Arab American support for Biden collapsed over the war in Gaza. Some are cautiously optimistic that the vice president could win it back.
When Joe Biden announced his decision to end his reelection bid amid mounting concerns about his ability to beat Donald Trump, many Democrats were relieved. The prospect of Trump defeating Democrats in November, which for a time felt like a foregone conclusion, no longer seemed so certain.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Arab Americans, many (though not all) of whom have historically aligned themselves with the Democratic Party, were relieved for another reason. To them, Biden has been the single-biggest cheerleader of Israel’s punishing and relentless assault on Gaza, which has over nearly 10 months claimed the lives of at least 39,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the U.S. and the U.N. While the president has shown deep empathy with Israelis since Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which killed some 1,200 people, he has struggled to convey the same level of sympathy towards Palestinians—and, at one point, even cast doubt on the extent of the Palestinian death toll in Gaza.
“I don’t think he was as balanced as he could have been, and that was really hurtful to a lot of people,” says Jasmine El-Gamal, an Arab American and former Middle East adviser at the Pentagon.
While many Arab Americans might have anticipated this from Trump, who’s made no secret of his disdain for Palestinians (he notably used their identity as a slur against Biden during their debate last month), El-Gamal says they expected more from the purported “empath-in-chief.” Biden’s failure to treat rising anti-Semitism and rising anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia with an equal sense of urgency left many feeling particularly deflated. “They’re similar threats, and they should be addressed with similar urgency, and I don’t think that was the impression that was coming out of the Biden administration,” El-Gamal says, noting that it made her and others feel “deprioritized as a human being because of your identity.”
Read More: How U.S. Policy on Gaza Could Change Under Kamala Harris—or Donald Trump
That feeling had a tangible impact: Within the first month of the war, Arab American support for Biden and the Democratic Party dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded. Michigan, a critical battleground state that boasts one of the largest Arab American populations in the country, appeared all but lost.
With Biden out of the race, the prevailing question now is: Can Harris win them back? So far, there seems to be a guarded optimism. Several Arab American activists and analysts who spoke with TIME say that their community is still waiting to see what changes, if any, the presumed Democratic nominee will pledge to bring to U.S.’s policy on Gaza should she win in November. Most all of them recognize that Harris has the potential to have a better relationship with Arab Americans than her predecessor—a relatively low bar that shouldn’t be too difficult for Harris to clear. But they don’t want her to take their support for granted, either.
“There’s a sense of hope,” James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, tells TIME of Biden’s decision to end his reelection bid. His organization’s latest nationwide poll of Arab Americans, conducted in May, found that an overwhelming majority (79%) have an unfavorable view of the president. Although AAI doesn’t yet have polling on views towards Harris, Zogby says that she has largely been seen as more empathetic. “She’s reached out to the community and individuals in different ways to let them know of her concern and her staff have been responsive,” he says, “which is far different than the White House.”
For those who couldn’t countenance a vote for Biden but regard Trump as a threat to the country, the vice president’s candidacy offers a much-needed reprieve. Despite the deep animosity towards Biden, Zogby says AAI’s polling has shown that the Democrats could win back much of support they lost among Arab American voters—many of whom joined the “uncommitted” campaign in a bid to pressure Biden to change tack on Gaza—if there’s a meaningful policy shift.
In the aforementioned poll, 60% of those surveyed said they’d be more likely to vote for Biden in November if he were to demand an immediate ceasefire and unimpeded humanitarian aid into Gaza or if he were to suspend diplomatic support and arms shipments to Israel until they implement a ceasefire and withdraw forces from Gaza. While Biden has unveiled a proposal to end the war that would involve a six-week ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal from populated areas of Gaza, he has been less willing to withhold military aid to Israel, save for only the largest of munitions.
While Harris hasn’t articulated any major policy deviations from Biden when it comes to Gaza—like the president, she has repeatedly pledged support for Israel’s security and self-defense—she hasn’t been seen as driving the administration’s policies on this issue either. Instead, she has offered Americans a rhetorically different approach. In March, she became the first senior administration official to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. She was also quicker than Biden to sound the alarm about the humanitarian catastrophe in the besieged enclave, where scores of Palestinians have been forced to live in inhumane, famine-like conditions, and explicitly laid blame on the Israeli government for its part in creating the crisis.
Unlike Biden, whose longtime devolution to the Jewish state has earned him the reputation of being perhaps most pro-Israel American president in history, Harris has long been regarded as being more evenly empathetic when it comes to Israelis and Palestinians. Hala Rharrit, a former Arabic language spokesperson in the U.S. government who resigned earlier this year in protest of the Biden administration’s Gaza policy, tells TIME that the State Department often relied on her speeches when communicating to the Arab world for this reason.
Some Arab Americans are hopeful that this record could make Harris uniquely suited to mending the divide within the Democratic Party as a result of the war on Gaza. “I think she’s the only one who can unite us,” says Sami Khalidi, the president of the Dearborn Democratic Club and a former 2020 Biden delegate who is due to reprise his role at the upcoming Democratic convention in Chicago. He notes that while Arab Americans in his community still want to wait and see who Harris might pick as her running mate, “they favor her over Trump.”
Not all Arab Americans share this view. Indeed, many will be of the belief that Harris’s record, as Biden’s vice president, is inextricable from current U.S. policy. “There’s a genuine and really deep-seated anger and hurt that the Arab American community and the Palestinian American community, in particular, has felt,” Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank and policy network, tells TIME, noting that while these communities may be able to engage with Harris in the way they were unable to with Biden, “There’s still going to be a lot of Palestinian Americans and progressive Americans who are like, ‘That’s it, I’ve had enough of the establishment Democratic Party,’ and this kind of ties into a deeper resentment around electoral politics.” Some “uncommitted” delegates have already signaled that they will withhold their endorsement unless Harris commits to big policy shifts, such as ending military aid to Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington offers an early test of how Harris will approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should she win the presidency. Many Arab Americans and progressive Democrats perturbed by Israel’s conduct in Gaza were cheered by Harris’s decision not to preside over Netanyahu’s speech to Congress—a scheduling conflict, her team said, that many nonetheless regarded as a clear snub. But perhaps the clearest sign of her strategy will be revealed following her meeting with the Israeli premier later today, in which she will reportedly tell him that “it is time for the war to end.”
“I don’t think anyone expects her to drastically announce a shift from Biden, especially when she is running [for the presidential nomination],” Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former chief foreign policy advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, tells TIME. “But I think there are things she can say that will indicate a different path.” One option championed by several of Democratic lawmakers is to consistently apply U.S. laws to future military aid to Israel, which prohibits American tax dollars from going to foreign military units suspected of committing human rights violations.
“I’m optimistic, but I’m waiting,” says Tariq Habash, a Palestinian American who earlier this year became the second political appointee to resign over the Biden administration’s Gaza policy. He and others tell TIME that while they are realistic about what is possible when it comes to U.S. policy in the Middle East, they also believe that there is leeway for change. “It is past time for talking points,” Habash says.“You also have to back it up with action.” If Harris does, he says, maybe Arab Americans will too.
