One week out, we know that Kamala Harris got significantly fewer votes than Joe Biden got in 2020, even among Democratic-leaning constituencies, so that’s an important indicator. It’s not so much that these voters were swinging to Donald Trump or seeing him as a savior for Gaza, but perhaps people were much less enthusiastic to show up for her. That applies to younger voters, many of whom did back Biden in huge numbers to eject Donald Trump in 2020, and to Arab and Muslim Americans.

Looking at the swing states, Michigan gets talked about a lot, but you also have large Arab American populations in Georgia and New York, where Harris’s margin of victory for a safe Democratic state was much lower than Biden’s in 2020 or other Democrats’ historically. There does appear to have been an impact.

We know that there were a significant number of votes for Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate. In states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where it’s a matter of tens of thousands of votes between Trump and Harris, yet a third-party candidate is getting some of those votes on an antiwar platform, that is telling you that Gaza is having an outsized impact among certain groups.

When it comes to the Trump campaign, according to the New York Times, their research told them that undecided voters were six times as likely as other swing-state voters to be driven by their view of the war in Gaza. That is a constituency that Trump very openly courted. We saw him during those insane rallies where he was promising to be a peace president and end the wars.

I don’t think there’s much reason to believe that he will deliver on those promises. But the degree of exasperation with the approach of the Biden administration — the sense that there was still no change in policy after a year, with at least 44,000 people dead — created an opening for Trump.

We can also see this in the postmortems coming out of the Harris campaign. They are pointing to the fact that she didn’t differentiate herself from Biden on Gaza and saying, “Look, there were opportunities to pick up some of those voter groups that you missed.” When Harris took over from Biden as the Democratic candidate, she had an opportunity to present herself as being different and she botched it.

When Biden unveiled his cease-fire proposal on May 31, I think there was a sense on the part of many US government officials that they could land the plane. There was a lot of confidence (and perhaps hubris) on their part.

Thinking about the wider context at the time, we saw the deadly raid that Israel launched, killing hundreds of Palestinians while rescuing a handful of Israeli hostages. There was ongoing bombing and displacement in Gaza. To outside observers, it did not look as if Israel had stopped escalating its campaign.

However, the Biden administration officials told themselves a story. From their perspective, a couple of things had happened. Firstly, they had persuaded Biden to stop a shipment of two-thousand-pound bombs and some five-hundred-pound bombs, which was really a stretch. That shows you how limited their willingness to impose any kind of restraint on US support for Israel was. But for them, that was huge.

They were also looking at the picture of the Israeli attack on Rafah, the southernmost town in Gaza, on the border with Egypt. This was the place where more than a million Palestinians had fled in response to Israeli evacuation orders. The United States said for months that an Israeli assault on Rafah would be a red line. Biden openly set this test for himself.

The Israelis then attacked Rafah in early May. They also prompted a serious diplomatic crisis, which continues to be a problem, by taking over Gaza’s border with Egypt. That was a clear escalation, crossing Biden’s red line. But you had US officials like John Kirby saying, “We don’t think the Israelis have crossed the line.” They thought the Israelis hadn’t launched a full-blown invasion, so from that point of view, they could say, “We’ve gotten results from the Israelis — they aren’t doing this.”

Into June and July, you saw people from the Biden administration very much saying, “Look, you all told us to put pressure on the Israelis — we finally did it.” They were now putting the onus on Hamas, even though Hamas had already agreed to some form of cease-fire, saying, “We want to do this — we want to have a permanent settlement.” Meanwhile, the Israeli side wasn’t taking this as seriously.

On the one hand, you had the Biden administration telling people, “Hamas is the obstacle, and we can’t question or challenge the Israelis in any way, because Hamas will exploit that.” At the same time, Benjamin Netanyahu was creating a political crisis for the Biden administration by working with Republicans in Congress to say that the United States had stopped the supply of weapons to Israel.

In fact, the United States had not really stopped sending weapons in any significant way, apart from the hold on two-thousand-pound bombs. But because Biden had agreed to that, Netanyahu worked together with Republicans to create a narrative of the United States abandoning Israel. Biden’s team failed to challenge this narrative and in fact gave it their blessing.

By the end of June, you had the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, travelling to Washington, where the Biden administration publicly assured him, “Don’t worry — we’re going to expedite the supply of weapons — in fact, we’re even going to send some of the bombs that we previously held up.” That was a clear folding on the part of the US government to Israel.

The other aspect of the folding of the US position was Biden’s disastrous debate performance on June 27. This signaled to Netanyahu that Biden was either going to lose his candidacy or lose the election. That shifted the narrative in a big way and created the space, coming into July and August, for Netanyahu to add new demands, saying that Israel wanted to have permanent control over the Gaza-Egypt border.

Even though the United States and Israel continued to say that Hamas was the obstacle to a cease-fire, Hamas openly stated by early July that they would accept the cease-fire proposal, while Netanyahu was introducing new demands. At the end of July, Israel assassinated the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. As we approached the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in mid-August, the Biden administration was in a position where its officials had publicly put what was left of their credibility on the line. They were being aggressively questioned, and they were responding to that questioning with a lot of hubris rather than reflection.

What I heard from administration officials and people close to them was, “We haven’t paid a huge political cost over Gaza — we have presented a cease-fire proposal, and now everyone should give us credit for that.” That effort ramped up in the week prior to the DNC. For political reasons, they would have loved to walk into the convention saying, “Look, we solved the war.” Of course, the Israelis were in no position to give them that.

There was another momentous shift when Biden stepped down as the Democratic candidate and Kamala Harris took over. Harris had a high-profile meeting with Netanyahu where she said, “I will not be silent on the suffering of Palestinians.” That was all well and good, but they didn’t use that momentum in any clear or powerful way, which led to the reality that I saw on the ground at the DNC. There was huge frustration among the Uncommitted movement of voters, who said they were denying support to Biden until he shifted his Gaza policy, but also among rank-and-file Democratic delegates.

People in the party were saying, “Even if we don’t know very much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, about the accusations of genocide and war crimes, about what our taxpayer dollars are funding in terms of potential ethnic cleansing, we don’t want to be hearing about this anymore — we want to be celebrating — we want to have joy.” The Harris narrative was to say, “Let’s move on from Trump” (and implicitly, “Let’s move on from Biden”). Her campaign theme song was “Freedom.” But what the Biden administration failed to do was free their party and their coalition from being implicated in what is arguably the deadliest and most horrifying war of the century so far.

That brings us to early September, which is when I would say any pretense or hope of cease-fire negotiations fell apart. You had the incident where Israeli troops discovered the bodies of six hostages that Hamas had been holding, including the dual Israeli-American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin. That created a mood of anger and rejection of any kind of peace, not just in Tel Aviv but also in Washington.

While some of the families of Israeli hostages ramped up their calls for an agreement, you saw US officials at that point openly starting to embrace the Israeli position that you can’t negotiate with Hamas. A longstanding feature of the Biden administration’s thinking — their fear of being seen as anti-Israel, in spite of their huge support for Israel — started to loom large once again.

In the last two months before the election, we didn’t see any movement on a cease-fire, and we also didn’t see any US pressure on the Israelis. In the month of August, according to aid groups, more than a million Palestinians in Gaza did not receive any food. There was also the beginning of the Israeli operation in Lebanon.

I can recall being with some quite senior Biden administration officials in this period as they were saying, “We’re going to get a diplomatic solution for Lebanon — we’re going to prevent a straight-up Israel-Hezbollah war.” Within days, you had Netanyahu ordering the assassination of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, while he was in New York, before launching an Israeli ground operation in Lebanon with clear US support. That was when any hope of US restraint over Israel died.

There’s another point I want to mention in relation to the preelection period. In Washington, some people never seem to go out of style. Figures like Biden’s top Middle East adviser, Brett McGurk, are sometimes compared to cockroaches — a nuclear bomb could land on Washington, but they would still have top foreign policy jobs. That was an important dynamic by this stage, because people within the Biden administration were starting to think, “We want a job in a Harris presidency, so we don’t want to be doing anything too daring right now, particularly not on Israel-Palestine.”

There are a few trends and themes at work here. Throughout the period since October 7, I had been hearing anxiety inside the US government about Israel seeking US military support and weaponry not just for use in Gaza, but also for a potential invasion of Lebanon. The Biden administration appointed an envoy, Amos Hochstein, who had a channel to Hezbollah, through which he able to convey a strong US desire to avoid an Israel-Hezbollah war.

Hochstein was even able to create the accurate impression, which is hard in terms of US diplomacy, that Hezbollah did not want a war. If a war was going to happen, it would be because Israel and Netanyahu chose it. All of that shifted in September to a stunning degree. Up to that point, the Biden administration had been able to prevent an all-out war, while there were growing signs of Israeli willingness to escalate the use of force, going after Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon as well as Iranian commanders.

From September, there was a remarkable shift in what US officials were saying. They started parroting the Israeli line: “Look at how successful we are; we have been able to target so many people in Lebanon. Hezbollah is a paper tiger, in a way that many regional experts did not think it was.” The Israeli and US governments both pointed to the pager attack, which targeted hundreds of people associated with Hezbollah — many of them possibly not fighters, and located in civilian areas — but the United States quietly embraced that as a sign of Israeli prowess.

When the Israelis took out senior Hezbollah leaders like Nasrallah, the United States took that as another sign: “They know how to target these guys — they know where they are.” Finally, you saw the United States embracing a very alarming Israeli narrative, one that experts on international law say has resulted in staggering bloodshed in Gaza and is now being copied and pasted into Lebanon. This is the idea that all of these civilian areas have been totally infiltrated by combatants and thus are fair game.

Under international law, there are principles of proportionality in terms of where you can attack, which require you to do as much as you can to minimize civilian casualties. But US officials suddenly began saying things like, “Literally every house in southern Lebanon is full of Hezbollah weapons.” Okay — does that make it a legitimate target? Probably not, according to the Biden administration’s own standards for reducing civilian harm. But you saw them taking that line.

From that point of view, looking at the clear Israeli failure to develop a plan in Gaza with a lasting solution for its future that would prevent Hamas from coming back, which is Israel’s stated aim, this was an opportunity for the Israelis to say, “We can be successful here on a different front — give us a chance.” The Biden administration decided to give them that chance.

This was in spite of the fact that it received numerous warnings from inside its own government. While there might be a lot of success, is it tactical or strategic? Is it long-term and sustainable? Nearly two months on from the Israeli pager attacks and the assassination of much of the Hezbollah leadership, Hezbollah hasn’t folded. There isn’t going to be a Lebanon after this conflict in which Hezbollah does not play a major role, and Hezbollah attacks on Israel and on Israeli soldiers are continuing.

I’ll start with the US assessments. There’s no shortage of expertise inside the US government to measure potential war crimes. The US government is quite comfortable saying, “The Russians are perpetrating what look like war crimes in Ukraine,” or, “We believe there’s a genocide in Myanmar.”

All of that expertise is there, particularly when it comes to an extremely close partner like Israel. The United States has huge insight into how Israel is treating humanitarian aid, much of which is funded by the United States, and into how its military is operating, given the close relationship between the two militaries.

We are at the cusp now of the deadline you mentioned for Israel to meet that benchmark to improve access to humanitarian aid for Palestinians. Aid groups tell us that it clearly hasn’t done so. Again, it has ignored these requests from the US while pointing to loopholes and caveats.  [Note: Since this interview was conducted, the thirty-day deadline has passed. State Department officials confirmed that Israel has not complied with the benchmarks set by the United States, but Antony Blinken announced that there would be no consequences for Israel.]

The Israeli narrative will say, “We let in a lot of aid.” But is it going to all the places where aid is most needed? For instance, there’s aid reaching northern Gaza, but not the section where international and US experts believe there is a very high risk of famine — the parts that are covered by the “Generals’ Plan.”

Israeli officials will say, “There’s all this aid gathered on the Palestinian side of the crossing at Kerem Shalom — why isn’t the UN distributing it?” The UN and aid groups will respond by saying that there is no safe way to distribute aid inside Gaza, because they don’t know whether they might be stopped by Israeli guards or hit by air strikes. The delivery of aid continues to be far short of what the United States expects.

It’s important to remember there is a standard in US law to which US government officials have been pointing to try and hold Antony Blinken accountable. There is a standard governing assistance to foreign countries that says if you block US humanitarian aid, you cannot receive certain kinds of US weapons. The Biden administration has been aware of that provision hanging over its head, because lawmakers have been highlighting it for almost eleven months now, since last December.

I don’t know how the administration can in good faith say that Israel is in compliance with that standard. It did claim in a report last May that Israel was not blocking US aid, by pointing to a four-week period of improvement in April. But that was not a consistent improvement, and as aid groups have stated, the situation has gotten much worse since then, in large part because the Israelis crossed the US red line and invaded Rafah, which was where the entire aid infrastructure for Gaza was based. Aid groups haven’t been able to rebuild that infrastructure.

That leads directly into the ICJ genocide case, because the case has raised the question: Are the Israelis trying to diminish the Palestinians or reduce their numbers as a protected group? Given that there’s such a huge risk of starvation and disease in these overcrowded places, I think it strengthens the case and the scrutiny that South Africa and other nations have been calling for.

From the US perspective, their approach throughout has been to say that this is not a matter for international discussion. They want it to be a matter between the United States and Israel. But given that they haven’t been able to produce results, I think further ICJ discussions will say, “Despite our orders clearly being issued, you haven’t done anything with them, so it’s on to other measures we can pursue.”

The United States is very happy to seek international scrutiny when it appears convenient. When Biden wanted the UN Security Council to endorse his cease-fire proposal back in June, the United States was happy to go there and get the votes, but at the same time it can push back when it wants to. The charges of hypocrisy and double standards has become emblematic of this conflict and will remain a major issue for US standing in the world as a result of its Gaza policy for years to come.

Now that we’re on the cusp of a Trump administration, the ICC question in particular becomes more salient, because the last Trump administration actively targeted the ICC (something that we know Israel has done covertly as well). This is a fear that I’ve heard from folks close to the ICC: not only will the United States be rhetorically opposed to international accountability for both Israel and Hamas, but it will also take steps to stymy the investigations and make life harder for the ICC as it pursues these ongoing potential indictments for Netanyahu, Gallant, and others.

This would-be deal is a bargain in which the United States would provide security guarantees to Saudi Arabia, the Saudis would provide a long-term commitment to the United States, implicitly preventing them from growing closer to China and Russia, and the Saudis would give Israel recognition, which would be hugely significant, given their stature and influence in the Muslim-majority world. This is something that Israel has sought for a long time.

The Palestinians are left out of that equation. The discussion around this deal had always said there will be a “component” for the Palestinians. The importance of that component has grown as discussions have continued, and now the Saudis are saying they want it to be significantly bigger.

Will those discussions keep going? I wish I had a commitment to anything as much as Brett McGurk does to a US-Saudi-Israel deal, so I think they will keep going, at least for the remainder of the Biden presidency. Biden administration officials, with McGurk chief among them, see this as a legacy issue for the president, in a similar way to how they see the AUKUS deal with Australia and the UK around nuclear submarines.

These are the kind of grand strategic efforts that may or may not bear fruit in the long run in terms of securing US influence in various theaters, but which unquestionably are very out of touch with where the US public is today. That disconnect is going to shape the continued discussion around the US-Saudi deal.

This proposal is catering to the DC think tank crowd, which loves ideas like this and generates endless position papers about them. But it’s also catering to the future careers of men like McGurk, Blinken, and Jake Sullivan. These men who have been shaping the foreign policy of the Biden administration now have to think about the rest of their lives.

Blinken was previously in private business, advising on geopolitical matters. Can he use this as a feather in his cap? Or Sullivan, who has future political ambitions? Can they say, “Look, even though there were tens of thousands of dead civilians and no progress toward Israeli-Palestinian peace, at least we got this bargain”? With the prospect of a Trump presidency and a very different kind of relationship between Trump and the Saudi royal family, I think any idea that this will be seen as a Biden administration win is now almost dead, but they’re going to keep trying.

It’s important to track Harris’s chief foreign policy advisor, Phil Gordon, because he was running a parallel messaging operation to Harris. While she was standing up next to Netanyahu saying, “I will not be silent on the issue of the Palestinians,” it fell to Gordon to say that she would not be pursuing an arms embargo, which was a demand that many antiwar activists were making of her. That shows you there was no worked-out approach to how she might think differently to Biden on Gaza.

In part, that was because the inner core of the Biden administration had made Harris and her team largely irrelevant on this issue. They might have been marginally consulted, but they were certainly never decision-makers and rarely had serious input. When she suddenly took over the mantle from Biden, there wasn’t a ready-made playbook or Harris doctrine on Gaza, Lebanon, or Israel — any of it.

Her campaign and her policy staff made a clear decision that they weren’t going to develop that playbook. One of her key policy advisors, Ilan Goldenberg, is someone who has publicly and in detail thought about peace between Israel and the Palestinians, recommending some steps that the Biden administration didn’t take. When Goldenberg was appointed as her outreach director to American Jewish communities, you didn’t see him putting across any messages about differing from Biden.

That leads us into the DNC, where the request for a Palestinian American speaker was vividly denied, even though there were Israeli Americans who spoke from that stage. The campaign’s response was to say, “We had a Muslim American,” which was not the same as having a Palestinian, particularly in the context of running against Donald Trump.

Trump played this in a very interesting way. As some folks in the Uncommitted movement put it, he made himself appear to be both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. On the one hand, Trump used the word “Palestinian” as a slur repeatedly in his debate with Biden, and also against Chuck Schumer. At the same time, his surrogates and his family members were out there saying, “Trump will stop the wars.”

They didn’t have to say how Trump would stop the wars, because the alternative to what they were offering was very clear — it was the status quo Biden administration policy. There was no alternative to that policy coming from Harris. The only thing to which they were responding was the policy that people were watching as it produced dead babies every single day. That was the consequence of the Harris campaign choosing not to present an alternative plan.

You saw Trump, even in the last days of the campaign, make striking moves where he had “Muslims for Trump” on campaign stages. He had Arab American surrogates — including the father-in-law of his daughter Tiffany — out there saying he would personally help stop the wars in Lebanon and Gaza. Since the Harris team didn’t have an answer and made a clear political judgment to ignore voters for whom this was a principal concern, Trump was able to romp.

I’ve been talking to people inside government circles to try to understand what may come next. There was some talk and some hope that the Biden administration would use the unprecedented new policy it unveiled in February, giving the US power to financially target violent Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank who have been dealing out bloodshed and turmoil to a degree that hasn’t been seen in decades.

They have applied some sanctions on those settlers, and there was speculation that they might apply them to more significant settler targets, or to institutions that enable settler violence, or even to ministers in Netanyahu’s own cabinet, like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who are known extremists. But from what I’m hearing, a lot of that discussion has gone quiet. There’s now a lot of waiting among US officials to see what the tone is from President Biden, and there hasn’t been any clear communication of that.

What you see in the efforts of Sullivan, Blinken, and others to work with the Trump transition team is, I think, an attempt to build good faith and trust with that team and not to try to tie their hands. Will this approach bear fruit for the Biden administration, in terms of the Trump people not rolling back every single thing they’ve done? It’s quite unlikely to work in that sense, but that’s probably what they’re going to do.

I’d also look at the US-Saudi file. There’s a prospect that the Biden administration will try to shoehorn through some US-Saudi commitment that they can point to in the long run. I also think there’s a real fear, particularly among Palestinians, about what will happen in this lame-duck period. We could see Netanyahu pursuing greater violence and bloodshed, feeling that Biden is not going to rein him in, and even if Trump has an interest in reining him in to some degree, he’s not in office yet.

Finally, I’d look at the diplomatic setting, where the United States shields Israel from scrutiny at the UN Security Council. Does the Biden administration allow some sort of resolution through in a face-saving effort before they leave office to say, “We did allow Israel to be questioned in one way”? That was a tactic that the Obama administration used, and perhaps the officials around Biden, many of whom did serve under Barack Obama, will use it again.

It’s a very alarming picture for Palestinians and advocates of lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace. You’ve already seen Trump appoint very hawkish pro-Israel figures, like his secretary of state pick, Marco Rubio. These are not people who have a history of saying they want to compromise with Palestinians in general, and still less with Hamas in particular.

I think there’s a possibility that Netanyahu will see it as being in his interest, and in line with Trump’s campaign-trail promises, to achieve some sort of apparent compromise that will cover Lebanon and perhaps also Gaza, so that he and Trump can both claim a win. But what does that compromise look like?

Is it a compromise that allows Israel to continue launching deadly strikes every few days or every few weeks, because we know that Hamas is resurgent, and we know that Israel wants to retain that capability? Is it a compromise that gives its blessing to the effective ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from northern Gaza, which has been discussed by some Israeli hard-liners, and the reestablishment of Israeli settlements within Gaza, which would be crossing a huge red line?

There’s also a lot of anxiety about the future of the West Bank and what kind of settlement might be reached there. There has been outreach from the Palestinian side to the incoming Trump team, which could bear fruit to a certain degree, whether that involves Trump meeting Mahmoud Abbas or having him pressure Netanyahu to some extent.

But the overarching message we’re getting from the Trump team is they want to push this under the rug as quickly as possible. We know that they are not a team that is focused on human rights and that they have been pretty derogatory toward Palestinians throughout their previous time in office, so they are not going to advance that goal in a way that will lead to a just or sustainable peace.

They want to turn toward more hawkish positions on China, and toward Ukraine and their planned trade war with Europe. Against that backdrop, I think they’re going to pursue a messy settlement in the Middle East, and there’s a real risk of bloodshed there. That’s particularly clear if you think about Netanyahu, who has an incentive to solidify his power and his image as Israel’s security savior.

Netanyahu will be looking at his own political prospects for the next several years. His shift over the last year has been to abandon the idea of relying on the moderate or centrist forces in Israeli politics, to whatever degree those forces remain. He has become even more dependent on support from the far right, with their plans for annexing the West Bank and building settlements in Gaza or even Lebanon.

Insofar as he has reached out to the center of Israeli politics — the kind of people that American liberals have sometimes looked to as saviors, such as Benny Gantz or Yair Lapid — the whole Israeli political spectrum has shifted so far to the right that even the centrist figures are now enabling those extreme polices. There’s a lot of potential for greater bloodshed and violations of international law from this point.

Finally, of course, Trump previously pursued a policy of applying maximum pressure on Iran. He is now saying that he might be open to negotiations with Iran. What kind of military risk is he prepared to take as a negotiating tactic? Remember, this is the man who ordered the assassination of Iran’s top general, Qasem Soleimani, risking a major war.

The idea that Trump was a peace president was propagated on the back of some lucky moments and smart decision-making by Iran and other players to avoid a war. We may not be so lucky over the next four years of a Trump administration. There is huge potential for miscalculation, with figures like Netanyahu involved who are pursuing a broader conflict.