Former Biden State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller now admits that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza.
In a Sky News podcast interview released on Monday, Miller—who was infamous for smirking every time he took a question on Gaza during State Department briefings in the Biden administration—said Israel is “without a doubt” committing war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza.
“Do you think what’s going on in Gaza now is a genocide?” asked Sky News correspondent Mark Stone.“I don’t think it’s a genocide, but I think it is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes,” Miller replied.”
“You wouldn’t have said that at the podium,” Stone pressed.
“Yeah, look, because when you’re at the podium, you’re not expressing your personal opinion. You’re expressing the conclusions of the United States government. The United States government had not concluded that they committed war crimes, still have not concluded that,” Miller replied.
Stone said, “But your personal view is that they have—and they were while you were there.”
“Yes,” Miller said, before stumbling over his words to add a qualification. “There are two ways to think about the commission of war crimes. One is if the state has pursued a policy to deliberately committing war crimes, or is acting reckless in a way that aids and abets war crimes, if the state is committing war crimes. And that I think is an open question.”
“What is almost certainly not an open question is that there are individual incidents that have been war crimes where Israeli soldiers and members of the Israeli military have committed war crimes. And we do know that Israel has opened investigations. But look, we are many months into those investigations and we’re not seeing Israeli soldiers held accountable. So ultimately, in almost every major conflict, including conflicts prosecuted by democracies, you will see individual members of the military, of militaries, commit war crimes, and the way you judge a democracy is the way you hold these people accountable.”
“But Israel hasn’t,” Stone asked.
“And that’s my point, we have not yet seen them hold sufficient members of the military accountable and I think it’s an open question whether they’re going to,” Miller said.Miller, who served as Joe Biden’s State Department spokesperson for the last two years of his administration, spent that time defending U.S. arms sales to Israel, justifying U.S. vetoes of U.N. proposals calling for a ceasefire, and downplaying Israel’s war crimes—over and over again.
If Miller really believed that Israel was committing war crimes and could not express his true thoughts from the podium, he could have resigned from his position, like a few other brave people in the Biden administration did. But his Sky News interview reveals that he’s simply interested in avoiding blame, as Israel continues its mass starvation of Palestinians and its war crimes become even more evident to the public.
In fact, before his half-hearted admission that Israel is committing war crimes, Miller still took some time to blame protesting college students in his analysis of the situation.
“There was a time when our public discussion of withholding weapons from Israel, as well as the protests on college campuses in the United States, and the movement of some European countries to recognise the state of Palestine—appropriate discussions, appropriate decisions, protests are appropriate—but all of those things together were leading the leadership of Hamas to conclude that they didn’t need to agree to a ceasefire, they just needed to hold out for a little bit longer, and they could get what they always wanted,” he said.
“Now, the thing that I look back on, that I will always ask questions of myself about, and I think this is true for others in government, is in that intervening period between the end of May and the middle of January [2025], when thousands of Palestinians were killed, innocent civilians who didn’t want this war, had nothing to do with it, was there more that we could, could have done to pressure the Israeli government to agree to that ceasefire? I think at times there probably was.”
What brilliant insight.
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