Arab Americans are almost universally horrified by some of the things that President Donald Trump has said in his first two and a half weeks in office. Even the chairman of “Arab Americans for Trump”, Bishara Bahbah, is suddenly alarmed. And yet, there are reasons to believe that Arab Americans played a crucial role in electing Trump.
News outlets reported that Arab Americans snubbed the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, to punish the Democrats for supporting Israel in Gaza. Voice of America, for instance, reported that “In a historic shift, Muslim and Arab Americans broke with two decades of Democratic loyalty, splitting most of their votes between President-elect Donald Trump and third-party candidates.”
As reported in CBS News, Ali Alfarajalla, a Baghdad-born realtor in Dearborn, Michigan who normally votes for the Democrats, switched his vote because, he said, “If 50,000 Palestinians dead under the rubble isn’t enough to sway me from Democratic Party, I don’t know what is.”
Even among Democrats, a group that called itself the “uncommitted” became determined to punish the Biden/Harris administration, and therefore to reward Trump.
Besides the fact that everybody knows that Trump isn’t less likely to support Israel than Biden was, the attitude of Arab Americans who turned on the Democrats betrays a total disconnect from reality.
They don’t blame the Gaza war on Hamas, which started the war with a massacre and the kidnapping of men, women, and children, including some Muslims and some Americans. They don’t blame their own failure to denounce Hamas. They don’t blame the longstanding failure of the Palestinians to accept the existence of Israel and to agree to a two-state solution.
Instead, they blame the Biden/Harris administration for doing what any decent US administration would have done, support Israel’s right to defend itself.
It is mind-boggling that even though Harris went out of her way during the campaign to demonstrate empathy towards the Palestinians, most Arab American voters turned their backs on her and allowed the election of someone who is not known for empathizing with anyone, let alone Arabs.
As if to prove this point, Trump is now pushing the idea of the United States “taking over” and “owning” the Gaza Strip, therefore taking it away from the Palestinians. Condemnation of Trump’s idea has been widespread, including from Germany, an ally of Israel. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said, “The civilian population of Gaza must not be expelled, and Gaza must not be permanently occupied or repopulated.”
Obviously, not all Arab Americans contributed to the mass hysteria that enabled Trump’s election, but it seems that most did. They could have elected Kamala Harris, someone who is openly concerned about Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and who would almost certainly have opposed any Israeli settlements in Gaza. Instead, they elected someone who has no respect for the Palestinian right to live on land that even the US recognizes as theirs, at least until now.
Most Arab Americans evidently placed their hatred of Israel ahead of the interests of the Palestinians. That is perhaps not surprising since the Palestinians themselves have made that choice repeatedly at every opportunity given to them to have a state, including the 1947 UN partition plan, the missed opportunity between 1948 and 1967 to declare the West Bank and Gaza a Palestinian state, and the rejection of the peace plan offered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000, among other opportunities.
Former Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Abba Eban famously said: “The Arabs [Palestinians] never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Apparently, Arab Americans suffer from the same syndrome. Now they must live with the consequences, just as the Palestinians live with the consequences of having refused every opportunity given to them.
It turns out that actions have consequences. Who knew!
