Associated Press
Hundreds of protesters from Detroit, Michigan, and surrounding communities attend an October 2023 rally calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Detroit has one of the largest Arab American populations in the United States, including many Palestinians.
When they issued the Port Huron statement in June 1962, the founding members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) could not have known the scale of the horror that was to emerge in Vietnam, where—by the time their manifesto was drafted—fewer than a hundred Americans had died and U.S. intervention had not yet hit its peak. Indeed, it would take two more years for the Gulf of Tonkin incident to lend cover for an American war that would claim the lives of some two million Vietnamese civilians.
SDS, at its inaugural gathering in Port Huron, Michigan, that summer, took aim at the prevailing political climate in the country, which, they warned, was being overrun by the interests of an expanding military-industrial complex.
The students put forward a set of lofty goals—disarmament, combating hunger, and corporate accountability, to name a few—that would matter well beyond the next electoral cycle. Together, these goals added up to a more comprehensive and forward-looking vision, one that the U.S. political system had taught voters to fear. “Fearing vision,” the Port Huron students wrote, “we justify rhetoric or myopia. Fearing hope, we reinforce despair.”
A similar sentiment is now emerging among opponents of the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Gaza, which has so far killed one out of every 100 Palestinians within the twenty-five-mile-long strip. Israel’s three-month bombing campaign and ground invasion has netted the state a slate of war crimes allegations, many of them backed by social media videos enthusiastically posted by its own soldiers. Yet despite making it to the docket of the International Court of Justice, these alleged crimes have not only gone unrebuked by the administration of President Joe Biden, they have been aided and abetted through direct U.S. military support—the kind that SDS warned against six decades ago.
Now, many in America’s Arab and Muslim communities are poised to hold Biden accountable in the 2024 presidential election due to his stance.
When he became an American citizen last year, Samer Hassan was looking forward to casting his first vote for a U.S. President this November. Hassan’s family had migrated from Venezuela, where they had first settled after fleeing conflict and displacement in the Middle East. But with another war raging in Gaza and the U.S. President actively supporting what many consider a genocidal Israeli campaign against Palestinians, the election has lost its luster. “Every day that the Biden Administration continues to fund apartheid Israel,” says Hassan, a thirty-two-year-old Palestinian writer based in Chicago, “is another day the United States delegitimizes itself in front of its citizens.”
With political party affiliations evenly split among Americans, and record numbers identifying as independent, Arab Americans like Hassan, who see the Biden Administration as complicit in Israel’s war, could play an outsized role in deciding the outcome of the next presidential election. They are joined by a broader group of Muslim Americans from other ethnic backgrounds. Yet despite polls showing a steep drop in support for Biden among these demographic groups, as of this writing, the White House has continued to sidestep their demand for a ceasefire in Gaza, even as the administration provides the weapons that have killed almost 23,000 people there.
“It feels like a moral responsibility not to vote for [Biden].”— Zeina Azzam, poet based in Virginia
That disregard, according to Arab and Muslim American voters interviewed for this article, has left them with no choice but to vote against Biden in this year’s election—even if it means the return of Donald Trump, whose administration was openly antagonistic to Arabs and Muslims. Registered voters in four different states told The Progressive that Biden’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, coupled with his repeated dehumanization of Palestinians, had made a vote for the sitting President unconscionable.
“It feels like a moral responsibility not to vote for [Biden],” says Zeina Azzam, sixty-seven, a poet based in Alexandria, Virginia. In previous presidential elections, Azzam resisted being a one-issue voter, since the candidates “were all pro-Israel anyway.” But with Biden, she says, the stakes for Palestinians are too high.
Speaking to MSNBC’s Joy Reid, outgoing Biden appointee Tariq Habash, who resigned in protest on January 3, said that it was up to Biden to convince him to vote Democratic in the upcoming presidential election. Given the President’s track record so far, however, Azzam doubts Biden can sway voters like her. “I don’t know if Biden can do anything that would make me change my mind,” she adds. “I can’t get myself to vote for him after he’s supported the genocide in Gaza.”
In Azzam’s home state of Virginia, a group of Arab Americans that supported Biden in his 2020 presidential bid has already announced that it would disband. Commenting on the move, Maher Massis, founder of the Arab Americans Biden 2020 committee, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that members of his community “feel like they have been backstabbed by the administration.”
Whether Arab Americans can tip the 2024 results in Virginia, where they number about 200,000 of the state’s 8.7 million residents (roughly 2 percent), remains to be seen. Although Biden scored a resounding victory in Virginia in the last election, voters came out in force for Trump in 2016, when Hillary Clinton eked past the newcomer by just five percentage points.
Elsewhere, the Democrats already have little room for an Arab or Muslim American exodus. In Michigan, home to one of the largest concentrations of Arab and Muslim Americans, recent polls show Trump leading Biden by eight to twelve points. That’s a stark reversal of the President’s fortunes four years ago, when Biden topped Trump by nearly 3 percent—or a little more than 150,000 votes. With about twice as many Michigan voters tracing their roots to the Middle East and North Africa, the President could presumably recoup his current deficit by winning back Arab American voters.
If his campaign staff realize this, they seem to have botched the effort. Late last year, Biden appeared to signal a tougher stance on Israel’s targeting of Palestinian civilians, but the message was overshadowed by his actual policy decisions. Speaking at a December 12 fundraising event, the President referred to “indiscriminate” Israeli bombing, warning that the country was losing global support for what it claimed was a war against Hamas. That the Biden Administration had, three days earlier, approved the transfer of 14,000 tank shells to Israel left no question about the President’s sincerity and willingness to reverse course.
“The word inside the White House is that the Muslims will fall in line. No, we will not.” — Omar Suleiman, an American Muslim scholar
Even if Biden did withhold future weapons transfers, many younger voters of Arab descent remain unsure if they could support him. They see his staunch backing of Israel as part of a pattern of political cowardice. Despite the President’s reputation for empathy, his track record on Gaza has shown voters that he is all too willing to sacrifice innocent lives in the service of power.
One Arab American law student, who asked to remain anonymous because she had already faced threats for her pro-Palesinian activism, regretted voting for the President in 2020. “Biden regurgitates what he’s told,” the twenty-four-year-old said. “We need an independent thinker [in office].”
Ahlam Muhtaseb, fifty-three, a professor of media studies at California State University in San Bernardino, believes many in the Arab and Muslim American communities are likely to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein or independent Cornel West while others are vowing to sit out the 2024 election altogether.
“The bottom line is that we will never—no matter what—elect Joe Biden,” Muhtaseb says. Voters like her, she adds, are willing to risk a second Trump term because the former President’s “harmful, racist rhetoric” never led to the kind of mass slaughter being endured by Palestinians in Gaza. “People are thinking, we’ve seen the worst,” Muhtaseb continues. “It can’t get worse than Biden’s policy on Gaza.”
Some voters are facing the possibility of a second Trump presidency by staying focused on a longer-term vision. In a video posted to Facebook, American Muslim scholar Omar Suleiman said that, for too long, his community has been told, “just vote for the lesser of two evils.” Suleiman is part of a national coalition of activists, united under the banner #AbandonBiden. In December, the group launched a nationwide campaign focused on key swing states in the upcoming presidential election. The coalition’s goal is to make sure the sitting President “will lose each and every one of them,” University of Minnesota professor Hassan Abdel Salam told Politico.
“The word inside the White House is that the Muslims will fall in line” ahead of the 2024 election, Suleiman added. “No, we will not.” Instead, Suleiman called on voters angry with Biden to “come together and craft our own agendas and put forward more ethical candidates and usher in a new era.”
It’s the kind of hopeful vision put forward by the students at Port Huron. Like the Vietnam War they saw coming, a bloodier future for the Middle East isn’t inevitable. But for these Arab and Muslim American voters intent on a different future, Joe Biden isn’t the man for the job.