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\n Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Instagram\/vp46archive\n <\/p>\n
The 2024 election season was particularly tumultuous in Michigan, Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed recalled on Friday. In his home state, more than 100,000 Democrats voted \u201cuncommitted\u201d<\/a> in the presidential primary, a rebuke of the Biden administration\u2019s handling of the Israel-Hamas war and the devastation in Gaza. Now, the legacy of that primary is taking center stage for El-Sayed, who supported the \u201cuncommitted\u201d cause but later endorsed Kamala Harris, who will campaign with him on Tuesday. Appearing on Morning Joe<\/a>, El-Sayed acknowledged \u201churt feelings about engagement with the Arab and Muslim community\u201d in 2024 while framing this week\u2019s event as \u201can opportunity for us to come together.\u201d<\/p>\n If Harris runs for president again<\/a>, she\u2019ll surely face questions about her role in the administration during Israel\u2019s offensive in Gaza following Hamas\u2019 October 7, 2023, attacks<\/a>, a harrowing period chronicled in reporter Akbar Shahid Ahmed\u2019s new book, Crossing the Red Line<\/a>. Harris \u201cwasn\u2019t a major force\u201d in shaping Israel-Palestine policy, Ahmed told me, but she attended in small meetings with Biden and key officials, and also met with<\/a> Netanyahu shortly after becoming the party\u2019s nominee.<\/p>\n Ahmed, who reported during the Biden administration for HuffPost and is now a diplomatic correspondent at the Washington Sun, writes witheringly of a Biden policy \u201cdominated by timidity, ambition, callousness, and staggering hubris\u201d and which effectively enabled atrocities in Gaza<\/a> through continued U.S. military aid and failure to constrain Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even when he crossed the administration\u2019s \u201cred line\u201d by invading the southern city of Rafah. He scrutinizes the roles of senior Biden officials, such as national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who declined to be interviewed for the book. (Last week, Sullivan pointed to<\/a> progress made in the region toward the end of Joe Biden\u2019s presidency while admitting \u201cI wish we had done more to end the war sooner.\u201d) The book, out Tuesday, should only is reignite debate about what the U.S. could\u2019ve done differently, and comes as Americans\u2019 views of Israel have grown increasingly<\/a> negative<\/a>, and ahead of Netanyahu speaking this week<\/a> at the UN General Assembly.<\/p>\n Looking back, Ahmed writes about the frustration of activists in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention after party leaders refused to include<\/a> a pro-Palestinian speaker, especially given hopes that Harris\u2019s rise might have sparked a shift away from Biden\u2019s reflexive support for Israel. Harris, of course, was in a bind, having just 107 days<\/a> to offer a distinct vision for America without radically breaking from the Biden administration for which she served as vice-president.<\/p>\n \u201cHarris has not provided any clear answer on this question of what she would do differently and what she believes should have been done differently,\u201d Ahmed told me. She has lately been \u201ctesting the waters with pro-Palestine voices,\u201d he said, but people haven\u2019t \u201cfound her messaging convincing yet.\u201d<\/p>\n My conversation with Ahmed on his reporting about a consequential 15 months, and how the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict play into the 2026 midterms and the already next presidential race, is below.<\/p>\n You covered a lot of these<\/a> events<\/a> in real time<\/a>. What was your intention for the book?<\/p>\n Even in real time, we saw the Biden administration try to deny the reality of what was happening on the ground in Gaza, telling us that U.S.-backed Israeli attacks we saw with our own eyes were not as bad as they actually were, and telling us that we should not be as concerned. And the Biden administration was trying to deny culpability, to say this is about Hamas \u2014 which of course did begin the war with their attack, or say it was about Netanyahu \u2014 but to try to deny the U.S. responsibility. I wanted to focus on the Biden era because I felt that that denial was already happening.<\/p>\n You write about some tense exchanges with the Biden White House and administration officials. Did you find that after Biden left office, people were more willing to talk about what happened?<\/p>\n I was talking to folks throughout the period that I covered, and many of them became even better sources for a book. Some were only willing to talk after a book was confirmed.<\/p>\n It speaks to a broader Washington culture of a lack of honesty, especially when it comes to foreign policy, which is a result itself of a lack of accountability for anything on foreign policy calls. Some of the folks who I did talk to were willing to only once it became clear that I had information that made them look bad.<\/p>\n You mention in the book how you felt like some journalists in Washington might be more predisposed to trust Biden officials. Can you talk about that dynamic?<\/p>\n I think there\u2019s a real credence that\u2019s given to Democrats writ large, but especially to this kind of class of experts. And of course expertise is really important, but the sense that after the chaos in the first Trump era \u2014 where you had appointees from Omarosa Manigault Newman to Jared Kushner, people who didn\u2019t necessarily have any of these strategic backgrounds doing these important jobs \u2014 journalists suddenly felt, \u201cOh, the people who we were consulting, formerly State Department, formerly White House, are back.\u201d<\/p>\n A lot of journalists were willing to believe that the Biden team could somehow bring this under control. This is also a result of, frankly, journalists and Democrats very often putting themselves on the same side as critics of Trump, especially in that first Trump presidency. I felt like it was a green-room coziness, too, that evolved in addition to a personal level of coziness and an assumption of good judgment.<\/p>\n Photo: W. W. Norton & Company\n <\/p>\n You describe the \u201cstaggering hubris\u201d of the Biden team and their \u201charrowing mismanagement.\u201d Was there one specific failure that helped set the course for how the administration would handle Israel\u2019s offensive post\u2013October 7?<\/p>\n I gave President Biden and his spokespeople until early summer to retract his statement on the \u201c40 beheaded babies.\u201d<\/a> That was a claim that the president made early, that this occurred on October 7. It was an unproven claim<\/a>. He never apologized.<\/p>\n That kind of language very early on really established where they\u2019re going to view this conflict through the lens of partisan and ideological preferences rather than the data that they are getting. And they\u2019re not going to admit any fault or wrongdoing. I think those kinds of things set the tone.<\/p>\n After Biden stepped aside, you write how Kamala Harris had an opportunity to signal a shift at the Democratic National Convention. Tell me about the decision to not put a Palestinian voice onstage and how that reflected the broader way that the administration was responding during this period.<\/p>\n You never saw Kamala Harris or her team outline what they would actually do differently. What continued was the sense of no daylight<\/a> \u2014 the Biden mantra that if we present ourselves as separate from Israel, others, like Hamas and Iran, will take advantage of it.<\/p>\n Not only does it ignore that the Biden administration had not met goals it set for itself \u2014 bringing home hostages, reducing civilian casualties, moving toward the Israeli-Palestinian peace \u2014 it also didn\u2019t reflect any of their other messaging, which was \u201cThere\u2019s a new fresh face for the party.\u201d We have the opportunity for this historic candidacy: first woman president, a Black and South Asian woman much younger than Biden.<\/p>\n Based on what was happening in the party Establishment at that time, it reflected the continued dominance of people from the Biden era, and really even going back to the Clinton era, who were longstanding Democratic partisans and operatives who didn\u2019t want to rock the boat.<\/p>\n And there was a constant dismissal of the antiwar sentiment, a sense that we\u2019ll get these voters back as that can\u2019t be a driving issue for them. Of course, in this year\u2019s primaries<\/a> we\u2019ve seen<\/a> that Gaza has been the animating force for a number of major wins.<\/p>\n How do expect Democratic candidates will position themselves on Israel in 2028?<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/4699029096d62d65b6ab721e3d564b23bf-crossing-redline.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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