WHEN Fox News called Pennsylvania for Donald Trump in the early hours of Wednesday, all but confirming that he will be the next president of the United States, there were a handful of Arab activists left at a watch party in Dearborn, Michigan.
“Genocide is bad politics,” said one attendee at the event, which had Palestinian and Lebanese flags hanging outside its doors.
And as the reality of another Trump presidency set off anger and sorrow from many Democratic commentators, at the Arab American gathering, there was a sense of indifference, if not vindication.
Democratic candidate Kamala Harris had ignored the community’s calls for reconsidering the unconditional US support for Israel. The vice president also continued to assert what she calls “Israel’s right to defend itself” despite the brutal atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Activist Adam Abusalah said part of the reason why Harris lost was her decision to side with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the expense of alienating the Democratic base — Arab and Muslim Americans as well as young people and progressives.
“It’s not our fault. They cannot vilify our community,” Abusalah said.
“We’ve been warning the Democrats for over a year now, and the Democrats continue to downplay what’s going on.”
He added that Harris’s main message to the Arab community was to warn of the dangers of a Trump presidency — a tactic that did not work as voters in the area were laser-focused on the ongoing war in the Middle East that affected many of them personally.
In the Arab-majority suburb of Dearborn, anger over Israel’s US-backed assault on Gaza and Lebanon was tangible at the ballot box.
Harris lost the city to Trump by more than 2,600 votes. President Joe Biden beat Trump by more than 17,400 votes — that is more than a 20,000-vote swing that helped the Republican former president reclaim Michigan.
Candidate Jill Stein, who centred opposition to the war in her platform, also performed relatively well in the city, growing the Green Party’s support from 207 votes in 2020 to more than 7,600 this year.
Hussein Dabajeh, a Lebanese American political consultant in the Detroit area, noted that Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat, significantly outperformed Harris in Dearborn, receiving more than 9,600 votes than the vice president.
