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 “uncommitted” in the presidential primary, a rebuke of the Biden administration’s 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 “uncommitted” cause but later endorsed Kamala Harris, who will campaign with him on Tuesday. Appearing on Morning Joe, El-Sayed acknowledged “hurt feelings about engagement with the Arab and Muslim community” in 2024 while framing this week’s event as “an opportunity for us to come together.”

If Harris runs for president again, she’ll surely face questions about her role in the administration during Israel’s offensive in Gaza following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attacks, a harrowing period chronicled in reporter Akbar Shahid Ahmed’s new book, Crossing the Red Line. Harris “wasn’t a major force” in shaping Israel-Palestine policy, Ahmed told me, but she attended in small meetings with Biden and key officials, and also met with Netanyahu shortly after becoming the party’s nominee.

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 “dominated by timidity, ambition, callousness, and staggering hubris” and which effectively enabled atrocities in Gaza through continued U.S. military aid and failure to constrain Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even when he crossed the administration’s “red line” 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 progress made in the region toward the end of Joe Biden’s presidency while admitting “I wish we had done more to end the war sooner.”) The book, out Tuesday, should only is reignite debate about what the U.S. could’ve done differently, and comes as Americans’ views of Israel have grown increasingly negative, and ahead of Netanyahu speaking this week at the UN General Assembly.

Looking back, Ahmed writes about the frustration of activists in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention after party leaders refused to include a pro-Palestinian speaker, especially given hopes that Harris’s rise might have sparked a shift away from Biden’s reflexive support for Israel.........

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