In Washington, whether a public official or their spokesperson is speaking honestly is usually not fully known until much later. Take Israel’s attack on Qatar last week: the Trump administration claimed not to have known about it ahead of time, but Israeli officials told Axios that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had given President Donald Trump a heads-up.

When a president leaves office, his former staffers tend to get rather loose-lipped — an opportunity for them to rehabilitate their reputation and, perhaps, tell the truth about their views (or at least the narrative they’d like to put forward on their own terms, not those of their boss). 

The past few months have provided such an opportunity to the three architects of President Joe Biden’s Middle East policy team: Secretary of State Tony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk, Biden’s coordinator for the Middle East at the White House. All of them played a crucial role in shaping American policy toward Israel and Gaza after Oct. 7. Each has in recent months written op-eds and made lengthy appearances on podcasts and cable news to comment on developments in the Middle East. 

Looking at where Blinken, Sullivan and McGurk have positioned themselves publicly, without the constraints of government service, is a sign of the options available to Democrats right now, at a moment when the party’s future is up for grabs — with an ascendant anti-Israel wing that is exerting stronger influence than ever, though it remains in the minority. 

Sullivan, a measured foreign policy hand with a keen eye for politics, has in recent weeks begun saying that the U.S. should consider withholding weapons to Israel, a position he said he did not support one year ago. Whether Sullivan’s shift to the left represents a genuine change of heart or a response to shifting political winds within the Democratic Party, it’s a sharp departure from the way Biden governed. 

McGurk, meanwhile, has been more willing to give the Israelis leeway in their prosecution of the war in Gaza and actions elsewhere in the Middle East. McGurk, used to being the behind-the-scenes negotiator who traveled regularly to Doha, Jerusalem and Cairo after Oct. 7, is now a commentator on CNN. That’s where he said in June that he gives “extremely high marks” to Trump for the way he handled Israel’s 12-day war with Iran and Washington’s brief entry into that conflict — while Sullivan has said the U.S. strikes weren’t necessary. 

Helming the State Department, Blinken was Biden’s chief diplomat. And now, he finds himself in the middle of McGurk and Sullivan: navigating the party’s leftward pull while also sticking by his pro-Israel bona fides. He wrote in The New York Times in June that Trump shouldn’t have struck Iran — but now that Trump did so, “I very much hope it succeeded.” When many Democrats last month came out in support of European efforts to recognize a Palestinian state, a unilateral move that Israel opposes, Blinken wrote in The Wall Street Journal that he thinks it’s the right thing to do — but that France, Canada and the U.K. are “doing it too hastily,” and without needed conditions. 

None of these men are aligned with the party’s far-left wing that seeks to sanction and isolate Israel on the world stage. Even Sullivan, in his commentary saying the U.S. should withhold weapons to Israel, is quick to point out the horrible toll of the Oct. 7 attacks two years ago and to praise Israel for weakening other threats in the Middle East, like Iran and Hezbollah, its proxy in Lebanon. 

But keep an eye on the subtle yet shifting ways each of them approaches Israel and the Middle East to better understand the paths open to Democrats, as the party considers how to move forward and rebuild its battered brand in the era of Trump.