Arab and Muslim Americans and their allies are criticising President Joe Biden’s response to the Israel-Hamas war, asking him to do more to prevent a humanitarian crisis in Gaza or risk losing their support in the 2024 election.
Many Arab Americans accuse Biden of failing to push for any humanitarian ceasefire even as Palestinians are killed fleeing Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip, more than a dozen academics, activists, community members and administration officials said.
Their growing frustration could impact Democrat Biden’s reelection bid, which opinion polls show is likely to be a rematch with the Republican frontrunner, former President Donald Trump.
In hotly contested Michigan, Arab Americans account for five per cent of the vote. In other battleground states Pennsylvania and Ohio, they are between 1.7pc to 2pc, said Jim Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute.
Biden won Michigan with 50.6pc of the vote in 2020, compared to 47.8pc for Trump, and Pennsylvania with 50.01pc to Trump’s 48.84pc, a difference of less than 81,000 votes.
Arab and Muslim Americans are unlikely to back Trump but could sit out the election and not vote for Biden, some activists said.
“I do think it will cost him Michigan,” said Laila El-Haddad, a Maryland-based author and social activist from Gaza.
While condemning the October 7 attacks by Hamas on civilians in Israel that killed 1,400 people, Arab Americans said the Israeli response was disproportionate and Biden’s failure to condemn the bombardment has many questioning his promise of a “human rights centred” foreign policy.
Abdullah Hammoud, the first Arab-American mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, home to the largest Muslim per capita population in the US, decried Biden’s failure to condemn Israeli threats to cut off water, electricity and food for over two million Palestinians in Gaza.
“Nothing could have prepared us for the complete erasure of our voices and radio silence from those whom we elected to protect and represent us,” he wrote on X. “Our family members trapped in Gaza have been ignored, our calls for a ceasefire drowned out by the drums of war.”
Linda Sarsour, a former executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, told hundreds of attendees at a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) event on Saturday that Muslim-Americans should make any political donations contingent on a change in policies.
Many are pressuring Biden to push Israel to temporarily halt its attacks on the Gaza Strip that have killed thousands of Palestinians.
Israel’s bombing of Gaza is “now in the realm of genocide targeting the entire Palestinian population,” said CAIR, the largest Muslim civil rights group in the US, adding that government officials will be “complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza” unless they intervene.
Biden’s push for more than $14 billion in new US aid to Israel is also drawing fire.
“If you look at his rhetoric, it’s unbelievable, and now they are trying to pump billions and billions of dollars militarily into Israel, with some $100 million in humanitarian aid for the Palestinians,” said Sa’ed Atshan, a Quaker Palestinian-American who teaches peace and conflict studies at Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College.
Even Biden’s former boss, President Barack Obama, usually a staunch backer of Biden’s policies, offered some pointed public advice on Monday, calling on the US to continue leading the world “in accelerating critical aid and supplies to an increasingly desperate Gaza population.”
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