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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
‘Blame yourself’: Trump’s election hasn’t dampened
pro-Palestinian activists’ anger at Democrats
By Gregory Krieg, CNN
Updated:
5:58 PM EST, Sat November 16, 2024
Source: CNN
For Democratic pro-Palestinian activists, ’s reelection delivered a
bitter vindication.
Led by the , they spent months pushing and pleading with the Biden
administration to scale back its support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
Their warning had been consistent and direct: Not only did Democrats
risk collapsing support among Arab American and Muslim voters in
Michigan, but the conflict – and the continuous flow of military aid
to the Israeli government – could depress enthusiasm among the
coalition of young, mostly progressive-minded voters who proved key to
Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.
“We told them that the impact of Gaza was going be bigger than just
the Arab community. It’s why the turnout was lower in college areas
and among young Black voters,” said James Zogby, co-founder of the
Arab American Institute and a Democratic National Committee member for
more than 30 years. “From the polling we’ve been doing over the
last year, we saw it had an impact. And it certainly had an impact on
my community.”
Early post-election analysis of the race suggests that those concerns
were well-founded – and emblematic of a broader disconnect between
party leaders and the Democratic grassroots. Arab Americans, like
Latino and Black men, all moved toward Trump in the final accounting.
The president-elect’s vote-share improved nearly everywhere, from the
red states he’s dominated for nearly a decade to traditionally
liberal electorates, where Democrats either stayed home or, to a lesser
degree, backed third-party candidates.
“While Kamala Harris was ignoring communities, especially of Muslim
Arab communities here in Dearborn,” Uncommitted co-founder Lexis
Zeidan told CNN, Trump “was coming to these communities and pandering
to these communities, and he was capitalizing off of these vulnerable
emotions and telling them what they wanted to hear.”
Dearborn, Michigan, is home to the country’s largest Arab American
population. As the results came the night of the election, its shift
away from the top of the Democratic ticket startled even some of the
most passionate activists.
Four years after Biden dominated there, Trump got 42% of the vote, a
plurality. Green Party nominee Jill Stein nearly cracked 20%. Harris
landed in the middle, with 36%. According to national exit polls, more
than 6 in 10 Muslims voted for the Democrat – a clear majority, but a
stark decline from past cycles.
Zeidan and other allies in the movement also pointed to Harris’
letdowns with other minority voters that had traditional broken
strongly for Democrats.
“This (election) wasn’t a referendum on Gaza policy,” Zeidan
said. “What (the national results) showed you is that she not only
was sidelining ‘uncommitted’ and Arab and Muslim voters, but she
was sidelining other communities of color as well – working class,
climate justice, the Latina and Latino community.”
Wa’el Alzayat, CEO of the Muslim American advocacy organization
Emgage, guessed that Harris’ Muslim support might have come in as
high as 90% if she had clearly signaled plans to break from Biden’s
policy in the region. Emgage ultimately endorsed Harris, despite some
of its members’ misgivings, arguing that “pursuing an anti-war
agenda had a better shot under (the Democrat’s) administration.”
Trump’s initial planned appointments, Alzayat said, confirmed his
anxieties.
“What kind of peace and freedom for the Palestinians are we going
have under Mike Huckabee and Tulsi Gabbard? My God. And Matt Gaetz.
What kind of rights are pro-Palestinian students going to have?” he
said, naming Trump’s controversial picks for ambassador to Israel,
national intelligence director and attorney general, respectively.
That fear and frustration, though, has not translated to guilt.
Activists and voters who spoke to CNN over the past three days
unanimously rejected any suggestion that their work was to blame for
Harris’ unraveling.
“I don’t have any regrets,” Uncommitted spokesman and strategist
Waleed Shahid told CNN. “We tried our best to bridge the campaign and
the party with the community. Tried to help the campaign help
themselves by changing their policy position and doing something that
was in the mutual self-interest of the community and the party.”
“And they rejected those offers pretty plainly.”
Uncommitted most memorably led a push at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago this summer to allow a Palestinian-American
speaker to address the party. After weeks of back-and-forth, on the
final night of the confab, party officials inside the United Center
told Uncommitted leaders it was a no-go.
Michigan Democrats, led by the state party chair Lavora Barnes,
objected immediately – first in a brief interview with CNN, then in a
statement to reporters.
“The thing I’ve been saying and I will always say is that these
uncommitted voters are our voters, they’re our family,” Barnes told
CNN at the time. “They are good Democrats who have an issue that they
want to voice, and they have every right to voice it.”
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, another prominent
Michigan-based leader, also condemned the decision, accusing the party
of putting “our heads in the sand” and ignoring the festering
anger.
Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman would have been the one to speak that
night, had convention organizers allowed it. Romman said she had even
watered down her remarks in a bid to ease the transaction. She did, in
the end, deliver her speech – to a group of Uncommitted leaders and
allies who began a sit-in outside the convention.
Months later, Romman, who was reelected to her statehouse seat last
week, told CNN she has only become more troubled by the Harris
campaign’s refusal, as she saw it, to acknowledge the depth of
suffering among Palestinian- and Lebanese-American emigrees, long
stalwarts of the Democratic coalition.
“If you needed our votes to save you, you should have acted like
it,” Romman said of Democrats now wagging their fingers at the Arab
American community. “Yes, Trump is way worse. Am I happy that he’s
an office? No, I’m terrified and I did all that I could to prevent
that.”
Uncommitted didn’t officially endorse either candidate, but Romman
voted for Harris. Shahid and co-founder Abbas Alawieh both urged others
to do the same.
In Dearborn, Arab American voters speaking to CNN expressed frustration
with Trump’s early moves, but insisted they were not anguishing over
their votes.
“I feel good that I don’t have blood on my hands,” said Dalal
Baydoun, who voted for Stein. “Because like I said, they’re all
with genocide, so having to not be a part of all that makes me feel
good.”
The global debate over how to describe or define Israel’s actions in
Gaza, the occupied West Bank and, increasingly, in Lebanon, has often
overshadowed the less complicated reality on the ground here, where the
opposition is diverse, organized and angry.
A United Nations report out Friday said Israel’s offensive in Gaza
“is consistent with the characteristics of genocide,” citing mass
civilian casualties and using starvation as a weapon. An onslaught that
began as a reprisal against Hamas following the terror group’s
October 7, 2023, rampage in southern Israel, has, from the perspective
of international observers, become a global scandal.
Last week, the UN Human Rights Office said it “found close to 70 per
cent to be children and women, indicating a systematic violation of the
fundamental principles of international humanitarian law” on the part
of the Israeli military.
That report landed at about the same time Biden’s Departments of
State and Defense said – after a weeks-long review – that they
could not “verify” whether Israel used American-made weapons in
violation of international humanitarian law.
Close watchers of Harris’ rhetoric during the campaign sniffed out a
subtle shift during her final days on the stump in Michigan. Her talk
about ending the war in Gaza had become more robust.
“This year has been difficult, given the scale of death and
destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement
in Lebanon, it is devastating,” Harris said during an late rally in
East Lansing, home to Michigan State University. “And as president, I
will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home
the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure, and
ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity,
freedom, security and self-determination.”
Activists were hopeful, they said, but worried that it was still too
little – and coming way too late in the campaign. Former President
Bill Clinton had already deepened the wounds, calling Gaza the
“hardest issue here,” before effectively arguing Israel’s actions
in Gaza were, if not justified, then understandable given Hamas’
tactics.
“I understand why young Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan
think too many people have died, I get that,” Clinton said. “But if
you lived in one of those kibbutzim in Israel, right next to Gaza,
where the people there were the most pro-friendship with Palestine,
most pro-two state solution of any of the Israeli communities, were the
ones right next to Gaza. And Hamas butchered them.”
Clinton’s remarks were the capper, multiple operatives told CNN, on a
campaign that seemed unable – or unwilling – to see how its broader
strategy of trying to lure moderate Republicans by embracing former
Rep. Liz Cheney and her father, Iraq War architect and former Vice
President Dick Cheney, was further undermining its case with Arab
Americans.
“If there’s one person Muslims and Arabs hate more, or about the
same as Donald Trump,” Shahid said, “it’s probably Dick
Cheney.”
Zogby, who said he is now planning to run for a vice chair slot on the
Democratic National Committee, also questioned the campaign’s
decision to lean on Liz Cheney, describing it as a slap in the face to
Arab Americans.
Still, Zogby added, for all the missteps and slights, he is “not
happy with my community” – and said Trump’s early round of policy
and personnel moves predicted darker days to come.
“There’s going to be a reckoning for this,” he said of Arab
American support for Trump. “Those who said, we’re going teach
Democrats a lesson, or maybe Trump’s better in a second term, well,
they’re already getting their reckoning, and he’s not even started
this term.”
This story has been updated with additional information.
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