For more than four decades, Elliott Abrams has been near the center of American foreign policy. Abrams was an Assistant Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration, a deputy national-security adviser under George W. Bush, and a special representative for both Iran and Venezuela during the Trump Administration. Currently, he is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
During his tenure with the Reagan Administration, Abrams was involved in supporting authoritarian regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador, both of which were committing extensive human-rights violations that were widely documented in the press. (The Guatemalan leader, Efraín Ríos Montt, was eventually convicted of crimes against humanity and genocide, though his conviction was later thrown out on technical grounds; in El Salvador the military was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.) Abrams was known in the Reagan years for his aggressive performances in TV interviews and his criticism of journalists who questioned the Administration’s human-rights record. After Abrams’s wife suggested machine-gunning Anthony Lewis, then a columnist for the New York Times, in 1987, Abrams said, “I wouldn’t waste the bullets. I would rather have them go to the Contras. They would use them to more effect.”
Indeed, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, after Congress had banned military aid to Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, Abrams began overseeing the Restricted Interagency Group, which coördinated Central America policy. He eventually pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress about his knowledge of how the Contras were being funded and armed, but he was pardoned in 1992 by the outgoing President Bush. In 2023, President Biden controversially nominated Abrams for the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which is under the jurisdiction of the State Department. (He has not yet been confirmed.)
I recently spoke by phone with Abrams, who, in addition to his role at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the chairman of Tikvah, a Jewish nonprofit organization. He also heads the Vandenberg Coalition, which co-released a long report on the future of Gaza this year. Abrams has been writing frequently about the war there; he has been a staunch supporter of Israel for many decades. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why aid isn’t entering Gaza in adequate amounts, whether the Reagan Administration really supported human rights in Latin America, and how he views his own work in government.
Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?
No.
Lately, you’ve been writing about how Israel’s been receiving a lot of unfair criticism.
I went to work for [the Democratic senator] Henry (Scoop) Jackson in 1976, in part because I admired his strong support of Israel. So I’ve been thinking—and to some extent writing—about Israel for almost fifty years.
How do you think the war is going from Israel’s perspective?
I think from a military point of view it’s gone well, in the sense that they have significantly damaged Hamas as a fighting force, and all that’s left now are a few battalions in Rafah. It was their goal to eliminate the ability of Hamas to attack Israel militarily as it did in October. They need, in my view, to complete that task, or Hamas will regenerate itself fairly quickly.
A lot of the commentary about the war has become more and more focussed on the death toll in Gaza, the lack of aid reaching Gaza, and Israel blocking that aid. Do you feel that that’s been misplaced, or are you concerned about those things?
I’m concerned about them, and I think that most of what is written about it is misleading, if not false.
How so?
For example, everyone, including the President of the United States, now says that the death toll is more than thirty thousand. That’s a Hamas figure, and we actually have no idea what the death toll is. [In November, the highest-ranking State Department official for Middle East affairs told Congress that the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is controlled by Hamas, could be undercounting the death toll.]
I’m very happy to see the additional efforts being made now to get humanitarian aid into Gaza, and it looks as if they’re starting to pay off.
Additional efforts by whom?
By Israel. [This month, the United Nations stated that the number of aid trucks crossing into Gaza had ticked up slightly to around a hundred and ninety per day in April, from about a hundred and sixty in March—but still far below the more than five hundred that experts believe is necessary.]
Oh, O.K. Why were those efforts not happening before, in your mind?
I’m not sure of the answer to that.
Yeah, it’s a bit of a mystery. I haven’t been able to crack that one.
I’m not sure of the answer. Part of the problem, though, has been and I guess still is: What about the distribution inside Gaza? Who is going to do that? I think, for example, if you look at the American naval effort—that is, our effort to build a pier so the ships can come in from Cyprus—I have really not seen any discussion of who’s going to distribute what comes into Gaza.
Right. There’s also not much infrastructure left in Gaza. So it’s hard to distribute stuff.
Well, there’s criminal activity and there’s Hamas, so it’s hard. It’s very, very hard.
I understand that there are all these logistical troubles, but it has seemed for a while that we are reaching these possible famine levels and Israel is blocking aid.
I think we should be very, very careful in drawing such a conclusion. For one thing, Hamas continues to have sway in parts of southern Gaza, and we know, I think pretty clearly, that some efforts over the past couple of months to distribute aid have been defeated by criminal gangs trying to take the aid and by Hamas taking some of the aid. [David Satterfield, the Biden Administration’s envoy for humanitarian aid in the Middle East, stated, in February, “No Israeli official has come to me, come to the Administration, with specific evidence of diversion or theft of assistance delivered by the U.N.”]
I was more talking about the number of trucks that are even allowed in. You had ministers in the Israeli government making it seem like they didn’t want aid to come in, things like that.
Well, I don’t care what fanatical, right-wing members of the Israeli government say in their speeches. That should not be taken as Israeli policy. [Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, blocked flour shipments from reaching Gaza out of concern, he claimed, that it would reach Hamas through the U.N. Relief and Works Agency.]