When aides gathered in the Oval Office one day in the spring of 2024, they found President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on the verge of an outburst. His "face was red like a beet" and he "seemed ready to blow his stack," his top Middle East adviser recalled. Mr. Biden had grown so livid at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel over the conduct of the war in Gaza that he appeared close to washing his hands of the whole conflict and cutting off the critical flow of American arms. "Bibi, man, what the fuck are you doing?" Mr. Biden demanded, using the prime minister's nickname when they got on the phone, as the adviser recalled. "You think I'm Santa Claus? No Santa in Israel, pal."
Mr. Mc Gurk's account, outlined in an interview and in a new memoir called "Brink" to be published Tuesday, provides new details about the friction between Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu during those months of terrorism, war and humanitarian crisis. Perhaps no foreign policy issue bedeviled Mr. Biden as much as Gaza, and he found himself under criticism both from the left in his own party for not restraining Mr. Netanyahu more and from the pro-Israel camp for restraining him too much. "He always said this was the worst crisis he ever dealt with in his entire career," Mr. Mc Gurk said. As it was for Mr. Mc Gurk, who spent more than a year shuttling back and forth to the region after Oct. 7 trying to find a way to stop the war and to free hostages held by Hamas, even developing a hernia along the way. Mr. Mc Gurk is an unusual figure in today's polarized Washington, a survivor who has crossed lines that are rarely crossed these days. The son of two teachers, Mr. Mc Gurk, 53, trained to be a lawyer and clerked for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist only to divert into foreign policy after Sept. 11, 2001, volunteering to go to Iraq as a legal counsel and then advising four presidents of both parties on the Middle East. He worked for President George W. Bush on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, stayed on when President Barack Obama came into office and then served President Trump in his first term. He resigned after Mr. Trump decided to abandon America's Kurdish allies by abruptly withdrawing troops from Syria, then returned to the White House as Mr. Biden's coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa. Mr. Mc Gurk had already written a draft book about his work for other presidents, but his publisher insisted that he had to include three chapters about Mr. Biden and Gaza. Those three chapters became a book unto themselves, one that he wrote while it was "very fresh, very raw." At some point, he still hopes to publish the other book. But this is the first of a series being written by Biden foreign policy counselors like former Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden's national security adviser. According to Mr. Mc Gurk, the nearest Mr. Biden came to a full break with Mr. Netanyahu was on that spring day in 2024. Mr. Biden was frustrated over civilian casualties, blocked humanitarian relief and stalled negotiations to end the war. He had grown more distant from the Israeli prime minister. While the two spoke 20 times in the final three months of 2023, they spoke only twice in the first three months of 2024.
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