Joe Biden doesn’t appear to care about the Palestinians he and his administration have helped to kill. When he finally met with a small group of Muslim American leaders in April this year who described to him the horror and peril Gazans were facing, Biden reportedly responded by changing the subject to Hamas’s atrocities on October 7 and dismissively telling a doctor he had already seen the photos of starving women and children she was showing him — which was impossible, since they had come from her phone. As former Clinton State Department official Aaron David Miller put it when asked if Biden has the same empathy for Palestinians as he does for Israelis, “No, he doesn’t, nor does he convey it.”

But there is one thing we know Biden does care about: his own legacy and reputation. And as a result of his blank-check policy to Israel, one that is now moving beyond genocide in the Gaza strip and unfolding into the largest Israeli military offensive in decades on the decidedly Hamas-less West Bank, Biden now stands on the brink of obliterating that, too.

For the better part of the last year, Biden and his foreign policy team have been deluding themselves that their central role in facilitating what more and more experts are declaring a genocide of Palestinians will be forgiven and forgotten as long as he emerges from it all with the promise of Palestinian statehood. In this fantasy, Biden would let Israel rampage through Gaza until it got tired, secure a cease-fire and hostage-release agreement, broker a deal that would trade normalized Israeli relations with Saudi Arabia for “irreversible” steps toward a demilitarized Palestinian state, and the president would then embark on a “victory tour,” taking credit for finally getting something close to a two-state solution, as an international coalition rebuilt a flattened Gaza and temporarily patrolled the wreckage of its streets — all in time to win the presidential election in November. Easy.

That Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly rejected this idea even as the White House eagerly shopped it around, insisting again and again that Israel would retain “security control over all territory west of the Jordan [river]” that was meant to make up a future independent Palestinian state, didn’t seem to give Biden and his team any pause.

They have continued clinging to this idea, even as Israel’s destruction of Gaza has lasted many months longer than the early 2024 cutoff they envisioned, and even as Netanyahu has alternated between brazenly ignoring Biden and regularly humiliating him. As recently as last week, Vice President Kamala Harris made a call for Palestinian “self-determination,” a fancier way of saying statehood, a major applause line in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Now, with Israel’s latest escalation seeing it kill at least eighteen in the West Bank and inflammatorily escort at least 160 extremist settlers into the Al-Aqsa Mosque holy site, Biden’s already dubious endgame is slipping into the realm of total fiction.

As Israel began on Tuesday its attack on the West Bank — a territory that, it bears repeating, isn’t ruled by Hamas and has little to no connection to October 7 — its foreign minister, Israel Katz, called for acting there “exactly as we deal with terror infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian civilians and any other step needed,” a call backed by the Israeli agriculture minister. “This is a war for everything, and we must win it,” Katz said.

It doesn’t take a PhD in Middle Eastern studies to understand what this could mean. As part of its “war for everything” in Gaza, the “terror infrastructure” Israel has destroyed there has, in reality, been any and every structure that’s standing and is vital for a functioning society, since, in Israel’s perverse logic, the fact that Hamas is embedded among ordinary Gazans and has built tunnels under much of the territory makes practically everything fair game for bombing.

Israel has now destroyed all or close to all of Gaza’s hospitals, universities, and schools, mosques and churches, businesses, whole neighborhoods, and the facilities it uses for drinking water, to list just a few. Besides the appalling human toll, this has meant more than half of its buildings have been damaged or destroyed, outdoing the devastation inflicted by Allied carpet bombing on Germany in World War II, a scale of destruction that people who look at war zones for a living say they have never seen before, and which has turned Gaza into an uninhabitable ruin that will take decades to recover.

The “temporary evacuations” Israel pats itself on the back for have proven the exact opposite in practice. They now appear to be permanent displacement, with 1.9 million Gazans — almost the entire population of the strip — forcibly displaced since the start of the war, some as many as eight times. Israel is now in the process of permanently occupying northern Gaza, and the Israeli far right and other prospective settlers are already making plans to swoop in, grab what land they can, and build beachfront properties.

If what Israel is now planning for the West Bank even approaches this, then it is hard to see how the already vanishing prospect of a two-state solution survives. In fact, given that Netanyahu has already massively expanded illegal Israeli settlements in the territory, and that his latest government has been putting into motion what it makes openly clear is an annexation plan for it, this looks more like simply the next stage of an effort to make sure it doesn’t: in this case, by using a thin pretext to expel the people who already live there and take their land.

Israel is only doing this because it has learned, from ten months of dithering and timidity from the White House, that there is nothing it can ever do that would make Biden cut off the weapons and military support it needs to carry on its spree of violence. As a result, the president risks going down in history not as he dreams, the great statesman who did what no one could and secured a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but as the exact opposite: the butcher and fool who killed the dream of Palestinian statehood for good.

That outcome would be a disastrous one for the United States, which already suffered the worst attack on its soil this century in large part over its deep complicity in Israel’s crimes. But little of Biden’s behavior over the past year suggests that US interests are his major concern. What he is fond of, as he took care to remind us often, is the verdict of historians and foreign policy experts. He might want to think about what they’ll say in a few years or decades if he keeps letting Israel’s extremists have their way.