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.
اضافة اعلان
“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, demanding a permanent cease-fire and ending US 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 the Democratic and Republican 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 US politics works and
her convictions about what’s necessary to stave off even more mass death in
Gaza.
“We
are 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 own avowed Zionism and the political influence of Israel’s
American champions, but to her and others like her, it has become intolerable.
That’s why Elabed is managing the Listen to Michigan campaign, which is
organizing to get people to protest Biden’s handling of the war by voting
“uncommitted” in Tuesday’s Democratic primary.
Biden
will most likely never satisfy those most horrified by his Middle East
policies, but if he does not 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 meaningful steps to restrain it. Given the intensity of
pro-Israel sentiment in some corners of the Democratic Party, breaking with
Israel has long been seen as politically risky.
Biden will most likely never satisfy those most horrified by his Middle East policies, but if he does not 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.
The
“uncommitted” margin in Michigan next week will be an imperfect but useful
gauge of the degree to which cleaving to Israel has become risky as well.
Listen to Michigan
Elabed
said Listen to Michigan, which officially launched just weeks ago, is aiming to
garner between 10,000 and 15,000 votes, enough to “send the message to Joe
Biden, and his administration and the Democratic Party, that we are a political
force.” (Trump’s Michigan margin in 2016 was about 10,000 votes, though Biden
beat Trump by much more than that in 2020.)
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 Bernie Sanders in
2016, though Sanders himself has disavowed the “uncommitted” campaign.
Biden’s
team seems to understand that they are in trouble in Michigan. Early this
month, they dispatched aides to Dearborn to meet with Arab American leaders,
including one from Listen to Michigan. 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 the
Gaza Strip, they’re not going to mollify activists. And while it appears
obvious that Trump would be worse on the issues pro-Palestinian activists care
about, their desperation to exert leverage on Biden seems, at least for the
moment, to override the fear of Trump’s return.
It
is therefore a political as well as a moral imperative for Biden to do more
than simply decry Palestinian civilian casualties, particularly as Israel
threatens to invade the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than 1 million
displaced people are sheltering in hideous conditions. Prominent
epidemiologists have estimated that if the war escalates, an additional 85,000
people in Gaza could die over the next six months.
The
urgent need to prevent as many of these deaths as possible transcends U.S.
politics, and it should be reason enough for the administration to stop
shielding Israel at the United Nations, where this week it vetoed another
cease-fire resolution. But given the stakes of the 2024 election, the political
implications of the ongoing war can’t be ignored. “I don’t see Biden winning
Michigan unless he changes course on Gaza,” former Michigan Democratic Rep.
Andy Levin told me.
Of
all the people who’ve joined the movement to vote “uncommitted” on Tuesday, Levin
surprised me the most, because just last month, he shot down calls from
progressives who wanted him to challenge Biden for the nomination. Levin, whose
father and uncle both served in Congress for more than three decades, is an
observant Jew and former synagogue president — a post now held by his son —
who, in 2022, was targeted by AIPAC for his relentless criticism of Israel’s
occupation of the Palestinians. (The
group
spent more than $4 million to defeat him in a Democratic primary.)
To
some on the left, Levin’s combination of deep Michigan roots and defense of
Palestinian rights made him seem like a uniquely promising vehicle for anti-war
energies. In the left-wing magazine In These Times, University of Chicago
historian Gabriel Winant floated the idea of drafting Levin to run against
Biden, writing, “The relationship between Israeli militarism and political
authoritarianism here at home is one that he understands intimately.”
Levin,
however, was uninterested. “I am supporting Joe Biden. I’m super proud to have
served with him,” he told Politico, comparing this moment in US politics to the
political climate in Germany in 1932 when the country was on the cusp of
Nazism. Levin hasn’t changed his mind about the importance of Biden’s
reelection: By backing the “uncommitted” movement, he said, he’s trying to save
the president, not destroy him.
Biden’s team seems to understand that they are in trouble in Michigan. Early this month, they dispatched aides to Dearborn to meet with Arab American leaders, including one from Listen to Michigan. 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.
Levin
frames Listen to Michigan as a way for Democrats to express their outrage while
leaving the door open to return to the fold in November, and thus a pragmatic
alternative to calls from a separate group of activists to “abandon Biden.”
Many of those working on Listen to Michigan, he said, are “people who feel like
it’s a pants-on-fire crisis that we have to change course on Gaza for
substantive reasons,” and that doing
so is the best way for Biden to beat Trump. “That is a beautiful thing when
practical political objectives line up with the right thing to do,” he said.
There
are plenty of Democrats, in Michigan and elsewhere, who don’t see this
alignment. The state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who has emerged as one of
Biden’s leading surrogates, argues that protest votes in Michigan’s primary
will only weaken Biden ahead of November. “Every vote that doesn’t support Joe
Biden makes it more likely we have a Trump presidency,” she told me.
But
a refusal to take disillusionment with Biden seriously could also make a Trump
presidency more likely. A recent survey by the Michigan-based polling firm
EPIC-MRA found that 53 percent of voters in the state, and 74 percent of
Democrats, favor a cease-fire in Gaza. That same survey showed Trump ahead in
Michigan by four points, though that is equal to the poll’s margin of error.
“It points to a potential Trump win unless things dramatically change,” Bernie
Porn, a pollster for EPIC-MRA, told The Detroit Free Press.
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.
This
article originally appeared on February 23, 2024 in the New York Times
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