Probes uncomfortable questions ... Reading Ahmed’s book, you get the sense that there was something grimly inevitable about Biden’s support for genocide ... Both chilling and familiar ... Ahmed provides a particularly effective account of the administration’s failure to dislodge Israel’s systematic restrictions on food, medicine, and other aid.
In his indispensable new book, Crossing the Red Line, the journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed shows how we got here ... Offers a glimpse into just how entangled the Biden White House was with lobbyists and donors who wanted to ensure that Israel enjoyed a free hand ... Captures the absurdity of American officials who typically comported themselves with superpower swagger.
A deeply reported account of White House and State Department decision-making ... Where the book falls slightly short is in its reluctance to explicitly prescribe legal or political accountability ... Nevertheless, Crossing the Red Line offers a vital, sobering diagnostic of how American power operates behind closed doors ... Ahmed is all about showing and not telling. But what he shows to us throughout this book is that liberal hand-wringing, equivocation, and performative self-recrimination in practice functioned as a filibuster so Israel could do their dirty work.
