The word “genocide” was coined in 1941 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer from a Polish family, who combined the Greek word for a people (genos) and the Latin translation for killing (cide). At its most basic, genocide meant systematically destroying another group. Lemkin laid it out as a two-phase, often colonial process in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: First, the oppressor erases the “national pattern” of the victim. Then, it imposes its own. Genocide stretched from antiquity (Carthage) to modern times (Ireland).

“The term does not necessarily signify mass killings although it may mean that,” Lemkin explained in a 1945 article. “More often it refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations”—cultural institutions, physical structures, the economy—“of the life of national groups.” The “machine gun” was merely a “last resort.”

Lemkin was a lawyer, not a sociologist. By birthing the term “genocide,” he was not trying to taxonomize the horrors of war. Instead, Lemkin—who lost 49 family members in the Holocaust—hoped that he could identify a crime to stop it. Nazi terror could not simply be Germany’s “internal problem.” With genocide, Lemkin hoped to give legal and moral weight to international intervention. He hoped to bring into being an offense that could be policed and, in turn, stopped in a new and supposedly civilized world.

Today, as Israel stands accused by South Africa of genocide before the International Court of Justice for the methods used in its war on Gaza, it is worth recalling Lemkin’s arguments. The question of Israel’s actions has been a narrow one: Has the killing met the criteria for genocide under current international law? But Lemkin’s broader conception of the term—though it has been chipped away at by courts and has faded from public memory—has been less discussed.

The sad reality is that Israel’s actions likely met Lemkin’s original definition long before the war on Gaza. Starting in 1947, roughly 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled by Israel and barred from returning. After the 1967 war, Israel began occupying the remainder of what was once Palestine. It has since settled hundreds of thousands of people on that land, while subjecting Palestinians to what international human rights groups increasingly consider to be a system of apartheid. The goal of its settlement policy has been clear: to replace one cultural fabric with another.

Israel is not the only nation whose actions fit Lemkin’s conception of genocide. The same could be said of the formation of the United States and the mass slaughter of Native Americans. (In fact, Lemkin listed it as a textbook case.) What is different now is a more obvious hypocrisy after decades of international governance designed to create a supposedly new, rules-based order.

“Genocide” represented Lemkin’s desire to move toward this internationally policed peace. Douglas Irvin-­Erickson, a George Mason professor who wrote an intellectual biography of Lemkin, said he aspired for a form of world citizenship that reflected his “stunningly broad indictment of oppressive state powers.”

It’s no surprise then that when making it a crime after World War II, nations were careful to protect themselves. The Soviet Union removed political groups from those that could be victims of genocide, to secure a free hand for its purges of dissidents. The United States kept Lemkin’s ideas about cultural genocide out, lest it be in violation for Jim Crow laws. The convention was a “lynching bill in disguise” in the words of a Louisiana segregationist. (Congress only ratified the genocide treaty in 1988 after Ronald Reagan caused a backlash by laying a wreath at a German military cemetery that included the graves of 49 members of the SS.)

“Outlawing genocide becomes this marker of a civilized society,” Irvin-Erickson explained. “But at the same time, [Lemkin] is watching the delegates who are negotiating the Genocide Convention, and they’re literally writing their own genocides out of the law.” His greatest allies came from what is now called the Global South—the nations that had been, or reasonably feared becoming, victims.

Since the Genocide Convention’s adoption, international courts have arrived at a narrow reading of the already narrow interpretation of Lemkin’s concept, says Leila Sadat, the James Carr Professor of International Criminal Law at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. The emphasis of the law is determining whether a country or individual has killed massive numbers of a group of people, and whether they did so with a provable intent to destroy that group. This poses a problem for prosecutors since most perpetrators of genocide are not as transparent as Adolf Hitler.  

This winnowing of what counts as genocide would have deeply frustrated Lemkin. As Irvin-Erickson has written, genocide was “not a spontaneous occurrence” for Lemkin but a “process that begins long before and continues long after the physical killing of the victims.” Melanie O’Brien, a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, emphasized that the dehumanization that leads to one group killing another en masse is not a prelude to genocide but a part of it.

But because its definition has been narrowed, Rwanda has been the most clear-cut case of genocide since the Holocaust according to international judges. For the horrors that occurred in Bosnia, a seemingly textbook genocide of Bosnian Muslims at the hands of Slobodan Milošević and fellow Serbs, only the 1995 slaughter of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica cleared the bar as an act of genocide in international trials of Serbian war criminals. (Milošević died in prison before any conviction could be secured.)

In the eyes of Sadat, one of the world’s leading experts on international criminal law, the Genocide Convention has become more of “a monument to the Holocaust” than a tool that can be effectively deployed in court. Still, she says South Africa may prevail in clearing the “very high bar” needed to prove a charge of genocide in court due to the scale of death in Gaza, the extreme rhetoric of top Israeli officials, and Israel’s decision to restrict food and other humanitarian assistance. “A question I have is: Is this a Srebrenica moment?” she says. “And I fear that we may well be looking at exactly that.”

In May, Aryeh Neier, a co-founder of Human Rights Watch, concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza have crossed the line. Neier wrote in the New York Review of Books that he initially refrained from using the term but that the obstruction of aid into Gaza had convinced him: “Israel is engaged in genocide.”

The situation is so grave that, even under the current constrained definition, the judges of the International Court of Justice may eventually agree. In the face of Hamas’ brutal attack and its officials’ repeated calls to annihilate Israel, the Netanyahu government has turned to physical destruction—a technique that Lemkin considered to be the “last and most effective phase of genocide”—at a scale that is unprecedented in its history. More than 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, most of them civilians. The deaths of thousands more Palestinians trapped under the rubble are believed to still be uncounted. A famine has begun. 

Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, is now seeking warrants for the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas’ leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But Israel remains undeterred. In late May, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its assault on Rafah. Days later, the Israeli military used American bombs in a strike on Rafah that killed dozens of civilians. Lemkin saw something like this ineffectiveness of international governance coming.

“Better laws are made by people with greater hearts,” Lemkin wrote about how his original definition of genocide had been undermined in its codification. “They want non­enforceable laws with many loopholes in them, so that they can manage life like currency in a bank.”

While testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Power, administrator of USAID and former US Ambassador to the UN, said that officials have “credible” information that famine is occurring in northern Gaza. Up until now, the UN has said famine in Gaza is “imminent.” (USAID did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Power’s comments.)

Power’s statement came after Rep. Julián Castro (D-Texas) asked her about news reports that some USAID officials had sent a cable to the National Security Council warning that famine was likely already occurring in parts of Gaza and that deaths due to hunger would likely “accelerate in the weeks ahead,” as first reported by HuffPost last week. 

Power told Castro that those cables were based on a report compiled by a UN-backed agency and released last month that found that famine in northern Gaza was projected to occur between mid-March and May 2024.

“That is their assessment,” she told Castro of the agency’s findings, “and we believe that assessment is credible.” 

“So there’s—famine is already occurring there?” Castro asked. 

“That is—yes,” Power replied. 

One in three kids in northern Gaza are malnourished, Power said at yesterday’s hearing, adding that officials expect rates of “severe, acute malnutrition” for kids under five to continue rising. The World Health Organization said last month that 27 children in Gaza had reportedly died of malnutrition since the start of the war last October. Experts say that those who survive could be left with life-long health complications, including stunted development.

“Food must flow, and food has not flowed in sufficient quantities to avoid this imminent famine in the south and these conditions that are giving rise already to child deaths in the north,” Power said. 

It is illegal under the Foreign Assistance Act for the United States to provide military aid to countries that are obstructing US humanitarian assistance without the president notifying Congress that doing so is in America’s national security interest. Dylan Williams, the vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, told Mother Jones last month that Biden “is not complying with the law at this point” given the extensive evidence that Israel is obstructing the delivery of food, medicine, and other aid.

The sad reality of all this is that Power is the author of an excellent book on the United States’ historic failure to prevent genocide and other atrocities. She understands the playbook the US government uses to deflect responsibility and render itself impotent better than almost anyone. As she wrote in A Problem from Hell in 2002:

America’s nonresponse to the Turkish horrors [during the Armenian genocide] established patterns that would be repeated. Time and again the U.S. government would be reluctant to cast aside its neutrality and formally denounce a fellow state for its atrocities. Time and again though U.S. officials would learn that huge numbers of civilians were being slaughtered, the impact of this knowledge would be blunted by their uncertainty about the facts and their rationalization that a firmer U.S. stand would make little difference. Time and again American assumptions and policies would be contested by Americans in the field closest to the slaughter, who would try to stir the imaginations of their political superiors. And time and again these advocates would fail to sway Washington. The United States would offer humanitarian aid to the survivors of ‘race murder’ but would leave those committing it alone.

What makes the current famine and slaughter in Gaza different from some of the examples detailed in the book is that the United States has played a key role in enabling them while Power has been a high-ranking official in its government.

Power’s best and most thorough reporting is on the Bosnian genocide. She makes clear she believes the United States should have used its military might far earlier to stop Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, even though his war crimes were not being committed with US weapons.

The same cannot be said today.

What is also clear from the book is that Power believes that publicly resigning is one of the most effective things that civil servants and political appointees can do to try to stop ongoing atrocities. A section of her book titled “Exit” begins bluntly:

The State Department is difficult to leave. As with most hierarchical institutions, rituals entrench the solidarity of ‘members.’ Stiff ‘initiation costs’ include fiercely competitive foreign service exams, tedious years of stamping visas in consular offices around the world, and dull desk jobs in the home office. Because of the association of service with ‘honor’ and ‘country,’ exit is often seen as betrayal. Those few who depart on principle are excommunicated or labeled whistle-blowers. US foreign policy lore is not laden with tales of the heroic resignee.

This reality, Power stresses, is to be lamented, not celebrated. She portrays the State Department officials who resigned over President Bill Clinton’s inaction over Bosnia as heroes. She describes how one resignation can inspire another—creating a cascade of public dissent. At the same time, Power is clear-eyed about how hard it is to move large institutions like the State Department. Still, she believes it is worth trying.

But many end up staying as a result of a noble but ultimately twisted calculus. “[T]he very people who care enough about a policy to contemplate resigning in protest often believe their departure will make it less likely that the policy will improve,” Power writes. “Bureaucrats can easily fall into the ‘efficacy trap,’ overestimating the chances they will succeed in making change. Dropping out can feel like copping out. The perverse result is that officials may exhibit a greater tendency to stay in an institution the worse they deem its actions.”

Sheline, who is 38, holds a PhD in political science from George Washington University and previously worked at the Quincy Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC that aims to promote responsible statecraft. At the State Department, Sheline was doing a two-year fellowship at the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, which is often known as DRL.

Her work focused on promoting human rights in the Middle East and North Africa. While she did not work on Israel-Palestine directly, Sheline participated in internal dissent discussions and forums. Still, the US backing of Israel’s military campaign, she told me, affected her ability to do her job. Sheline found that it was becoming almost impossible to make a difference because of the lack of credibility of the United States. “The civil society groups are not really interested in having anything to do with the US government right now,” she explained, “understandably.”

Sheline was well aware that resigning publicly could foreclose future job opportunities within the US government, but felt that the stakes were too high not to do so. She told Democracy Now! that she could not help but imagine a future conversation with her young daughter. You were at the State Department. What did you do?

“I want to be able to tell her that I didn’t stay silent,” she said, holding back tears.

Sheline and I spoke on Tuesday about why she quit and what she hopes her protest will mean.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Was there a moment when you became convinced that it was better to resign than to try to influence the direction of how the war was being handled from the inside?

I don’t think there was necessarily one clarifying moment. It became clear over time that being on the inside, I wasn’t going to be able to make a difference. I tried through the dissent channel. State had internal fora, which I participated in. I tried to do what I could on the inside.

In terms of deciding to go public, it came from observing the ways in which public pressure—including through things like the uncommitted campaign—seems to be the only thing that is getting this administration to shift even a little bit. When colleagues asked if I’d be willing to resign publicly, that is what ultimately caused me to make that decision. My hope is that by resigning publicly I can contribute to this effort to build public pressure.

I do think that many, many people are suffering quietly. Everybody has this learned helplessness. Or they’re afraid of being seen as antisemitic. But I think many, many, many Americans are horrified by what’s happening. So, I would encourage people to publicly express their opposition to the policy by putting up a “Ceasefire in Gaza” sign. Because I think that’s what it’s going to take: Other people seeing that they’re not alone.

You’ve said that a political calculation has been made within the administration to support Israel. How did you come to that conclusion?

It comes from conversations with people, whether it’s in State or not in State, of just trying to understand: Why is the US continuing to do this, even in abrogation of American laws? This administration has talked a lot about overcoming the ways that the previous administration broke the law or the previous president breaks laws or disregards international institutions, etc. The Biden administration wanted to reestablish America’s moral leadership or standing for legal leadership, yet they are not following American laws.

So to try to understand why they continue to make that calculation, what I’ve heard people say is it must be the political calculus. The assumption is it’s just too politically toxic to do anything other than be in lockstep with the government of Israel. It seems that is changing and I just hope that the administration is paying enough attention to realize that they might be making the wrong political calculus here. And if they’re making these decisions based on politics, it’s time to make some new decisions.

In looking into Joe Biden’s record on this issue, I came across a 1984 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing at which he was arguing in favor of moving the US embassy to Jerusalem decades before Donald Trump did so. Biden said at the time: “I don’t know why we just don’t simply move it to the western sector of Jerusalem and be done with it…If the Arabs can sustain and understand and swallow our policy in Lebanon, they can take about anything.” Conscious or not, how is a bias toward seeing Israeli lives as more real and more valuable impacting how the war is being conducted?

We’ve heard over and over the dehumanization coming out of official statements from the White House, from the State Department. Palestinians died rather than were killed by Israel. So much more of an emphasis on the anguish of the families of hostages, which obviously is very real and devastating anguish. But again, if the policy is to get the hostages back then let’s make that the policy and actually make that happen. But clearly that is not what the government of Israel is actually interested in doing, or at least [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has few political incentives to try to get the Israeli hostages back.

One hundred percent I would agree that both Biden himself and the administration writ large have demonstrated that they consider Israeli lives to be worth more than Palestinian lives.

You’ve talked about how decisions about the war are being made at the very top. Who do you see as shaping the direction of the war and what is the impact of having such a small group in charge?

This question comes up a lot. Who is responsible? Is it Biden? Is it [White House Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa] Brett McGurk? Is it [National Security Advisor] Jake Sullivan?

My sense is that Biden is a self-identified Zionist and I think has been very clear, like in that quote you just read, in everything he’s said. It’s not so surprising that this is the policy he’s taken given his history and statements.

In terms of McGurk and his role in pushing for Israeli-Saudi normalization and his support for the United Arab Emirates. The willingness of the Biden and the Trump administration to overlook public opinion in the Middle East to align with these authoritarian rulers and to discount what people actually would want in the region is really frustrating.

The State Department has repeatedly claimed that it has found no violations of international law by Israel. In A Problem from Hell, Samantha Power, who is now in charge of USAID, quotes a former State Department official as saying: “The intelligence community is responsive to what the bosses want to know.” How much do you think that the US not finding violations of international law is a function of trying not to find them?

[State Department spokesperson] Matt Miller is lying. They have found violations. They’re just not willing to make them public. That’s not against him personally. He’s just doing his job. He’s the mouthpiece for what the administration wants said on these issues. There are people working very hard inside State to try to hold Israel accountable, but none of that will actually go into effect unless Biden wants it to.

[Editor’s note: According to a spokesperson, the State Department has not “at this point concluded that Israel has acted in violation of international humanitarian law,” but said that “processes are ongoing” for monitoring the situation.]

How do those findings get neutered or ignored as they are moved up the chain?

Some of this stuff I can’t really talk about. The people who are trying to work on this issue don’t want too much attention. People who are trying to work on these accountability measures are afraid that if the measures are leaked before they’re actually put into place that it would mean they would never be put into place. My hope by going public and contributing to public pressure is that the administration decides it is time to implement some of these measures. That it’s just grown untenable to continue to deny reality.

It is unfortunate for me as someone who is quite concerned about the return of a Trump administration—knowing what that could mean for the future of American democracy, for the future of American society. I don’t want to live in that America. I am also just so dismayed by the ways this government is doing so many of the same things as far as the assault on the truth and on what people see with their own eyes. And disregarding US laws.

What would it look like for the administration to be honest about violations of international law and what consequences should follow from that?

The Leahy Laws, for example, that say units of foreign militaries that engage in gross violations of human rights are no longer eligible to receive US military assistance. Or that foreign governments that block American humanitarian aid render themselves ineligible to receive, again, foreign military assistance.

Israel is in violation of both of those laws, and any number of US laws related to those broader stipulations.

Heading into October 7, the Biden administration was following a Jared Kushner-style approach by attempting to build on the Abraham Accords by normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Post-October 7, it seems like the plan is to do the same thing but on an even bigger scale and with more rhetorical emphasis on Palestinians. Is it accurate to say that the strategy has changed little since October 7 and what do you make of that?

I agree it remains similar. I think it reflects the personalities involved. Again Brett McGurk. This is his big goal. In general, I think the Abraham Accords are unnecessary because these were not governments that were threatening Israel in any way. These were governments that were already quietly maintaining normalized relations with Israel they just weren’t public about it.

The extent to which the previous administration and this administration are willing to make an open-ended commitment to both Saudi Arabia and Israel is in no way supportive of US interests and would only require the US military to support both of these authoritarian governments. And I’m calling the Israeli government authoritarian given its policy of apartheid—as well as within Israeli society itself its efforts to disempower the judiciary.

Committing American service members to go to war to prop up the House of Saud or protect Bibi Netanyahu from going to jail, this is not in US interest. I think the entire Abraham Accord project is unnecessary.

To what extent do you think that some of these policies that seem nonsensical are the result of making an initial calculation that there is no room to challenge Israel because of domestic politics. And then you have to think of things to do within that box and they end up not making much sense?

I would agree with that assessment. Alternatively, what’s been reported is that Biden came in not really wanting to do much on the Middle East, hoping to shift US foreign policy so it’s not so bogged down in the Middle East—as it has been for decades now.

But you had Brett McGurk, specifically, and the National Security Council focusing on trying to get Saudi-Israeli normalization. It would have been a very big deal. It may still be a very big deal, again, because of the open-ended security commitment that that would entail.

It just seems kind of ridiculous. If your boss has told you, I don’t want to hear about your portfolio. You handle it for me. And then what they end up doing—that’s why it was called the Al-Aqsa Flood—Hamas was trying to prevent Saudi-Israeli normalization. I guess I’m sort of confused why Biden hasn’t fired McGurk already.

We’re almost six months into the war. More than 30,000 people have been killed. Widespread famine appears to be imminent, if not already present. Israel seems to be trying to start a regional war. Yet the US is blocking funding for UNRWA, the most important aid organization in Gaza, while sending billions in military aid to Israel. Is there anything that can change Biden’s mind or the White House’s direction?

It seems like political pressure is what has shifted the needle at all. Things like the abstention in the UN Security Council, even though they turned around right away and said it was non-binding. It’s ridiculous. But they did abstain. 

I don’t think Biden wants to lose the election over this. I worry a little bit that there are probably some portions, especially within the Arab-American community, that the Democrats have just lost. There’s no way they would vote for Biden after all this.

My hope is that if the administration realizes this could cost them the election and they shift significantly just based on that electoral calculus, that there would be people who otherwise wouldn’t have supported him because of this policy who would reconsider and support him if there was a significant shift.

Using America’s massive leverage in the form of cutting off weapons to Israel. Not providing this military aid to Israel. Insisting that humanitarian aid get into Gaza. Insisting on a ceasefire. People keep saying things like: The US doesn’t actually have that much leverage. No, the US does have leverage. It is not being used. Israel can’t fight the war without US weapons.

Update, April 4, 2023: This story has been updated with a statement from the State Department. 

In a statement released by the White House on Saturday, Biden said that the “bipartisan funding bill I just signed keeps the government open, invests in the American people, and strengthens our economy and national security.” At the same time, he added, “This agreement represents a compromise, which means neither side got everything it wanted.”

The White House did not specify the tradeoffs. Republican priorities that made it into the bill include funding for 2,000 additional Border Patrol agents and money for additional detention beds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Meanwhile, Biden said the measure expands “access to child care, invests in cancer research, funds mental health and substance use care.”

Some of the most controversial provisions relate to Israel and the ongoing war in Gaza. The bill blocks funding from going to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency—the most important organization serving Palestinian refugees in Gaza and throughout the region—until March 2025. The move comes after Israel alleged in January that a dozen UNRWA employees—less than 0.1 percent of its 13,000 workers in Gaza—had participated in the October 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,200 people. (About 100 hostages taken during the attack are believed to be alive in Gaza.)

After learning of the allegation from Israel, which has long tried to undermine UNRWA, the agency fired all of the surviving workers and opened an independent investigation that is ongoing. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who voted in favor of the spending bill, has been vocal in his support of UNRWA.

"If you look at the person who's in charge of operations on the ground in #Gaza for @UNRWA, it's about a 20-year (former) US Army veteran. You can be sure he's not in cahoots with Hamas"

Thanks @ChrisVanHollen @ScottAnderGaza pic.twitter.com/CV4DHWBenz

— UNRWA (@UNRWA) March 23, 2024

Nevertheless, Congress is blocking funding for the organization at a time when Gazans are on the brink of famine and children have died of starvation. The Foundation for Middle East Peace called this funding decision a “moral obscenity and will directly contribute to killing innocent people.”

In January, the Biden administration contributed to the backlash against UNRWA by temporarily suspending funds for the agency after learning about the Israeli allegations from UNRWA’s head Philippe Lazzarini. As I reported earlier this month:

In doing so, the administration imperiled the only organization capable of responding to the catastrophe caused by the Israeli assault: Scott Paul, a humanitarian policy expert at Oxfam, described the agency as the “backbone” of the response in Gaza and explained that up to 80 percent of aid to the area is dependent on it in some form. The organization has been feeding and sheltering more than 1 million people in Gaza.

The recently signed bill includes the more than $3 billion in military aid that the United States has provided to Israel on an annual basis for years. The combination of military aid for Israel with the UNRWA funding ban led Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to vote against the bill. Sanders explained in a statement:

While hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children face starvation in Gaza, this bill actually prohibits funding to UNRWA, the key United Nations aid agency delivering life-saving humanitarian support. This will only intensify the already horrific situation in Gaza. This bill also provides another $3.3 billion in US military aid for Netanyahu’s right-wing government to continue this barbaric war. The Netanyahu government should not receive another penny from US taxpayers.

In the statement released by the White House, Biden called on Congress to pass the supplemental national security spending bill that is currently stalled in the House. That bill includes $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, $14 billion in additional security assistance for Israel, and $9 billion in humanitarian aid for Palestine, Ukraine, and other parts of the world. 

The funds for Israel would be one of the largest military aid packages in US history, even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to ignore Biden by severely limiting the amount of aid allowed into Gaza and vowing to invade Rafah in spite of whether the US ultimately signs off on that operation. More than 1 million people are currently sheltering in Rafa, and according to the local health ministry, more than 32,000 people have been killed in Gaza—most of them women and children.

The military aid for Israel in the spending bill and the supplemental national security bill Biden supports come with no strings attached. In contrast, the spending bill contains long-standing provisions under which economic aid for Palestinians would be suspended if it obtains national recognition at the United Nations without Israeli permission, or if Palestinians initiate or support efforts to have Israelis prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called the spending bill “unconscionable” and voted against it. “The actions of Hamas should not be tied to whether a three-year-old can eat,” Ocasio-Cortez said Sunday on CNN. “The actions of Hamas do not justify forcing thousands—hundreds of thousands—of people to eat grass as their bodies consume themselves.”

As part of Sunday’s air assault, Russia used some advanced hypersonic missiles that are hard to shoot down. Overall, the Ukrainian Air Force said that it was able to intercept most of the Russian missiles and drones. Ukraine’s energy minister said Russian did manage to damage an energy facility in the western part of the country. Initial reports suggested that there were no casualties from the attacks.

The timing of Sunday’s attack is noteworthy in that it comes two days after terrorists affiliated with ISIS-K killed more than 130 people at a suburban Moscow concert hall. The attack was a major security failure on the part of President Vladimir Putin’s government.

On March 7, the United States issued a security alert warning that it was monitoring reports “that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts.” Days before the attack, Putin disparaged the statement, describing it as “obvious blackmail” with “the intention to intimidate and destabilize our society.”

On Saturday, Putin tried to suggest without evidence that Ukraine may have had a role in the assault, saying, “Based on preliminary information, a window for crossing the border was prepared for them by the Ukrainian side.” Ukrainian officials have denied any involvement.

Vice President Kamala Harris further reinforced the Ukrainian assertion in a Sunday interview with ABC in which she said there is no evidence “whatsoever” of a Ukrainian connection. “In fact, ” she said, “what we know to be the case is that ISIS-K is actually, by all accounts, responsible for what happened.” Harris also said that the attack was an “act of terrorism…the number of people who’ve been killed is obviously a tragedy, and we should all send our condolences to those families.”

On Sunday, Russia is observing a national day of mourning. Along with the 137 bodies recovered from the concert hall, at least 60 survivors remain in critical condition.  Authorities in Russia say that 11 people are now in custody, including, four described by Russia’s Federal Security Service as having been “directly involved.” 

NBC News announced on Friday that McDaniel would be joining its politics team. The decision was lambasted by reporters. Within NBCUniversal, MSNBC News President Rashida Jones has told employees that the cable network has no plans to have McDaniel appear on its shows. On Sunday, NBC News’ chief political analyst Chuck Todd criticized the decision on Meet the Press.

Quite a moment on Meet the Press this morning. pic.twitter.com/1RKvAq7mj2

— Mike Hixenbaugh (@Mike_Hixenbaugh) March 24, 2024

Meet the Press host Kristen Welker said that the Sunday interview was arranged before McDaniel’s hiring was announced and that it would be conducted as a standard news interview, not as a conversation with a new colleague. In response to questions from Welker, McDaniel appeared to renounce a number of the positions that she had amplified in her previous job.

Take the 2020 election. As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote in response to McDaniel being hired by NBC:

McDaniel did more than shill for the president. She played an important role in public and behind the scenes in Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election—and with it, two and a half centuries of constitutional governance. That should be a clear red line for employers in the truth-telling business. In November 2020 story in Politico, just a few months before the Capitol insurrection, Tim Alberta offered a glimpse of how McDaniel abetted Trump’s lies about the election and allowed her party organization to amplify them in even more absurd ways.

As Alberta reported at the time:

McDaniel told multiple confidants that she doubted there was any scalable voter fraud in Michigan. Nevertheless, McDaniel told friends and fellow Republicans that she needed to stay the course with Trump and his legal team. This wasn’t about indulging him, she said, but rather about demonstrating a willingness to fight—even when the fight couldn’t be won.

This is why McDaniel has sanctioned her employees, beginning with top spokesperson Liz Harrington, to spread countless demonstrable falsehoods in the weeks since Election Day. It’s why the RNC, on McDaniel’s watch, tweeted out a video clip of disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell claiming Trump “won in a landslide” (when he lost by more than 6 million votes nationally) and alleging a global conspiracy to rig the election against him.

In contrast, on Sunday, McDaniel acknowledged during the interview that Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president. When Welker pointed out this was the first time the former chair had done so, McDaniel disagreed. Then she was presented with an exchange she had with Chris Wallace last year in which she refused to acknowledge Biden had legitimately won the 2020 election. “I don’t think he won it fair,” McDaniel said in the clip. “I don’t. I’m not going to say that.” Fast forward to Sunday, when McDaniel said, “He won. He’s the legitimate president…Fair and square.”

McDaniel also condemned the violence on January 6, noting that the RNC put out a statement that day to that effect. Technically true, but McDaniel failed to mention that the January 6 statement did not say who won the 2020 election, nor did it mention that the assault on the Capitol was motivated by conspiracy theories promoted by a Republican president and his allies.

One day after January 6, McDaniel put Trump on speakerphone during an RNC meeting at a Ritz-Carlton on Florida’s Amelia Island. The crowd responded by chanting “We love you!”

As always, McDaniel read the room. Later in January 2021, she joined Trump on a call in which she pushed Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers not to certify the results of the election. “If you can go home tonight, do not sign it,” McDaniel said, according to a recording obtained by the Detroit News. “We will get you attorneys.”

In another exchange on Sunday, Welker asked McDaniel whether, like Trump, she supported pardoning those who had been convicted of crimes for their action on January 6. McDaniel said she did not. Why then, Welker asked, was McDaniel only now making that point, given that Trump had been calling for pardons for months. “When you’re the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team,” McDaniel replied. “Now I get to be a little bit more myself.”

In reality, the new McDaniel looks a lot like the old one: a craven political operative willing to play any part that comes with sufficient compensation and prestige. 

Still, even this proved too much. One day later, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the article was based on “uninformed speculation” by anonymous officials and that he wouldn’t be entertaining hypotheticals about how the US would respond to a major invasion of Rafah, which US officials have signaled they would accept in a more limited form. The dismissal was the latest indication of the administration’s almost complete unwillingness to even discuss imposing serious consequences on Israel for waging a war that has killed more than 30,000 people, most of whom were women and children.

Instead, the administration has adopted a newfound feeling of impotence. As State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller put it last month, “The United States does not dictate to Israel what it must do, just as we don’t dictate to any country what it must do.” The absurdity of this position was made clear when a reporter interjected, “Unless you invade them.” Miller couldn’t help but laugh.

It has been obvious for months that there are many things the Biden administration can do to restrain Israel and distance itself from a war that has been condemned throughout the world. The problem has not been a lack of options but a lack of political will. Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator who is now the president of the US/Middle East Project, told me, “I think many of us who had very low expectations of the US and of Biden have had a rude awakening as to how much lower the actual performance has been [compared] to even the lowest of low expectations.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s decision on Thursday to call on Israel to hold new elections is a sign of mainstream Democrats’ increasing awareness that the status quo is unsustainable. Still, neither Schumer nor Biden have supported more immediate and consequential steps such as limiting the transfer of US weapons to Israel.

Experts disagree about whether the United States could immediately force Israel to end the war. Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, and others believe that Biden could likely end the war in short order with a phone call, absent domestic political constraints. Robert Ford, a former US ambassador to Algeria and Syria who is now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told me he was more skeptical of Biden’s ability to quickly force Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hand but agreed the United States has more leverage than it is using.

As evidence of how important US backing has been for Israel, Levy cited veteran Israeli journalist Yoav Limor, who wrote in Hebrew earlier this month that without “Biden’s support, Israel would long ago have been forced to stop the fighting in Gaza due to a shortage of weapons, while at the same time it would have been forced to deal with United Nations Security Council resolutions (and possibly sanctions) against it.” Still, Levy thought it might take weeks or months of sustained US pressure to compel Israel to change course.

In any case, Biden is under no obligation to provide thousands of bombs to a country whose leader has consistently ignored him as Israel wages a brutal war that has leveled much of Gaza and caused children to die of starvation. “We need to stick to our own values,” Ford said. “If our values say, ‘Starving children is way beyond the pale,’ then we need to react to that and take stern action, whether or not it changes Israeli policy.”

Here are what some of Biden’s current options look like, according to experts I spoke with this month:

Restrict Arms Transfers

Levy and others agree that restricting arms sales is the most important step the United States can take to influence Israel and help bring the war to a close. The country’s reliance on US weapons is made clear by the fact that the United States has approved and delivered more than 100 separate military sales for Israel—almost one per day—since the war began.

Among other weapons, the United States has sent tens of thousands of artillery shells and thousands of unguided “dumb” bombs. It is not known just how many of them have been used in Gaza, but Israelis have not hidden the fact that these weapons are essential to the war effort. “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US,” retired Israeli Maj. General Itzhak Brik said in November. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability.” 

The president has broad authority to restrict weapons transfers under US law. Brian Finucane, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, worked for nearly a decade as a State Department attorney. He said the process by which Biden could stop more weapons from being sent to Israel is simple. “He tells the State Department, ‘Nope. Pause these transfers. We’re not doing this anymore.'”

An arms transfer memorandum released by the Biden administration last year states that the United States considers arms shipments on a “case-by-case basis” after taking into account US foreign policy interests, whether the weapons are more likely than not to be used to commit serious violations of international law, and other factors. Sarah Harrison, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group who was previously a Defense Department attorney, explains that the standard set by the policy doesn’t appear to be applied to Israel. 

There are many precedents for blocking weapons from being sent to Israel and other US allies. President Ronald Reagan halted the shipment of cluster bombs to Israel during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon that Reagan called a “holocaust” in a private call with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. In 2016, President Barack Obama limited arms sales to Saudi Arabia due to the number of civilians the country was killing with its bombing campaign in Yemen. The Biden administration has resisted many of Ukraine’s requests for advanced weapons systems.

Follow the Law

There is a strong case that even if the Biden administration wants to keep sending military aid to Israel, it is legally prohibited from doing so. Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act blocks the president from providing military assistance to a country that restricts access to US humanitarian assistance. Aid organizations, reporters, administration officials, and Israel’s own finance minister have made it clear that Israel is restricting humanitarian assistance from the United States and other countries for people in Gaza. As a result, Dylan Williams, the vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, said Biden “is not complying with the law at this point.”

Last week, 25 nongovernmental organizations—including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Oxfam—wrote a letter to Biden that called continuing to send military aid to Israel an “apparent violation of US law” in light of Israeli restrictions on humanitarian aid. Eight senators sent a separate letter to Biden last week about the Foreign Assistance Act that stated, “According to public reporting and your own statements, the Netanyahu government is in violation of this law.” One of the signers, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), told the New Yorker that he is “flabbergasted” that the president hasn’t invoked the Foreign Assistance Act to restrict military assistance to Israel. 

If Israel were letting in enough aid, the United States would not be airdropping food into Gaza and building a temporary port in Gaza. Ford has called the airdrops the greatest humiliation of the United States by Israel he has ever seen. He is struck by the fact that the US is acting as if it is “trying to get supplies into besieged people surrounded by an enemy of the United States.”

The president can get around the restrictions in the Foreign Assistance Act by notifying Congress that he believes providing military aid to Israel is in America’s national security interest, despite Israel restricting aid. But Biden has not done so. 

Williams said the administration could also potentially turn to the so-called Leahy Laws, which prohibit arms from being sent to foreign military units or individuals that are implicated in “gross violations of human rights.” The Independent recently asked retired Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy if providing arms to Israel currently complies with his namesake law. “No,” Leahy replied. “Is that succinct enough for you?”

Withdraw Support for Additional Military Aid

The Biden administration is urging Congress to pass a supplemental national security funding bill that includes $60 billion for Ukraine, $14 billion in security assistance for Israel, and $9 billion in humanitarian aid for Palestine, Ukraine, and other parts of the world. The bill has already passed the Senate with bipartisan support. It is now held up in the House, where Republicans are divided over the Ukraine funding.

If it passes, it would be the largest aid package for Israel since 1979, when President Jimmy Carter rewarded Israel and Egypt for signing a peace treaty. In contrast, this package would reward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for publicly ignoring Biden and subjecting Palestinians to what the president has called “indiscriminate bombing.”

Support UN Ceasefire Resolutions

On October 18, the United States was the only member of the 15-member UN Security Council to veto a resolution that called for “humanitarian pauses” to deliver aid to people under siege in Gaza. In December, it was the lone Security Council member to vote against a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. Days later, when the entire United Nations voted on a ceasefire measure, the United States, Israel, and eight other nations voted no, while 176 countries voted yes or abstained. (The eight nations that joined the United States and Israel—including Austria, Liberia, and Nauru—are home to less than 1 percent of the world’s population.) Last month, the United States vetoed a third Security Council resolution that called for a halt to the war. 

The Biden administration does not have to vote yes for these measures to pass. Even if the US abstained, the resolutions would pass since no other permanent Security Council member is exercising its veto power. Williams pointed out that the Reagan administration allowed through 21 UN resolutions that were critical of Israel. 

“A responsible United States would be actually leading from the front and putting forward its own Security Council resolutions that would seek to impose a ceasefire,” Finucane said. “The US is just not doing any of that.”

Push for a Permanent Ceasefire

Vice President Kamala Harris made news earlier this month by calling for an “immediate ceasefire.” What initially got less attention was the part that came immediately after: “for at least the next six weeks.” In other words, Harris was backing the administration’s existing policy of pushing for a temporary pause in the fighting. Ford finds it “exceptionally peculiar” that the administration is “taking credit with Democratic voters” for trying to get a temporary ceasefire at the same time it is vetoing Security Council resolutions demanding an indefinite halt to the war.

The administration hasn’t said what would happen after a temporary ceasefire ends. “After six weeks, then what?” Ford asks. “The answer is implicit that the fighting resumes, as it did last time. How you’re going to maintain sustainable humanitarian access if the fighting flares up again after six weeks, they do not explain.”

Levy said the United States should put forward a ceasefire deal that actually has a chance of being accepted by both sides. With a six-week deal, Levy explained, Netanyahu “is going to go out to the cameras and say, ‘We have a 42-day pause and I’m preparing now to call up the reservists. Because on day 43, we’re going into Rafah.’ How do you expect Hamas to agree to that?”

There are other things Biden could do that are less directly related to the war, such as sanctioning top Israeli officials for their actions in the West Bank or moving to recognize Palestinian statehood. But after five months of war, there are still few signs that Biden will suddenly embrace the need to constrain Israel—and if he does it will come months too late.

“We’re [at] a minimum of 30,000 dead people,” said Levy, the former Israeli peace negotiator. “This level of death and destruction and starvation and displacement. Absolute carnage. And you are still arming them? You are still backing up their narrative? And the best you can come up with is a bit of optimism over an ice cream and expressions of frustration and name-calling? Oh, man. That’s really bad.”

The interruption came after Biden criticized Donald Trump for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Fellow Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan has demanded that Van Orden apologize for his conduct, saying that Van Orden “continues to embarrass Wisconsin and the United States Congress with his constant unbecoming behavior.”  

Van Orden defended his conduct in a radio interview on Friday in which he claimed that Biden’s speech “could have been delivered by Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong or President Xi.” In some respects, Thursday’s outburst was a sign of progress. Unlike two previous incidents, Van Orden was shouting at an adult this time.

Cursing Out Congressional Pages

Van Orden got in trouble last year for yelling at a group of 16- and 17-year-old Senate pages for lying on the floor of the Capitol Rotunda to take photos. According to a transcript written by one of the pages immediately after the incident, Van Orden said some of the following things to the teenagers:

“Wake the fuck up you little shits.”

“What the fuck are you all doing?”

“Get the fuck out of here. You are defiling the space.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“I don’t give a fuck who you are, get out.”

Van Orden never apologized. Instead, he defended taking the teenagers to task for “defiling” the Capitol and treating the building like a “frat house common room.” (After losing his first congressional race in November 2020, Van Orden went to the Capitol on January 6 but did not enter the building.)

Shouting at a Library Page

In 2021, Van Orden made news for yelling at Kerrigan Trautsch, a then-17-year-old page at the Prairie du Chien library in Wisconsin. Van Orden, who was running for Congress at the time, took issue with a Pride Month-themed display in the children’s section of the library.

The main target of Van Orden’s rage was A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, a satirical children’s book written by John Oliver that imagines Mike Pence’s real-life pet rabbit Marlon Bundo marrying another rabbit of the same sex.

“His voice was loud, he was aggressive, he had his finger jabbing into [the book] constantly,” Trautsch said about what she described as “very uncomfortable” and “threatening” situation. Traustch said she offered to help only to have Van Orden keep saying: “Hush, you don’t have a voice. You don’t have a voice.” 

Van Orden reportedly demanded multiple times to know who had set up the children’s book display so that he could “teach them a lesson.” Trautsch was too scared to tell him that she had set it up, saying, “He was full on shouting at this point and he kept aggressively shoving the books around.”

Van Orden ended up checking out nearly every children’s book from the Pride display. He filed a complaint that day about A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo that was obtained by the La Crosse Tribune. The complaint misidentifies Pence’s rabbit as the book’s author.

Nearly Bringing a Loaded Gun Onto a Plane

Later in 2021, Van Orden went through security at an Iowa airport with a loaded handgun in his bag. Van Orden, a former Navy SEAL, pled guilty, paid a fine, and was ordered to take a gun safety course.

In a statement released at the time, his campaign said “this situation was purely accidental.” The campaign noted that Van Orden did multiple deployments to combat zones and is a weapons expert.

Van Orden drew on his military experience for his 2015 book titled, Book of Man: A Navy Seal’s Guide to the Lost Art of Manhood. According to the book’s description on Amazon, “Stories of fist fighting, fishing, and driving fast cars are all interwoven with the principles of what used to be known as basic manhood, but has now become a lost art.”

In an interview to promote the book, Van Orden said it covers topics such as how to start a fire and kiss a girl. The congressman, who identifies himself as a “heterosexual male” on multiple occasions in the interview, stresses the importance of being a “renaissance man” who can go from hunting to discussing poetry. It’s unclear if he considers shouting at presidents and teenagers to be one of his many talents. Van Orden’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 

Lazzarini had traveled to Washington, DC, knowing it was vital to maintain the support of his agency’s largest donor, especially with Gaza on the brink of famine. If the US and its allies pulled support, UNRWA—the most important humanitarian organization in Gaza—would be decimated at the moment it was most needed.

Rather than accept Lazzarini’s assurances or offer to await the findings of the independent inquiry, the Biden administration quickly decided to temporarily pause funding for the agency, even though less than 0.1 percent of its employees in Gaza were accused of participating in the October 7 attack. In doing so, the administration imperiled the only organization capable of responding to the catastrophe caused by the Israeli assault: Scott Paul, a humanitarian policy expert at Oxfam, described the agency as the “backbone” of the response in Gaza and explained that up to 80 percent of aid to the area is dependent on it in some form. The organization has been feeding and sheltering more than 1 million people in Gaza.

More than a dozen US allies, including Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada, followed America’s lead. Lazzarini has warned that the “rash” decisions by these countries, which led to about $450 million of donations being put on hold, have pushed UNRWA to its “breaking point.” William Deere, UNRWA’s senior congressional adviser in Washington, said nearly 70 percent of the agency’s funding was paused in some form. “We’re living month to month,” Deere explained in February. “We can muddle through March, but after that we have to shut our doors.” The organization received a reprieve last week when the European Union decided to provide about $54 million in funding, but a massive shortfall remains. 

The Biden administration’s decision to suspend funding for UNRWA is emblematic of the biases that have plagued its response to the war in Gaza. Israel has gotten almost everything it wants from the United States: thousands of bombs, vetoes of UN ceasefire resolutions, and bipartisan support for billions of security assistance making its way through Congress. This is happening even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defies his most important ally, refusing to allow enough aid into Gaza to prevent famine and declining to back away from a potential invasion of Rafah. Yet there are no signs the Biden administration will impose real consequences in response.

Netanyahu and others in Israel have long hoped to get rid of the UNRWA, which they see as a reminder to the world that, under international law, millions of Palestinians are refugees who have a right of return to their former homes. The United States has long supported the agency, contributing more than $7 billion since it began operations in 1950, but even Israeli officials were reportedly surprised by how quickly the US pulled its backing. An Israeli official told the New York Times that Israelis had tried to undermine UNRWA so many times that no one expected the latest allegation to have much impact.

Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and the director of its program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli affairs, said that the decision to suspend funding for UNRWA showed that “unproven allegations can destroy the only thing that is keeping Palestinians in Gaza alive.” He continued, “But daily evidence of Israeli war crimes is not sufficient to produce any change or actionable response from the United States like even slowing down the weapons pipeline.”

A former Biden official shared a similar view, saying, “I think what is very clear is that there are double standards at play.” The official noted that the many credible allegations that Israel has violated international human rights law since October 7 have not led to any real conditions on US military aid to Israel—much less a suspension of that aid. Nor did the ruling from the International Court of Justice that it is plausible that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide. (The decision, which stopped short of ordering Israel to halt the war, came out the same day the United States suspended aid to UNRWA.) The former official pointed out that it took only allegations against 12 of 13,000 UNRWA workers to prompt a funding halt. “It’s not weapons,” the official stressed. “It’s actual humanitarian assistance that is necessary to forestall a literal famine.”

More than 30,000 people—mostly women and children—have now been killed in Gaza, according to the local health ministry. Palestinian officials said that more than 100 people died last week after Israeli soldiers opened fire on people trying to remove flour and other food from trucks. Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, and others have made clear that Israel is responsible for the dire shortage of aid that has put Gazans at risk of imminent famine. Over the weekend, the United States took the surreal step of airdropping food to the people in Gaza its own ally is starving. 

The fact that uncommitted won a majority in Dearborn—while receiving 13 percent statewide, compared to 81 percent for Biden—is all the more powerful because the grassroots effort to vote uncommitted, led by groups like Listen to Michigan, began only a few weeks ago. If anything, the results in Dearborn may understate the degree of disgust with Biden among Arab American and Muslim voters: About 55 percent of Dearborn residents are of Middle Eastern or North African descent; the initial vote counts, which likely included a higher vote share of Arab American voters, had as much as 74 percent of people choosing uncommitted.

Meanwhile, there were clear signs around college campuses that—as polls have shown for months—Biden is similarly losing support among young voters. In many precincts in Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan, more than 20 percent of people went uncommitted, while in some the share voting uncommitted approached or exceeded 40 percent. (Overall, 17 percent of voters in Washtenaw County, which includes Ann Arbor, went uncommitted.)

The uncommitted campaign is a response to the reality facing Palestinians in Gaza, some of whom have relatives in Dearborn. Roughly 30,000 Palestinians—mostly women and children—have been killed during Israel’s war on Gaza, according to the local health ministry. A senior UN humanitarian official said this week, “If nothing is done, we fear widespread famine in Gaza is almost inevitable and the conflict will have many more victims.” The International Court of Justice concluded that South Africa has a plausible case that Israel’s actions constitute genocide.

Israel has fought the war with strong support from Biden and the United States, which has supplied the bombs and UN vetoes needed to keep the war going. That has led many Arab Americans and young people to reconsider their support for the president. As Dearborn’s Democratic mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, wrote in a New York Times op-ed last week that backed voting uncommitted: 

What compounds the constant fear and mourning is a visceral sense of betrayal. In the past three federal elections, Arab American voters in Michigan have become a crucial and dependable voting bloc for the Democratic Party, and we were part of the wave that delivered for Joe Biden four years ago. But this fact seems long forgotten by our candidate as he calls for our votes once more while at the same time selling the very bombs that Benjamin Netanyahu’s military is dropping on our family and friends.

As expected, the picture statewide was more mixed. Overall, more than 100,000 people voted uncommitted. Some commentators have pointed out that that is not all that different from the 11 percent who voted uncommitted statewide in 2012. But there are significant differences between the two elections.

In 2012, the Obama campaign was actively discouraging its supporters from voting in the primary since delegates were actually awarded via the state’s caucus. Partly as a result of that, turnout was unusually low. Fewer than 200,000 people voted in the 2012 Democratic primary, compared to more than 1.2 million in 2016 and 2020, and more than 750,000 this year.

In all three primaries from 2012 to 2020, between 19,000 and 22,000 people voted uncommitted. Having more than 100,000 Michiganders choose uncommitted is a major shift and a significant problem for Biden’s reelection effort, especially when considering that Donald Trump edged out Hillary Clinton by less than 11,000 votes in Michigan in 2016, while Biden beat Trump there by about 150,000 votes—a less than 3 point margin—in 2020. Polls now consistently show Trump leading Biden in the state. 

The results in Michigan are another sign the president’s team underestimated the level of outrage that its war response would provoke. The New York Times‘ Peter Baker reported Tuesday that the president’s advisers had been hoping the war would end in early January—and that they thought Arab Americans and people on the left would calm down as they saw Gaza being rebuilt over the summer. This, like so many of their predictions about the war and their ability to shape its direction, is proving to be wishful thinking.

It remains unclear how people who voted uncommitted Tuesday will end up voting—if they vote at all—if faced with a choice between Biden and Trump in the general election. But Democrats would be foolish not to take people like Terry Ahwal, a Palestinian American living in Michigan who was a longtime Democratic voter, at her word when she says she is not going to vote for Biden, absent major changes in US policy. “You want my vote? You cannot kill my people in my name,” Ahwal recently told the New York Times. “As simple as that.”