Will lack of action on Israel, Gaza cost Biden reelection?
As infuriated as she is by President Joe Biden’s stalwart support for Israel, Layla Elabed has not ruled out voting for him in November. A progressive Palestinian American community organizer in Dearborn, Michigan, a majority Arab American city near Detroit, she doesn’t want to see Donald Trump back in office.
“Donald Trump has never been a friend to our community,” she told me as we sat in an airy, modern Yemeni coffee shop. But to win her back, she said, “the very bare minimum” Biden needs to do is to completely overhaul America’s relationship with Israel, demand a permanent end to hostilities and end U.S. military aid to Israel, at least as long as its war in the Gaza Strip drags on.
Given how strong support for Israel is in both parties, I’m fairly confident that an aid cutoff is not going to happen anytime soon. But speaking to Elabed, the younger sister of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-mich., I sensed a chasm between my resigned assumptions about how U.S. politics works and her convictions about what’s necessary to stave off more mass death.
“We’re looking at unprecedented times where we are watching a genocide unfold in front of our eyes,” said Elabed. Biden’s backing of Israel may be predictable, given both his avowed Zionism and the political influence of Israel’s American champions, but to her and others like her, it’s become intolerable. That’s why Elabed is managing the Listen to Michigan campaign — to get people to protest Biden’s handling of the war by voting “uncommitted” in this past Tuesday’s Democratic primary.
Biden will most likely never satisfy those most horrified by his Middle East policies, but if he doesn’t do more to try, he’s in danger of losing Michigan in November, which would almost certainly cost him the election. The state has the country’s largest percentage of Arab American voters, and within that community — as well as among many non-arab Muslims, young people and progressives — there’s a deep sense of fury and betrayal at Biden for standing behind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel pulverizes Gaza.
These voters have heard Biden criticize Israel’s “indiscriminate” and “over the top” bombardment of Palestinian civilians and infrastructure, but they don’t see his administration taking steps to restrain it. .
Elabed said Listen to Michigan was aiming to garner 10,000 to 15,000 votes, enough to “send the message to Joe Biden ... that we are a political force.” More than 100,000 voted “uncommitted” Tuesday.
The campaign has spent six figures on mailers and digital advertising, and activists are holding phone banks and canvassing. High-profile Arab American leaders, including Tlaib; Abdullah Hammoud,
the mayor of Dearborn; and Abraham Aiyash, the Democratic majority leader of Michigan’s House of Representatives, are all on board, as is Our Revolution, the group founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016, though Sanders has disavowed the “uncommitted” campaign.
Biden’s team seems to understand they’re in trouble in Michigan. Early this month, they dispatched aides to Dearborn to meet with Arab American leaders. The next week, Biden issued an order protecting thousands of Palestinians in the United States from deportation for the next 18 months. In an important step against Israeli extremism, he imposed sanctions on violent settlers in the West Bank.
But as long as his efforts don’t directly address the catastrophic suffering in Gaza, they’re not going to mollify activists. And while it’s obvious that Trump would be worse on the issues they care about, their desperation to exert leverage on Biden seems, at least for the moment, to override fear of Trump’s return.
Given how catastrophic another Trump term would be — including in Israel, where the far right fantasizes about his return — I find people who threaten to withhold their votes from Biden maddening. But if Democrats want them to come around, listening to them will be more effective than lecturing them.