli political dynamics and maintain the adequate flow of assistance. The message to our interlocutors in the Israeli government was in essence, ‘If the politics are hard, blame the United States.’ Allowing Netanyahu to cite a need to satisfy U.S. demands was crucial then—and remains crucial today.” That makes it seem like you were trying to help the current government stay in power. No, I think you’re missing the point. The point I’m making is if your goal is to keep humanitarian aid flowing and you see obstacles that have to be overcome, you have to be realistic about what it takes to achieve the goal that you have. Our goal was to get the aid in. We wanted Israel to prevail in the war. What we’re saying in the essay is realistically there were limitations on how decisions would be taken and the coalition was concerned about not falling. It was their concern, not ours. I take issue with the characterization of our position being that we were trying to defend the coalition when we were trying to solve the immediate, urgent issue, which was getting humanitarian assistance in.

So when you say that, “Allowing Netanyahu to cite a need to satisfy U.S. demands was crucial then—and remains crucial today,” what do you mean? Netanyahu doesn’t want to piss off the super far-right ministers in his government by having it seem that Israel is delivering aid. So you’re saying that allowing Netanyahu to cite the need to satisfy U.S. demands is crucial to him remaining in power, correct?

You’re putting words in my mouth. I’m not going to let that happen. What I’m saying is in order to get a decision through his Cabinet, he needed to be armed with positions that he was able and willing to use. And what we would say is, “We need you to do this, and if that is a strategic concern then you do what we need.” I understand that you can see that as political cover, but it’s political cover to get a policy enacted, not to preserve a coalition. Our goal was to get aid in, and we were trying to help drive the decision-making process in a constructive way. I think that’s very different from taking political sides in a domestic context in another country.

If the goal was to get aid in, some people would say that keeping the current government afloat was a bad idea. Another possibility would have been to seriously threaten to stop arming them. How do you respond to that?

Look, I think President Biden was clear immediately after October 7th that he would support Israel in achieving the military objective of defeating Hamas. There was always a debate about what that meant, and we engaged diplomatically on the difference between defeating Hamas as a military and governing authority and eliminating the last Hamas fighter, which we didn’t believe at the beginning and I don’t believe today is possible. But our goal was to help Israel defend its people and its country. That was not something that we used as a general matter to say, If you don’t do other things we want, we’ll stop defending you. Part of it was that President Biden was so clear in his position that it wouldn’t have even been credible. Well, Biden still had the power to do it. I’m not saying he was going to, but he could have, right?

Right, but when he was Vice-President, Joe Biden was famous for saying great powers can’t bluff. It was something that is deep inside him—his commitment to supporting Israel in a legitimate, just fight was clear, and that had to coexist with pressing them on these humanitarian issues.

This is a war that a former defense minister to Netanyahu has referred to as ethnic cleansing. Whether you agree with this characterization or not, there is a certain point at which the U.S. could choose to stop helping Israel. Your answer is almost tautological, right? Biden wasn’t going to do this, so he couldn’t do this.**

Isaac, I think you have to put things in theperspective of the time frame. We’re talking about late 2023, early 2024, up until 2025. We engaged with Israel on military tactics in a very direct way. Take the decision to proceed in Rafah in May of 2024. [More than one million Palestinians, many of whom had congregated in Rafah in the first months of the war, fled the city during the offensive.] The Israeli military plan that was originally designed and the one that was executed were very different. If you look at the way they fought in Rafah, the reason we didn’t criticize it is that they took the advice that we had given them and they modified their military plans to be consistent with targeted intelligence-driven attacks. So we were engaging not just on humanitarian assistance; we were engaging on the conduct of the war. I’m not saying that everything went the way we would’ve advised, and I’m not saying we didn’t call them in the middle of the night many times saying, What on earth happened just now? When you would call them in the middle of the night and say, “What on earth happened?,” what was usually the answer?

The general pattern was that in-the-moment stories were inaccurate, and that the Israeli military and government establishment were not in a position to fully explain yet. We could almost never get answers that explained what happened before the story was fully framed in international media, and then when the facts were fully developed, it turned out that the casualties were much lower, the number of civilians was much lower, and, in many cases, the children were children of Hamas fighters, not children taking cover in places. Sorry, what did you just say?

In many cases, the original number of casualties—

No, I meant the thing about who the children were.

They were often the children of the fighters themselves.

And therefore what follows from that?

What follows is that whether or not it was a legitimate military target flows from the population that’s there.

Hold on, Mr. Secretary. That’s not, in fact, correct, right? Whether it’s a legitimate target has to do with all kinds of things like proportionality. It doesn’t matter if the kids are the kids of—

If you’re in a command-and-control center, that’s different than if it’s a school that’s emptied out and innocent civilians are taking shelter there. If you’re the commander of a Hamas unit and you bring your family to a military site, that’s different. I’m not saying everything fits into that, and I’m not saying it’s not a tragedy.

It may shine a very poor light on Hamas, but who the kids are does not make a difference in terms of international law.

It is not the simple question that it originally appears to be when the initial report makes it sound like the target was just an empty school that families took cover in. In some cases, I’m not aware of the full explanations, because when I left we were still asking questions to get more detail, and saying to them that they have to be able to explain these things. And I’m not going to say that none of them fall outside of the bounds of things where there should be disciplinary action against some of the officers involved. I don’t know the answer to that.

Also, very obviously stupid and insufficient idea that Israel only offered as a figleaf to cover for their genocidal intent was totally intended to work, we couldn’t have known how stupid it was:

Reading your piece, I was shocked to learn that the Biden Administration’s floating aid pier was an Israeli idea. This was the floating pier that Biden talked about in the State of the Union, and was operational in the spring of 2024 briefly before stormy weather made it inoperable. It was embarrassing, and people made fun of the Administration for it. Now it seems like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was also an Israeli idea. Both of them have been P.R. disasters, and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been a humanitarian disaster. The Israeli-American dynamic just seems very strange.

When the decision on the pier was made, it was supposed to work in a better way. It wasn’t supposed to get ripped apart by waves in the Mediterranean. So the things that were ridiculed were something that turned out to be something we’re going to have to deal with when we try to use that technology in another place. I never saw a risk assessment that predicted it was going to have such a difficult engineering challenge. With that said, almost half a million meals came across it and it became a very important diplomatic moment. I think diplomatically it accomplished quite a lot. It fed a lot of people. [The total aid delivered by the pier in its nearly three weeks of operation added up to approximately six hundred truckloads—about the same amount that entered Gaza on an average day prior to the war.] I’m not happy that the pictures are of waves knocking down a U.S. floating pier. But that’s not on the government of Israel.