ON the 100-day anniversary of the Oct 7, 2023, attack by Hamas against Israel, and after 25,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israel’s retaliatory strikes, then US president Joe Biden made a shocking statement: “I will never forget the grief and the suffering I have heard in my meetings with the families of the American hostages. No one should have to endure even one day of what they have gone through, much less 100.”
His statement did not reference the thousands of slaughtered Palestinians, including women and children, or the intentional targeting of hospitals and journalists. Nor did it acknowledge the International Court of Justice hearings that had begun days prior to investigate allegations of Israeli war crimes. The statement was derided as “shameful” by Barnett Rubin, a US foreign policy expert who knew Biden from their time in the Obama administration.
Biden’s one-sided statement is flagged in a new book, Crossing the Red Line, by award-winning Pakistani journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed, which documents how the Biden administration enabled Israeli atrocities in Gaza, and set the stage for the widening of the Middle East conflict during the current Trump administration.
In a book filled with examples of US negligence and complicity in breaches of international law in Gaza, this example resonates. Speaking last week at a book launch event, Ahmed used the example to illustrate Biden’s tunnel vision when it came to the Israel-Palestine conflict, specifically his inability to acknowledge the plight of Palestinians. In Biden’s and his administration’s perspective, all Palestinian children killed were the children of Hamas fighters; reports of famine in Gaza were exaggerated; schools and hospitals were Hamas hideouts; and intelligence or humanitarian reports suggesting otherwise were forced to caveat findings or report selectively.
The need for engagement is too often simplified.
The president’s inability to humanise Palestinians or empathise with their predicament was, Ahmed argued, a determinant of the US’s Israel policy and its failure to curtail Israeli transgressions. He highlighted a key reason for this lack of empathy: the US administration barely had any interaction with Palestinians. Although there was robust engagement with Israelis, Ahmed reports there were only five State Department officials in direct contact with Palestinians.
Of all the avoidable tragedies Ahmed’s work highlights, the fact that you need to talk to people on the other side of a conflict to remember that they are human, truly resonates. That recognition of humanity is then enshrined in policy and decision-making.
This need for engagement is too often simplified and understood as the need for backchannels during a crisis. No doubt, informal, person-to-person contact is invaluable when de-escalation is required. Recall the secret meetings that avoided nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis or — closer to home — the DGMO hotline that prevented the May 2025 Pakistan-India conflict from escalating further.
But backchannels cannot substitute for broader diplomatic and societal engagement, the type that goes past mere coordination to empathic connection; the type the Americans have in place with Israel, but did not bother to develop with Palestine, even at the height of humanitarian crisis during the darkest days of the Gaza war. It is a point that should be emphasised in the context of mainstream diplomacy at a time when most Western governments are reducing global diplomatic staff and closing embassies, usually as a cost-cutting measure, leaving them with few personal touch points in regions in perma-crisis.
But these lessons also apply domestically. The political polarisation of Western countries is increasingly attributed to a breakdown of engagement between urban and rural residents, the rich and the poor, and between different racial and ethnic communities. This, in turn, is blamed on everything from the isolation wrought by social media to the claw-back of government funding for community spaces.
We are not absolved from complicity closer to home. It is difficult to imagine Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz making the divisive comments she did about threats to Punjab primarily emanating from regional provinces without years of political suppression and polarised rhetoric between provinces, particularly with Balochistan and KP.
Without more access and engagement, compatriots cannot empathise with each other’s challenges. That engagement should be encouraged across all levels of provincial governments, but equally across society, whether in the form of more scholarships, economic ties, tourism, arts engagement or the lifting of media censorship. Without engaging, we’re in danger of forgetting each other’s humanity, and so exacerbating rather than allaying tensions.
The writer is a political and integrity risk analyst.
X: @humayusuf
Published in Dawn, September 14th, 2026
