Biden State Department Spokesman Now Says Israel Is Committing War Crimes

Biden's State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller speaks to reporters during the daily press briefing at the State Department in Washington, United States, June 3, 2024. Former State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller says that he personally believes Israel has been committing war crimes against the Palestinian people — including during his tenure in the Biden administration, where, as a major voice of US foreign policy, he daily defended Israel’s flattening of Gaza to the American public.Speaking to Sky News’ Mark Stone on the Trump 100 podcast, Miller said on Monday that it is “without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes” in the territory. When Stone asked if he held this belief while serving as spokesperson, he said yes.“Look, one of the things about being a spokesperson is you’re not a spokesperson for yourself. You’re a spokesperson for the president, the administration — and you espouse the positions of the administration,” Miller said. “And when you’re not in the administration, you can just give your own opinions.”The ex-State Department official said he believes Israeli soldiers committed war crimes in individual instances rather than as part of a wider policy of systematically erasing the Palestinian people, as muchof the international community has now accused the Israeli government.“We were expecting it coming,” Hamid Bendaas, spokesperson for the pro-Palestinian nonprofit IMEU Policy Project, told HuffPost of Miller’s admission. “But I think this is the first foray of that — of Biden admin officials being like, ‘Oh yeah, we were hard on Israel, we weren’t super pro-Israel,’ after saying for over a year that they were the most pro-Israel administration of all time, and a lot of the reporting since then obviously backing it up.” “But [Miller] is saying that he’s speaking about covering war crimes, right? It’s not even covering up Biden’s age or stuff like that,” Bendaas continued. “But covering up a war crime that you know happened, and saying that doesn’t happen because you’re following orders? That’s basically what he’s saying he did. It’s just a different thing.”United Nations officials,human rights groups and some world leaders have described Israel’s actions as genocidal, a term Miller rejected. Still, his comments on Monday represent a huge pivot from the statements he made every day on behalf of former Secretary of State Antony Blinken while heclashed with reporters who tried to push himon the US role in unconditionally supporting and arming an Israeli offensive that has now reached its nineteenth month.“It has to be said that Miller is also guilty of, at minimum, facilitating these war crimes,” progressive strategist Rania Batrice posted on X. “Matthew Miller, almost daily, not only lied to the public and the press, he did it in a shitty condescending way, in an attempt to mislead the public.”State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller speaks to reporters during the daily press briefing in Washington, D.C., on June 3, 2024.Though Miller insisted that he believed Israeli war crimes were individual acts, the State Department was aware that the Israeli government was committing possible war crimes. Experts within the US government concluded last year that Israel was intentionally blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza — a major development that would legally require the Biden administration to stop sending weapons to Israel. Blinken rejected the findings and delivered a report to Congress without that information, leading report author Stacy Gilbert to resign in protest.Gilbert was one of many Biden appointees who, unlike Miller, resigned over the administration’s unconditional support for Israel in its bombing campaign.Biden resignee and A New Policy co-founder Josh Paul told HuffPost, “The Biden Administration’s wanton lawbreaking when it came to what was happening in Gaza was no less a scandal than Watergate, and in the context of its human impact, probably a greater one.”Miller is the latest in a growing number of voices changing their tune and speaking out against Israel’s military campaign, the plight of Palestinians and the humanitarian crisis plaguing Gaza. The former spokesperson said that he wished the Biden administration did more to pressure Israel to accept a ceasefire deal after May 2024, when documentation of the military’s indiscriminate violence against civilians became nearly impossible to ignore.“I’m happy to be punitive to Matt Miller, but we also want to see more people be doing what Matt Miller is doing in a way, because it’s a sign that they are recognizing that public opinion has shifted pretty rapidly on this,” Bendaas said. “And especially on the Democratic side, it’s just extremely unpopular to be pro-Israel in the way that Democrats have been for the last few decades.”Related...'Indiscriminate, Unrestrained, Brutal': Former Israeli PM Calls Gaza Assault 'War Crimes'Israel Is Fighting 'Proxy War On UK's Behalf' In Gaza, Kemi Badenoch ClaimsIsrael's Netanyahu Claims Starmer Is On 'Wrong Side Of Humanity'

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