Palestinian-American Samia Assed is demoralized by the Biden administration’s handling of the war between Israel and Hamas and sees the election of Vice President Kamala Harris – and her selection as running mate – as “a small glimmer of hope.”
That hope was dashed during the Democratic National Convention last month, when a request for a Palestinian-American speaker was rejected. Harris’ speech left her with the impression that the Democratic presidential candidate would continue US policies that have outraged many in the anti-war camp.
“I couldn’t breathe because I felt overlooked and ignored,” said Assed, a community organizer from New Mexico.
Under other circumstances, Assed would have been delighted by the groundbreaking rise of a woman of color as her party’s candidate. Instead, she is desperately pondering her options.
Many Palestinian Americans have been grappling for months with the double burden of the rising Palestinian death toll and suffering in Gaza and their own government’s support for Israel in the war. Along with pro-Palestinian allies, they have mourned, organized, lobbied and protested as they watched the killing and destruction on their screens or touched their own families. Now they are also wrestling with arduous, deeply personal voting decisions, including in the contested states.
“It’s a very hard time for Palestinian youth and Palestinian Americans,” Assed said. “There is a lot of pain.”
Without meaningful change, a vote for Harris would be “like a stab in the heart,” she said. At the same time, Assed, who has been a lifelong Democrat and feminist, wants to support prevent another Donald Trump presidency and stay in dialogue with Democrats “to hold them accountable,” she said.
“It’s really a difficult situation.”
She is not alone.
In Georgia, the bloodshed in Gaza haunts Ghada Elnajjar. She said the war has claimed the lives of more than 100 members of her extended family in Gaza, where her parents were born.
She saw missed opportunities at the DNC to connect with voters like her. In addition to rejecting the request for a Palestinian spokesperson, Elnajjar noted a discrepancy between U.S. policy and Harris’s claim that she and President Joe Biden were working on a ceasefire and hostage deal.
“Without US financial and military support for Israel, this will not stop,” said Elnajjar, who campaigned for Biden in 2020. “I am a US citizen. I am a taxpayer … and I feel betrayed and neglected.”
She will continue to seek policy changes but will remain “undecided” if necessary and may leave the top of the ballot blank. Harris must earn her vote, she said.
Harris said in her speech to the Democratic Council that she and Biden would work to end the war so that “Israel is safe, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can exercise their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”
She said she would “always ensure that Israel is able to defend itself” and described the suffering in the Gaza Strip as “heartbreaking.”
While her recent rhetoric about Palestinian suffering was seen as empathetic by some who grew to dislike Biden over the war, the lack of a concrete policy shift appears to have increasingly frustrated many of those who want an end to the war. Activists calling for a lasting ceasefire have called for an embargo on U.S. weapons against Israel, whose military campaign in Gaza has killed over 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials.
The war was triggered by an attack on Israel on October 7, in which Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages.
Layla Elabed, a Palestinian American and co-director of the Uncommitted National Movement, said the demand for political change remains. At the national level, the Uncommitted movement won hundreds of thousands of votes in the Democratic primaries.
Elabed said Harris and her team have been invited to meet with “undecided” movement leaders from key swing states and with Palestinian families whose relatives have been killed in Gaza before Sept. 15. After that date, she said, “we have to decide whether we can actually mobilize our base” to vote for Harris.
Without a change in policy, “we cannot express support” and will instead continue to talk about the “dangers” of a Trump presidency and leave it to voters to vote according to their conscience, she added.
Some other anti-war activists go even further and argue that Harris should not be voted for unless change occurs.
“There is pressure to punish the Democratic Party,” Elabed said. “Our position is to continue to take up space within the Democratic Party” and push for change from within.
Some of the tensions came to lithe at an August rally in Michigan, when anti-war protesters interrupted Harris. Harris began by saying that every vote counts. As the shouting continued and protesters chanted that they would “not vote for genocide,” she took a sharper tone.
“If you want Donald Trump to win, say so,” she said.
Nada Al-Hanooti, deputy organizing director for the Muslim American advocacy group Emgage Action, rejected the argument by some that traditionally Democratic voters who don’t vote for Harris would actually support Trump. She said the burden is on Harris and her party.
“It’s an uphill battle right now being a Palestinian American,” she said. “I don’t want a Trump presidency, but at the same time, the Democratic Party needs to win our votes.”
Although she was dismayed that no Palestinian speaker was allowed on the DNC stage, Al-Hanooti said she was inspired by how “undecided” activists included Palestinians in the conversation at the convention. The activists were given space there to hold a forum discussing the plight of Palestinians in Gaza.
“We in the community must continue to urge Harris to provide conditioning assistance and reach a ceasefire,” she said. “The fight is not over.”
She said she had never experienced so much grief as she has in the past year. In the girls of Gaza, she sees her overdue grandmother, who was expelled from her homeland at the age of ten during the war for the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 and lived in a Syrian refugee camp, dreaming of returning home.
“It just tears me apart,” Al-Hanooti said.
She’s trying to channel her pain by pressuring elected officials and encouraging community members to vote, though she says she’s encountering increasing apathy and many feeling like their vote doesn’t count. “Our job at Emgage right now is simply to get our Muslim community to vote, because our power is in the community.”
In 2020, Emgage — whose political action committee supported Biden at the time — and other groups worked to maximize voter turnout among Muslim Americans, especially in swing states. Muslims make up a petite percentage of Americans overall, but activists hope that in states with sizable Muslim populations like Michigan, mobilizing more of them will make a difference in winning close elections — and demonstrating the community’s political power.
Some voters want to send a message.
“Our community has given away our voices,” argues Omar Abuattieh, a pharmacy student at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “Once we start to see our voices as a bargaining tool, we will have more power.”
For Abuattieh, whose mother was born in Gaza, this means that he wants to vote for a third party “to demonstrate the strength of a newly empowered community that deserves future consultation.”
A Pew Research Center poll in February found that U.S. Muslims have more sympathy for the Palestinian people than many other Americans and that only 6% of Muslim American adults believe the U.S. strikes the right balance between Israelis and Palestinians. Nearly two-thirds of registered Muslim voters identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, according to the poll.
But the racially and ethnically diverse Muslims in the United States are not a monolith in their political behavior; some have publicly supported Harris this election cycle. Among Muslim voters in 2020, 64% supported Biden and 35% supported Trump, according to AP VoteCast.
The Harris campaign said it had appointed two people to handle Muslim and Arab outreach.
Harris “will continue to meet with leaders of the Palestinian, Muslim, Israeli and Jewish communities, as she has done throughout her tenure as vice president,” the campaign said in response to questions, but did not specifically address the unaffiliated movement’s request for a meeting before September 15.
Harris is being viewed critically by those who believe the Biden-Harris administration has not done enough to put pressure on Israel to end the war, and also by Republicans who want to accuse her of not providing enough support to Israel.
Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said Trump would “once again build peace through strength to rebuild and expand the peace coalition he built in his first term to create long-term security for both the Israeli and Palestinian people.”
Many Arab and Muslim Americans were angered by the travel ban Trump imposed during his term in office, which affected travelers from several Muslim-majority countries. Biden then lifted the ban.
In Michigan, Ali Ramlawi, owner of a restaurant in Ann Arbor, said Harris’ nomination initially gave him relief on various domestic issues, but the DNC disappointed him on the Palestine issue.
Before the party convention, he assumed he would vote for the Democrats, but now he is considering whether he should support the Greens as their top candidate or not.
“Our vote cannot be taken for granted,” he said. “I will not vote for the lesser of two evils.”
___
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s partnership with The Conversation US and a grant from the Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
