If Kamala Harris had managed to win the presidency last November, would Israel and Hamas have reached a ceasefire and hostage exchange deal ahead of her inauguration? We can never know for sure, but it’s hard to imagine. The deal the two belligerents agreed to last week was facilitated by a historically unusual joint effort between the former and now current administrations, and both Joe Biden and Donald Trump were quick to claim credit. Biden’s claim rests on the ceasefire framework being nearly identical to the one his administration put forward last May, while Trump’s claim rests on the obvious rejoinder that no such deal was reached last May, or at any other point in the eight months between then and the final week of Biden’s disastrous presidency.

Reporting from multiple outlets suggests that Trump and his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, played a decisive role in forcing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hand. In a January 7 press conference from Mar-a-Lago, Trump warned that “all hell will break out” if a hostage deal wasn’t reached before his inauguration. “It wasn’t a warning to Hamas. It was a warning to Netanyahu,” Steve Bannon told Politico, which also quoted former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert as saying Netanyahu agreed to the deal “because he’s afraid of Trump.”

“The prime minister was dragged into this deal against his will and was unable to resist. He understood the consequences of disappointing Trump even before he reached the White House,” a Netanyahu associate told Al-Monitor, which also cited a former top Israeli official who said, “Netanyahu knows that with Trump he will not be able to wipe the floor as he did with Democratic presidents—like Clinton, Obama and Biden.” Witkoff reportedly told the Israeli prime minister to his face: “Don’t fuck this up.” And Netanyahu has already paid a political price: this past weekend, Israel’s settler-extremist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir resigned from Netanyahu’s shaky far-right governing coalition over the ceasefire deal, after standing with Netanyahu for fifteen months of genocidal warfare backed by the Biden administration.

The mass killing in Gaza is the one aspect of Biden’s legacy that can never be erased.

Biden and his few remaining dead-enders might protest, but everyone else knows Trump made this happen, which means he accomplished in a week what Biden and his “A-Team” of seasoned foreign policy professionals failed to achieve for over a year. This is a sobering admission for anyone who, like me, voted against Trump’s return to power and reasonably fears the scope of the damage he might inflict over the next four years. A week before the election, Nicholas Kristof opined in the New York Times that while he shared the frustration of many Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, and younger voters over Biden’s support for Israel, refusing to vote for Harris “could mean even more starving children, even more displacement and even more death” for Palestinians. It still could, and it would be naive to think the Trump administration policy won’t facilitate further Israeli land grabs and violence against Palestinians, but as of now Trump can plausibly claim he brought an end to one of the worst extended atrocities so far this century—an atrocity that was enabled at all stages by Biden and never repudiated by Harris.

When I say all stages, I mean all stages, because Biden’s failures in the Middle East predated and in many ways made possible the October 7 Hamas attacks that set off Israel’s brutal campaign. The bar was already in hell, but compared to almost any of his predecessors other than Trump in his first term, Biden did not even make a token effort to bring about a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (yes, even George W. Bush tried harder—look it up). After Trump shifted U.S. policy in the region well to the right—moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s authority over the Golan Heights, and negotiating the “Abraham Accords” that normalized Israel’s relationships with several Arab countries without any nod toward Palestinians—there was near-total continuity in policy going into the Biden administration, with Trump’s moves treated as fait accompli.

Biden’s point person on the Middle East, Brett McGurk, was a holdover from Trump’s first term, and McGurk’s singular, fanatical goal under both presidents was to broker a major peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, while treating the Palestinian issue as a minor nuisance. That set the tone for Biden’s whole Middle East approach, notoriously captured in a sentence national security advisor Jake Sullivan wrote for publication shortly before the October 7 attacks: “Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades.” The attacks likely occurred when they did because Hamas recognized it needed to do something bold to derail McGurk’s dreamed-for Israeli-Saudi deal, and in that sense they were successful: such a deal may yet happen under Trump, but it didn’t for the remainder of Biden’s presidency. Biden, in short, is not only responsible for arming and funding Israel as it committed war crimes against Gaza, but for two and a half years of myopic policy that left Israel and the United States blindsided by Hamas in the first place.

When Biden stepped aside from his reelection campaign a month after his humiliating debate with Trump last summer, Vice President Harris had an opportunity to reset the Democratic Party’s posture toward the Middle East. No one expected her to become a radical leftist, but she could have meaningfully distanced herself from Biden and pivoted back to Barack Obama’s more evenhanded positioning, in line with former Obama advisers like Ben Rhodes and Tommy Vietor, who have spoken out loudly and consistently against Biden’s support for Israel’s war. Some of us dared to hope, but Harris quickly poured cold water on that: her foreign policy adviser, Phil Gordon, announced after Harris met with pro-Palestine activists that the vice president “does not support an arms embargo on Israel,” and at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Harris campaign refused to allow any Palestinian speaker to appear onstage, no matter how anodyne their planned remarks. Instead, she campaigned with Liz Cheney, and she sent Israel hawk Ritchie Torres to campaign for Jewish votes and Bill Clinton to chastise Arab voters in Michigan. The Harris campaign’s contempt for Palestinians was so palpable that a pro-Trump PAC funded by Elon Musk capitalized on it, targeting ads at Arab Americans in swing states that claimed Harris would “ALWAYS stand with Israel.” It was a cynical play—the same PAC also targeted Jews in swing states with the exact opposite message—but Harris left a wide opening for it, and the thing is, it worked: many Arab Americans in Michigan and other swing states actually did switch from Biden to Trump.

In the same week that the ceasefire deal was tentatively announced, two other stories broke that spotlighted the extent of Biden’s moral and political failure in Palestine. One was The Lancet’s publication, subsequently covered in the New York Times, of a peer-reviewed study of traumatic injury deaths in the Gaza Strip from October 7, 2023 through June 30, 2024. The study estimated that the Palestinian Ministry of Health underreported such deaths by 41 percent during that period, and that over 64,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children, had died from traumatic injury, a figure that does not include the untold thousands more who died of starvation or disease resulting from Israel’s bombardment of Gaza’s infrastructure (a previous analysis published by The Lancet estimated total Palestinian deaths to that point at over 186,000). Another six months of nonstop devastation in Gaza have passed since the data for The Lancet study was collected. The exact casualty numbers may never be known and in a sense are irrelevant, as no one seriously doubts that Israel has inflicted indiscriminate collective punishment against a captive civilian population, in what has been declared a genocide by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and multiple world-renowned genocide experts (including some initial skeptics), and ruled at least “plausibly” genocidal by the International Court of Justice.

The other story that broke last week was an Institute for Middle East Understanding poll that made the most plausible case to date that Biden’s handling of Gaza might have cost Harris the election. Unlike most polls, which focus on what voters overall in 2024 prioritized in the presidential race—typically, economic issues like inflation—the IMEU poll focuses on the millions of Biden 2020 voters who opted for a candidate other than Harris in 2024, whether that meant Trump or a third-party candidate. Among this subset of the electorate, a 29 percent plurality named “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” as the most important issue in deciding their vote, with even higher percentages in the key battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. While no single factor can account for Harris’s shutout in all seven battleground states or Trump’s popular vote win, the IMEU poll provides strong evidence for what seemed anecdotally obvious throughout last year: the Biden-Harris team’s unapologetic support for Israel’s genocide alienated meaningful numbers of potential supporters.

Taken together, the Lancet study and the IMEU survey capture Biden’s decision to prioritize the slaughter of countless Palestinians over what he himself described as the core mission of his presidency: saving American democracy and preventing Trump from returning to power. As Trump sets about dismantling his predecessor’s fragile domestic accomplishments, the mass killing in Gaza is the one aspect of Biden’s legacy that can never be erased. When Trump rounds up migrants and refugees and forces them into camps, or guts the federal regulatory state, or ushers in the next mass-casualty pandemic—it will all be downstream of an addled Biden’s stubborn refusal to apply meaningful pressure on Netanyahu for fifteen months. After a decades-long and profoundly mediocre political career, it’s what Biden deserves to be remembered for.