Arab American Voter Backlash Against Biden Over Israel Policy
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Roshan Amiri
- . February 22, 2024
- . Update: February 22, 2024 9:18 pm
As the death toll has mounted rapidly among Gazan civilians amid Israeli airstrikes in recent weeks, outrage and disillusionment has grown among Arab American voters in Michigan – a constituency seen as crucial to President Biden’s narrow 2020 electoral victory there.
Activists are now mobilizing fiercely across Michigan’s Arab American communities to repudiate and exert pressure on a Biden administration seen as enabling the bloodshed through unwavering support of Israel’s brutal military assault on Gaza. The President’s stance has alienated many voters who helped provide his wafer-thin winning margin in the decisive swing state. Some residents rue having ever backed his candidacy in the first place.
Don’t Reward Biden at Polls for Abandoning Palestine
Nowhere is the backlash more pronounced than in Dearborn, a Detroit suburb that is home to one of the nation’s biggest concentrations of Arab Americans. Here, activists have been accosting mosque-goers after Friday prayers, furiously chanting “Don’t vote for Biden!” Their urgent message is resonating with many Dearborn residents appalled over the White House’s refusal to condemn Israeli actions in Gaza that rely heavily on U.S military hardware and foreign aid dollars.
Having secured Michigan by just 150,000 votes with help from Arab American communities, Biden now faces the possibility of a major political rebellion by a crucial element of his Michigan coalition. The intensifying opposition also jeopardizes his party’s hopes of retaining a hotly-contested congressional seat in the state in the 2022 Midterm Elections.
Voters Seek to Protest President’s “Abandonment” on Palestine
While some political organizers cling to the hope that declining electoral support could still compel Biden to adopt a more balanced policy on Palestine, others see the relationship with the President as unsalvageable. Activist groups like Abandon Biden are instead focused solely on communicating the depth of outrage felt by Arab American and Muslim voters in Michigan over U.S. complicity in the loss of civilian lives in Gaza.
These groups are explicitly urging voters to symbolically write in “Free Palestine” or vote “uncommitted” in the upcoming August 2nd Michigan Democratic Primary, purely as an act of protest against Biden’s posturing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For many recently stalwart Democrats, the casual enabling of apparent human rights violations abroad under Biden has rapidly overwritten any lingering wariness toward Republican attitudes on Islamophobia or immigration.
Loss of Labor Union Support Further Weakens Biden’s Standing
Biden is also witnessing defections from the state’s traditionally Democrat-aligned labour movement over his administration’s perceived tolerance of Palestinian civilian deaths. Lifelong Democrat and United Auto Workers member Merwan Beydoun is one local Arab American steelworker who has halted his donations to his union’s pro-Democrat political fund in the wake of White House postures on the Gaza crisis that he deems utterly indefensible.
With such prominent local Democratic activists and organizers speaking of President Biden’s Middle East policy stances as reprehensible “betrayals” that defy forgiveness, the Administration has significant work ahead rebuilding vital bridges ahead of the 2024 Presidential vote across Arab American and Muslim communities in the state of Michigan.
