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AFTER TRUMP’S VICTORY, PALESTINIANS CANNOT AFFORD TO WAIT UNTIL THE
NEXT US ELECTION  
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Samer Badawi
November 7, 2024
972 Magazine
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_ Palestinians and their allies must build on down-ballot wins, while
recognizing the limitations of electoral politics in the face of
Israel’s genocidal campaign. _

A sign congratulating Former President Donald Trump on his victory in
the US presidential election in central Jerusalem, November 7, 2024.,
Yonatan Sindel/Flash90

 

In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election, I
exchanged daily voice messages with a close relative in Lebanon who
had fled her home soon after the Israeli army began leveling entire
buildings with American weapons. That these arrived courtesy of a
Biden-Harris administration that had already sunk more than $22
billion
[[link removed]] into
Israel’s “war of self-defense” — straining
[[link removed]] even
the Pentagon’s resources — had long since alienated many would-be
supporters of the Democratic ticket. So when my relative asked what
would happen on election day, I told her that many American opponents
of Israel’s genocidal campaign had chosen to sit out the election
or, at most, lend their votes to anyone but Vice President Kamala
Harris.

Not long after the first results began rolling in, it became clear
that Harris had alienated a significant proportion of what had been
the Democrats’ base. Among Arab and Muslim Americans, her repeated
refusal to break with the Biden administration’s unquestioning
support of Israel pushed tens of thousands of voters toward Green
Party candidate Jill Stein
[[link removed]] or
even Donald Trump
[[link removed]].

Progressives abandoning the Democrats over their ongoing support for
Israel certainly wasn’t the only factor that swung the election for
Trump, or even the most pivotal. For one thing, the
president-elect’s margin of victory, both in the national popular
vote and in states that President Joe Biden had won in 2020,
outstripped the number of Democratic voters who had cast
“uncommitted
[[link removed]]”
protest ballots in the spring primaries.

But Harris also did little to galvanize progressives in the last days
and weeks of her campaign. Having already doubled down on her record
as a California prosecutor and tried to paint herself as a
tough-on-immigration candidate, her final pitch to American voters
drew on the dubious support of neo-conservatives like Liz Cheney and
her father, Dick Cheney, one of the architects of America’s
disastrous “war on terror.”

A FAILED ELECTORAL STRATEGY

But beyond Harris’ decisive loss in the presidential race, several
down-ballot contests — especially for seats in the House of
Representatives — also pointed to waning support for Israel. In
Pennsylvania, the hotly contested swing state that ultimately tilted
the election toward Trump, Pittsburgh’s Summer Lee — who
has called
[[link removed]] Israel’s
campaign in Gaza a genocide — retained her seat by a large margin.
And representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, both outspoken
critics of U.S. policy on Israel-Palestine, won easily. (In
California, incumbent Dave Min, who survived an AIPAC campaign against
him during the spring primary, currently remains neck-and-neck with
his Republican rival.)

Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib speak at an event hosted by
CAIR-Minnesota in Minneapolis, August 19, 2019. (Brad Sigal/Flickr)

In Michigan, a so-called “blue wall” state home to the country’s
largest concentration of Arab and Muslim Americans, Tlaib’s
down-ballot win alongside Harris’ loss underscores the
Democrats’ failed strategy
[[link removed]].
Although it remains unclear how many of these voters abandoned Harris
over her Israel policy or her refusal to allow a Palestinian speaker
at the Democratic National Convention, Tlaib’s victory showed that a
full-throated defense of Palestinian rights need not be a liability.

If anything, getting tougher on Israel could have swayed more voters
toward the Democrats. An August poll
[[link removed]] by
YouGov and the IMEU Policy Project revealed as much, with more than
one-third of voters in three swing states indicating that a pledge to
withhold weapons to Israel would make them more likely to support a
candidate.

In the lead-up to the election, liberal commentators like The New York
Times’ Nicholas Kristof recognized
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Harris’s failure to differentiate herself from Biden on Israel was a
major liability. But he still insisted that opponents of Israel’s
genocidal campaign could not afford what he called “liberal
purity.”

No matter the strength of their objections, the thinking went,
anti-war protestors were bound to recognize that Trump would be worse;
after all, he broke with longstanding policy to move the U.S. Embassy
to Jerusalem, recognize Israeli “sovereignty” over the Golan
Heights, and cut funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency
[[link removed]]. Kristof and
others failed to explain, however, how a return to the Trump era would
be significantly worse than a year in which that agency was not only
stripped of all U.S. funding but repeatedly targeted with American
weapons, killing more than a hundred of its staff and effectively
slowing aid to Gaza’s 2 million besieged residents to a trickle
[[link removed]].

Equally unconvincing is the contention that Trump would give Israel a
wider berth to carry out its assault on the people and infrastructure
of Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. As the Beirut-based journalist
Farah Silvana-Kanaan has pointed out
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the “carte blanche” argument is belied by the fact that, under the
current administration’s watch, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu has not only faced zero repercussions for his actions, but
has enjoyed unlimited material and diplomatic support.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with American Senator Kamala
Harris from California, at the PM’s Office in Jerusalem, on November
20, 2017. (Amos Ben Gershom/GPO)

At the same time, disillusioned Democrats holding out hope that Trump
could rein in that support have little indication that any change is
afoot. Billionaire Miriam Adelson, a staunch opponent of a Palestinian
state, poured
[[link removed]] $100
million into Trump’s campaign in its final weeks. And Trump himself
made a point of wielding “Palestinian” as a slur
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his campaign.

The incoming president’s reported
[[link removed]] insistence
that Israel end its Gaza assault before January — when the White
House changes hands — came with no known conditions, leaving open
the possibility that Netanyahu would fast track plans to seize the
territory and, with it, wide swaths of the West Bank. The latter would
fulfill what American rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a friend of
Adelson’s, has said
[[link removed]] is
a dream of the mega-donor.

THE UPHILL BATTLE FOR PALESTINE ADVOCACY

Girding themselves for Trump’s second term, some Palestinian allies
are redoubling their efforts in the political sphere. In the run-up to
the election, Abdullah Hammoud, the Arab-American mayor of Dearborn,
Michigan — where more than half the residents are of Middle Eastern
descent — vowed
[[link removed]] to
continue pressing for a change in U.S. policy toward Israel and the
wider region, no matter who won the presidential race. In a post
[[link removed]] on
X following Trump’s victory, Hammoud wrote that he would “continue
to hold the White House accountable to policies that will save and
improve lives.”

A Democrat, Hammoud withheld
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endorsement of Harris while also refusing to meet with Trump days
before the election. His city, though, picked
[[link removed]] Trump
over Harris by a 12-point margin, marking an extraordinary shift for a
constituency that had been reliably Democrat.

Into this schism, two former senior Democratic officials, Josh Paul
and Tareq Habash, who both resigned from the outgoing administration
over its Israel policy, have launched an organization called A New
Policy. According to its website [[link removed]], the
group’s political action committee “supports candidates for
federal office who seek to support a new U.S. policy toward the Middle
East.” But finding those candidates, especially after a year in
which the pro-Israel lobby boasted
[[link removed]] of securing
hundreds of wins across the country, may be a tall order.

President Donald Trump speaking at the annual AIPAC policy conference
in, Washington, D.C. on March 21, 2016. (Lorie Shaull/CC BY-SA 2.0)

For the few who survived the lobby’s onslaught, like Lee of
Pennsylvannia, whether the new PAC can help fend off pro-Israel
spending in future elections may matter less than the Palestine
solidarity movement’s ability to keep Israel’s actions — along
with their cost to human lives and the international legal order —
in the public spotlight. As the University of Chicago’s Eman
Abdelhadi told
[[link removed]] +972
Magazine before the election, “American society will have to divest
from Israel before [its] leaders do.”

That, too, is likely to remain an uphill battle during Trump’s
second term. As reported by Drop Site News
[[link removed]],
Project 2025 — widely regarded as the incoming administration’s
policy playbook — includes plans to “dismantle” what Trump
supporters have called a “Hamas support network” in the United
States. With hundreds of Palestine advocates already targeted
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their activism over the last year and student movements gagged by
university administrators, it’s hard to see how the protests that
animated campuses and many American cities in the last year can carry
the same vigor into a second Trump term.

On the other hand, if the primary ambition of that protest movement
was to end Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, looking beyond the
past year’s tactics might offer insights into why they have failed
— and, perhaps, point to a new way forward.

Long before this presidential election, some American activists were
already trying to come to terms with the movement’s shortcomings. In
May, a group of activists in northeast Ohio issued an anonymous
letter
[[link removed]] “offering
a critical analysis of the campus based movement in solidarity with
Palestine.” The letter said some student groups were too quick to
negotiate with university administrators and police while exposing the
most vulnerable protestors, like unhoused and undocumented people, to
“far greater risk of harm.”

Assessments of the protest movement have also questioned how its
priorities — and, by extension, its messaging — were set. Much of
this comes down to the challenge of political representation, with the
aims of the Uncommitted movement or national groups like A New Policy
diverging from those of many campus activists, for example.

Too often missing in these inventories are the voices of the very
people most directly threatened by Israel’s genocidal campaign.
What, if not futile, should the pursuit of electoral politics seem to
the Palestinians of Gaza or their counterparts under fire in the West
Bank or Lebanon? “While people are watching the U.S. elections, we
in North Gaza can hear heavy shelling and U.S.-sponsored bombs being
dropped on us,” Gaza-based Al Jazeera correspondent Hossam
Shabat posted
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vote counts rolled in. “Remember, whoever wins, they are all war
criminals.”

Such critiques seem particularly incisive and necessary in this
moment, and so too are calls [[link removed]] to keep
up mutual aid efforts for Palestinians struggling to survive
Israel’s onslaught. After all, for the millions of people whose fate
hinges on where Israel’s U.S.-made weapons fall, making sense of
what comes next is more than an analytical exercise; it could mean the
difference between life and death. It’s also why waiting until
America’s next election cycle is not an option.

Now that this one is over, my relative is no less clear on when — or
if — she might return to her home, which has so far been spared in
the bombing. The truth is, though, that a Harris win would have lent
no more clarity.

_SAMER BADAWI has been a contributor to +972 Magazine since 2014._

_OUR TEAM AT +972 MAGAZINE HAS BEEN DEVASTATED BY THE HORRIFIC EVENTS
OF THIS LATEST WAR. THE WORLD IS REELING FROM ISRAEL’S UNPRECEDENTED
ONSLAUGHT ON GAZA, INFLICTING MASS DEVASTATION AND DEATH UPON BESIEGED
PALESTINIANS, AS WELL AS THE ATROCIOUS ATTACK AND KIDNAPPINGS BY HAMAS
IN ISRAEL ON OCTOBER 7. OUR HEARTS ARE WITH ALL THE PEOPLE AND
COMMUNITIES FACING THIS VIOLENCE. _

_We are in an extraordinarily dangerous era in Israel-Palestine. The
bloodshed has reached extreme levels of brutality and threatens to
engulf the entire region. Emboldened settlers in the West Bank, backed
by the army, are seizing the opportunity to intensify their attacks on
Palestinians. The most far-right government in Israel’s history is
ramping up its policing of dissent, using the cover of war to silence
Palestinian citizens and left-wing Jews who object to its policies._

_This escalation has a very clear context, one that +972 has spent the
past 14 years covering: Israeli society’s growing racism and
militarism, entrenched occupation and apartheid, and a normalized
siege on Gaza._

_We are well positioned to cover this perilous moment – but we need
your help to do it. This terrible period will challenge the humanity
of all of those working for a better future in this land. Palestinians
and Israelis are already organizing and strategizing to put up the
fight of their lives._

_CAN WE COUNT ON YOUR SUPPORT 
[[link removed]]? +972 MAGAZINE IS A LEADING
MEDIA VOICE OF THIS MOVEMENT, A DESPERATELY NEEDED PLATFORM WHERE
PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI JOURNALISTS, ACTIVISTS, AND THINKERS CAN
REPORT ON AND ANALYZE WHAT IS HAPPENING, GUIDED BY HUMANISM, EQUALITY,
AND JUSTICE. JOIN US._

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