What Are Arab American Women Supposed to Do This November?
It was the ice cream that broke Reina Sultan. In February, when she saw a clip of President Joe Biden nonchalantly telling reporters he hoped to see a cease-fire in Gaza by the end of the weekend, a Van Leeuwen cone in his hand, her heart sank. Israel’s war on Gaza following the attacks by Hamas on October 7 had been raging for four months at that point, and the International Criminal Court had recently ordered the country to take action to prevent a genocide. “I wake up thinking about it,” the Brooklyn-based journalist says of the war. “I go to sleep thinking about it.” That image of Biden has replayed in Sultan’s head in the roughly 19 weekends since as a symbol of how seriously U.S. politicians take Israel’s bombing campaign, in which the death toll has passed 37,000, including 15,000 children. “I’ve been forced to witness babies that look like my cousins without their heads attached to their bodies,” Sultan says, “and there’s not a peep” from the president. “I expect nothing from him,” she adds.
I spoke with nearly a dozen Arab American women across the country over the past five months who tell me they’re fed up with the lack of progress they’ve seen from their elected officials on brokering a cease-fire. “I’m one of those people who calls my congressman every day,” says Amira, a 28-year-old Palestinian American from Columbus, Ohio. “We feel very strongly that the people in our government have severely failed us.” Not only do these women feel betrayed by their political leaders, but they’re also facing blowback for expressing that feeling. “I had a conversation with a colleague at work who was like, ‘You have to vote for Biden. If we don’t have Biden, we have Trump,’” Layla, a British Iraqi educator in New York, tells me. Diana Jarrar, a Palestinian Syrian entrepreneur in Los Angeles, says that some of her non-Palestinian friends have suggested she’ll be letting Trump win if she doesn’t vote this year. “I don’t care. I’m sorry if that seems unpatriotic,” she says. “It’s really unpatriotic to be enabling a genocide halfway across the world.”
I’ve been watching the “Could Arab American and Muslim voters cost Biden the 2024 election?” discourse unfold this year with a pit in my stomach. A troubling political atmosphere triggers memories from my post-9/11 upbringing: While young people and swing-state voters are also bailing on their support for Biden, some liberals seem primed to scapegoat Arab Americans should Trump win in November. I feel it when I see media figures respond to a columnist’s tweet about his Arab relatives abstaining from voting with “They won’t be happy when Trump puts them in camps.” I feel it when I hear Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez say she’d tell Arab Americans reluctant to vote for the Democratic nominee that she’d rather organize under a Biden administration than a Trump one, prefacing that she wouldn’t want to lecture Palestinian Americans on how to vote. The message these Democrats and the pundits who support them are sending is that the way to prove my community members care about upholding democracy is through discarding whatever feelings they may have about the president and his administration’s handling of the crisis, even if they’ve lost relatives in Gaza, and voting for Biden anyway.
Did you notice that the president didn’t say the word Palestinian at all during the presidential debate last month? I did. And when Trump did, he used it as a slur. When Biden did speak about the war, he noted that the U.S. is “the biggest producer of support for Israel anywhere in the world.” (Indeed, the U.S. government has continued advancing billion-dollar arms sales to Israel despite a coalition of lawyers urging Biden to halt these transfers.) Sultan, who is Lebanese American, worries that Biden is sending the message that “starving and bombing Palestinians is totally fine” by not focusing attention on those killed in the Israeli offensive. For her part, Jarrar feels that the administration hasn’t done enough to address Islamophobia at home. “The moment I start alluding to being Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim, people get uncomfortable,” she says. Several suspected hate crimes against Palestinian Americans in recent months — the stabbing death of a 6-year-old, the shooting of three college students wearing keffiyehs, and the attempted drowning of a 3-year-old girl — have put the community on edge. Layla Elabed, a 34-year-old Palestinian American in Michigan, sees this apprehension manifesting in her hometown. “There’s a lot of fear here, being in Dearborn as an Arab American and feeling like we’re sitting ducks,” she says. “Our community has received threats.”
As Amani, a 24-year-old Egyptian American from the Detroit area, puts it when picking between Biden or Trump, “Gun to my head? I would let the gun go off.”
Biden’s handling of antiwar and pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses earlier this year also rankled the women I spoke with. Yasmeen Kadouh, a Lebanese American community activist in Michigan, knew the organizers of the Columbia University protests. “When police broke up the encampment and arrested the students, it hit close to home,” she says. Layla, the educator from New York, says law-enforcement officers roughed up those she knew who were involved in student protests. “The police crackdown was one of the most horrific, antidemocratic things I’ve ever seen in my life,” she says. While Biden defended protesters’ right to free speech, he also described the demonstrations as disorderly and antisemitic; many protest organizers — including Jewish students — and extremism experts have rebuked these claims. (For his part, Trump called the protesters “raging lunatics” and said the NYPD raiding Columbia’s campus was a “beautiful thing to watch.”) “I can’t believe students protesting a genocide on campuses where they pay tens of thousands of dollars every year to attend would be assaulted and arrested with the full backing of all of our leaders,” Layla says. “It really brings into focus why the Palestinians have struggled to the extent they’ve struggled for the last 76 years. Every system is set up to work against them and to vilify them and anyone standing up for them.”
Women like me are left to puzzle through a complicated question: How should we vote? Biden garnered nearly 60 percent of the Arab American vote in 2020, helping him narrowly win swing states like Michigan. But according to a recent poll from the Arab American Institute, Biden is losing the community with only 18 percent planning to vote for him versus 32 percent planning to vote for Trump. (It’s important to note that even among Democrats generally, only 42 percent were pleased with the nominee before the disastrous debate.) While the president has telegraphed that he’s displeased with Israel’s actions, Biden has remained steadfast in his public support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “When we marched in D.C., we said, ‘We will remember in November,’” says Amira, who protested in the nation’s capital last year alongside thousands of others calling for a permanent cease-fire. “And we meant it.”
Elabed is the campaign manager for Listen to Michigan, an antiwar movement that aimed to put pressure on Biden by asking Democrats to vote “uncommitted” in primaries earlier this year. She finds it “incompetent and irresponsible” when Establishment Democrats, like Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, who said it was a “mistake” for party leaders to support the movement, argue that criticizing Biden could help Trump topple him. “We’re asking Biden and his administration to do something before the November elections,” she says. “He’s in a place of power, not Donald Trump. He sits in one of the most powerful seats globally to actually make change — to save lives in Gaza.”
As Democratic congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s younger sister, Elabed “felt we had a direct line with President Joe Biden through Rashida, through the times he met our mother; he met me.” It had been a proud moment for her to see the president greet their mother, who wore a traditional Palestinian thobe, at the White House. Now, though, she says, “To feel like there is no empathy there feels very, very hard. We’re talking about human beings — with folks that have a personal connection to the West Bank and to Gaza.”
For the women I spoke with, the war is not some abstract, political discomfort but a real danger to their relatives both in Gaza and across the Middle East. Reem Elkhaldi, a Palestinian American attorney in Orlando, Florida, has volunteered as a ballot-counter in the past and believed she was helping protect democracy when she voted for Biden in 2020. But since the Israeli offensive began, several of the 36-year-old’s relatives have been killed in Gaza, and she feels as though the “veil” of democracy in the United States has been lifted. “Our rights are dying,” she says. “I try not to hurt people and hold up my end of the social contract. I’m not going to actively support something I know oppresses somebody else.” Kadouh also took part in get-out-the-vote organizing for Biden in 2020 and used her podcast, Dearborn Girl, to encourage her community to get behind the Democratic nominee in that election. “We thought he was somebody that would do the right thing,” she says. But now, she feels as if “he’s put our community to the side.” Kadouh has family in southern Lebanon whose villages “are being bombed as we speak” by Israel. “They want our votes but not our voices,” she tells me.
We’re asking Biden and his administration to do something before the November elections. He’s in a place of power, not Donald Trump.
None of the women I spoke with plan on voting for the Democratic nominee this fall. “I campaigned hard for Obama. I campaigned for Bernie Sanders. I begrudgingly voted for Hillary and voted for Biden,” Noor Zufari, a Palestinian Syrian event planner in Tampa, says. “I just can’t do it anymore. It feels traitorous to Palestinians and the global South.” While these women are not thrilled about the prospect of another Trump presidency, they see little difference between him calling for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States and Biden helping fund the war in Gaza. “It’s deciding between the known sin of what Biden is doing and the unknown sin of what Trump could do,” says Jarrar. Or as Amani, a 24-year-old Egyptian American from the Detroit area, puts it when picking between Biden or Trump, “Gun to my head? I would let the gun go off.”
As these women turn away from the Democratic nominee, some are seeking out a third-party candidate they feel they can cast a ballot for with a clean conscience. “I think maybe I have become a single-issue voter” in regard to Gaza, Layla tells me. She’s not yet sure what she’ll do on Election Day. Kadouh plans to vote for either Cornel West, who has been critical of Biden’s approach in Gaza, or Jill Stein. Several others noted they have a favorable opinion of Stein in part because of her stance on Palestine and her criticism of Netanyahu. “She herself is a Jewish medical doctor, and I respect her knowing the repercussions she could face,” Jarrar says. “I’ll still vote because I can. It’s my last-ditch effort and the only actionable step I can take, symbolically speaking.”
Sultan plans on abstaining from voting in the presidential election altogether. “I couldn’t even imagine the guilt I would feel writing Joe Biden’s name down,” she says. Although she acknowledges “the immense danger we would be facing” if Trump is reelected, Elkhaldi is also considering not voting. “At some point, we have to put our foot down with Democrats who keep presenting a shitty candidate,” she says. Elkhaldi has thought about temporarily leaving the country instead. “I remember four years ago on Election Day how supercharged people were emotionally,” she says, recalling getting into an argument with other voters about who to cast their ballots for. This year, “already people have been extra hostile since October,” and she worries that wearing a hijab puts a target on her back. “I’m no longer going to continue like this is normal and pretend we are the upholders of freedom,” she says. “It was a really nice dream. It just wasn’t true.”