Less than a week before the 5 November poll, surveys indicate that Israel’s 13-month-old genocidal war on Gaza might tip the scales of the US presidential election.
A survey of Arab Americans conducted by the research unit of the Riyadh-based English language Arab News daily and the British international data analytics firm YouGov showed 43 per cent supporting Trump compared with 41 per cent for Harris, with 4 per cent backing Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
The nationwide poll of 500 Arab- Americans, conducted between 1 September and 1 October, suggested a voter turnout of 87 per cent for next week’s election, with Palestine the top priority, and Republican Party nominee Donald Trump leading Democratic nominee – and Joe Biden’s vice president – Kamala Harris by two percentage points.
The survey supports earlier polls among the 3.7 million strong Arab-American community. A 2 October survey by the Arab-American Institute showed Trump leading by one per cent.
The poll found that Arab-American support for the Democratic Party had eroded in the face of Biden’s unconditional support for Israel’s war on Gaza, and while Harris had regained much of the support Biden lost, at 41 per cent– compared to 42 per cent support for Trump – she remained 18 points below the 59 per cent level of support Biden received from Arab-Americans in the 2020 election.
Significantly, the poll showed that 12 per cent of Arab-Americans were supporting third-party candidates, the most prominent being Jill Stein, the Harvard-educated physician from Massachusetts. This is a departure not just from the 2020 elections but unprecedented in terms of the percentage of Arab-Americans opting for a third party.
Third party candidates rarely feature as a disrupting factor in swing states where nominees from the Democratic and Republican parties have roughly equal chances of winning. But because the Trump-Harris margin is so close, the threat of votes moving to third party candidates is viewed with concern by both the Harris and Trump camps.
Anxiety in the Harris campaign over the Arab-American vote appears to be more justified, and is compounded, say observers, by her failure to make any meaningful pledges to end the war. Instead, Harris’ campaign has appeared to snub Arab- Americans, refusing to allow Arabs or Muslims to speak at any of her rallies. Her campaign also removed a prominent Muslim community leader and former Democratic candidate for Congress after he was seen seated in the audience of a Detroit election event last week without citing a reason.
While Muslim community leaders who have requested meetings with the Vice President say they have been snubbed, at a rally in Michigan on Sunday Trump was endorsed by several Muslim figures who appeared on stage with the Republican candidate.
Bill Bazzi, the Arab-American Muslim mayor of Dearborn Heights in Michigan, endorsed Trump in a campaign rally as the Republican nominee stood next to him on the podium. “I’ve never seen the devastation that we’re seeing right now,” Bazza, who was born in South Lebanon’s Bint Jbeil, told the crowd. “When Trump was president there was peace. There were no wars, he was trying to withdraw our troops from overseas. We’re spending billions of dollars overseas yet we can’t take care of our infrastructure... That’s why I support and endorse Trump.”
While they may not be indicative of an overarching voting intention among Arab- Americans, such endorsements have met with little pushback from the Harris campaign. The Democratic response tends to be confined to one question: how could Muslims vote for the man who enforced a travel ban restricting nationals from seven Muslim countries from entry to the US? The “Muslim ban” was revoked by Biden in 2021.
Observers say that the Harris campaign, despite snubbing the Arab-American community, still expected Arab-Americans to vote Democratic out of fear of more anti-Arab and racist policies under Trump and even greater support for Israel’s right-wing government. They appear to have miscalculated the level of anger and disappointment at the Biden administration’s support for a war that has bombed Gaza to the stone age and killed six per cent of its population – according to the World Health Organisation –facts that Harris has failed to address throughout her campaign.
Eroding support for Harris among the Arab-American community which has traditionally voted Democratic has increasingly segued into the debate on uniting the centre and left to defeat the kind of authoritarian policies that Trump has regularly espoused.
“I hear the folks who oppose genocide but are voting Harris as seeking to unite the centre and the left in an effort to defeat fascism. There are problems with this. This imagines that fascism is emerging only from the Trump camp. It does not recognise how the mobilization of state violence, identity politics, the disregard of law or accountability, rejection of ‘truth’, media censorship and normalisation of genocide stems from the Democrats now,” wrote Palestinian-American human rights attorney Noura Erakat on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Throughout her campaign, Harris appears to have avoided the subject of Gaza – and the communities affected by it – altogether. A rare exception was when she acknowledged the “devastating” impact of the war on Arab- Americans during a campaign event in Oakland County two weeks ago. “I know this year has been very difficult, given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon,” said Harris, adding that the death of Hamas leader Yahya Al-Sinwar in Gaza “can and must be a turning point”, without articulating any policies she would support to achieve this.
Instead, the Vice President avoided naming any party to the war, calling on “everyone” to seize the opportunity to end the war in Gaza and “bring the hostages home”.
“Harris, Biden and the Democratic Party have refused to even share a stage with Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians – not even for the sake of optics or for the sake of their electoral interests,” said Sana Saeed, a Muslim American journalist. “Instead, Harris and her party have chosen to castigate and marginalise Arabs and Muslims who have overwhelmingly voted Democrat at every single turn.”
While the focus in this debate has been on the Arab and Muslim community’s anti-war stand there are growing signs that criticism of the Biden/Harris administration’s enabling of the Israeli genocide is impacting multiple ethnic groups.
Earlier this week the Los Angeles Times blocked a scheduled editorial endorsement of Harris over Gaza. The decision was enforced by the paper’s billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong who did not disclose his reasons, prompting the paper’s editor to resign in protest. Soon-Shiong’s daughter Nika, a progressive activist, told the New York Times that the blocked endorsement “was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children” in Gaza.
“Genocide is the line in the sand,” she wrote on X. “This is not a vote for Donald Trump. This is a refusal to ENDORSE a candidate that is overseeing a war on children.”
Although still an anomaly in US mainstream media, the LA Times’ decision was perceived as a break from decades of entrenched support for Israel in US newsrooms.
“Slowly but surely, slavish devotion to Israel is proving not to be an electoral asset but, particularly in a time of live-streamed genocide, an electoral burden,” remarked Mouin Rabbani, a commentator on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
An editorial by the Financial Times on 25 October urged Biden to halt weapon supplies to Israel for the first time since the war.
Biden has the tools to rein in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the leading British financial newspaper said. “He must halt the offensive arms sales to Israel that enable its relentless bombing of Gaza and Lebanon. He can do so without breaking Washington’s commitment to Israel’s defence, including providing air-defence systems.”
“But Biden’s message should be clear: the bombing must stop and the day after must begin. If not, the devastation and suffering in the Middle East will come back to haunt the West.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 31 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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