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Brett McGurk, who was the top Middle East adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., offered the first inside-the-room account of American efforts to manage the Gaza war.
By Peter Baker
Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent, first met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel during a visit to Washington in 1996 and briefly served as Jerusalem bureau chief in 2016.
Oct. 1, 2026, 3:56 p.m. ET
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.”
It was one of the most combustible moments in a fraught relationship that consumed much of the last 15 months of Mr. Biden’s presidency. Now, in the first inside-the-room account of Mr. Biden’s struggles to manage the war, Brett McGurk, his top Middle East adviser, reveals how close the two leaders came to a complete schism and describes the rocky path from the Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023, to the cease-fire and hostage-release agreement sealed in the final days of the administration.
Mr. McGurk’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.
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