WHEN Samraa Luqman voted for Donald Trump in November, she believed that, even if there were a one-percent chance that the former president would push for a ceasefire in Gaza, he would be a better option than the Democrats who had failed to stop the war.
Trump ultimately won that race and is slated to re-enter the White House on Monday. And in the lead-up to his inauguration, Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas have agreed to pause hostilities in Gaza, where more than 46,700 Palestinians have been killed in the last 15 months.
But Luqman says she doesn’t feel vindicated, even though Trump has claimed credit for pushing the ceasefire deal over the line.
Instead, she’s outraged at outgoing United States President Joe Biden for failing to finalise the agreement months earlier.
“I’m just even more angry because Trump, who is not even in office, did a little arm-twisting, and the ceasefire agreement was done right away,” Luqman told Al Jazeera. “This could have happened sooner. It’s so sad, all those extra lives lost.”
She added that the way the agreement was reached “solidified Biden’s legacy as Genocide Joe”, a nickname that links the Democratic leader to the Israeli abuses in Gaza.
After overwhelmingly backing Democrats in previous elections, many Arab American voters turned against the party and its candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, in November’s race because of their support for Israel’s war.
While many Arab voters say it is too early to celebrate the fragile ceasefire agreement, they stress that Trump’s intervention shows that they were right to abandon Harris.
The shift in Arab American voting preferences was especially apparent in the swing state of Michigan.
In predominantly Arab neighbourhoods on the east side of the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Harris received less than 20 percent of the votes. The majority of residents either cast their ballots for Trump or Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
While Harris argued that she and Biden had been working “tirelessly” to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza, the vice president also pledged to continue arming Israel without any conditions.
The Biden administration also vetoed four United Nations Security Council resolutions that would have called for a ceasefire in Gaza.
