'Blame yourself': Trump's election hasn't dampened pro-Palestinian activists' anger at Democrats

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators protest in Dearborn, Michigan, on May 19, 2024. (Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images/File via CNN Newsource)

For Democratic pro-Palestinian activists, Donald Trump’s reelection delivered a bitter vindication.

Led by the Uncommitted National Movement, they spent months pushing and pleading with the Biden administration to scale back its support for Israel's war in Gaza. Their warning had been consistent and direct: Not only did Democrats risk collapsing support among Arab American and Muslim voters in Michigan, but the conflict – and the continuous flow of military aid to the Israeli government – could depress enthusiasm among the coalition of young, mostly progressive-minded voters who proved key to Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.

“We told them that the impact of Gaza was going be bigger than just the Arab community. It’s why the turnout was lower in college areas and among young Black voters,” said James Zogby, co-founder of the Arab American Institute and a Democratic National Committee member for more than 30 years. “From the polling we’ve been doing over the last year, we saw it had an impact. And it certainly had an impact on my community.”

Early post-election analysis of the race suggests that those concerns were well-founded – and emblematic of a broader disconnect between party leaders and the Democratic grassroots. Arab Americans, like Latino and Black men, all moved toward Trump in the final accounting. The president-elect’s vote-share improved nearly everywhere, from the red states he’s dominated for nearly a decade to traditionally liberal electorates, where Democrats either stayed home or, to a lesser degree, backed third-party candidates.

“While Kamala Harris was ignoring communities, especially of Muslim Arab communities here in Dearborn,” Uncommitted co-founder Lexis Zeidan told CNN, Trump “was coming to these communities and pandering to these communities, and he was capitalizing off of these vulnerable emotions and telling them what they wanted to hear.”

Dearborn, Michigan, is home to the country’s largest Arab American population. As the results came the night of the election, its shift away from the top of the Democratic ticket startled even some of the most passionate activists.

Four years after Biden dominated there, Trump got 42 per cent of the vote, a plurality. Green Party nominee Jill Stein nearly cracked 20 per cent. Harris landed in the middle, with 36 per cent. According to national exit polls, more than 6 in 10 Muslims voted for the Democrat – a clear majority, but a stark decline from past cycles.

Zeidan and other allies in the movement also pointed to Harris’ letdowns with other minority voters that had traditional broken strongly for Democrats.

“This (election) wasn’t a referendum on Gaza policy,” Zeidan said. “What (the national results) showed you is that she not only was sidelining ‘uncommitted’ and Arab and Muslim voters, but she was sidelining other communities of color as well – working class, climate justice, the Latina and Latino community.”

Wa’el Alzayat, CEO of the Muslim American advocacy organization Emgage, guessed that Harris’ Muslim support might have come in as high as 90 per cent if she had clearly signaled plans to break from Biden’s policy in the region. Emgage ultimately endorsed Harris, despite some of its members’ misgivings, arguing that “pursuing an anti-war agenda had a better shot under (the Democrat’s) administration.”

Trump’s initial planned appointments, Alzayat said, confirmed his anxieties.

“What kind of peace and freedom for the Palestinians are we going have under Mike Huckabee and Tulsi Gabbard? My God. And Matt Gaetz. What kind of rights are pro-Palestinian students going to have?” he said, naming Trump’s controversial picks for ambassador to Israel, national intelligence director and attorney general, respectively.

Wa'el Alzayat, CEO of Emgage Action, in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on April 9, 2024 (Jose Luis Magana/AP/File via CNN Newsource)

That fear and frustration, though, has not translated to guilt. Activists and voters who spoke to CNN over the past three days unanimously rejected any suggestion that their work was to blame for Harris’ unraveling.

“I don’t have any regrets,” Uncommitted spokesman and strategist Waleed Shahid told CNN. “We tried our best to bridge the campaign and the party with the community. Tried to help the campaign help themselves by changing their policy position and doing something that was in the mutual self-interest of the community and the party.”

“And they rejected those offers pretty plainly.”

Uncommitted most memorably led a push at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this summer to allow a Palestinian-American speaker to address the party. After weeks of back-and-forth, on the final night of the confab, party officials inside the United Center told Uncommitted leaders it was a no-go.

Michigan Democrats, led by the state party chair Lavora Barnes, objected immediately – first in a brief interview with CNN, then in a statement to reporters.

“The thing I’ve been saying and I will always say is that these uncommitted voters are our voters, they’re our family,” Barnes told CNN at the time. “They are good Democrats who have an issue that they want to voice, and they have every right to voice it.”

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, another prominent Michigan-based leader, also condemned the decision, accusing the party of putting “our heads in the sand” and ignoring the festering anger.

Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman would have been the one to speak that night, had convention organizers allowed it. Romman said she had even watered down her remarks in a bid to ease the transaction. She did, in the end, deliver her speech – to a group of Uncommitted leaders and allies who began a sit-in outside the convention.

Months later, Romman, who was reelected to her statehouse seat last week, told CNN she has only become more troubled by the Harris campaign’s refusal, as she saw it, to acknowledge the depth of suffering among Palestinian- and Lebanese-American emigrees, long stalwarts of the Democratic coalition.

“If you needed our votes to save you, you should have acted like it,” Romman said of Democrats now wagging their fingers at the Arab American community. “Yes, Trump is way worse. Am I happy that he’s an office? No, I’m terrified and I did all that I could to prevent that.”

In Dearborn, Arab American voters speaking to CNN expressed frustration with Trump’s early moves, but insisted they were not anguishing over their votes.

“I feel good that I don’t have blood on my hands,” said Dalal Baydoun, who voted for Stein. “Because like I said, they’re all with genocide, so having to not be a part of all that makes me feel good.”

Dalal Baydoun voted for Jill Stein. (CNN via CNN Newsource)

The global debate over how to describe or define Israel’s actions in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and, increasingly, in Lebanon, has often overshadowed the less complicated reality on the ground here, where the opposition is diverse, organized and angry.

A United Nations report out Friday said Israel’s offensive in Gaza “is consistent with the characteristics of genocide,” citing mass civilian casualties and using starvation as a weapon. An onslaught that began as a reprisal against Hamas following the terror group’s Oct. 7, 2023, rampage in southern Israel, has, from the perspective of international observers, become a global scandal.

Last week, the UN Human Rights Office said it “found close to 70 per cent to be children and women, indicating a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law” on the part of the Israeli military.

That report landed at about the same time Biden’s Departments of State and Defense said – after a weeks-long review – that they could not “verify” whether Israel used American-made weapons in violation of international humanitarian law.

Close watchers of Harris’ rhetoric during the campaign sniffed out a subtle shift during her final days on the stump in Michigan. Her talk about ending the war in Gaza had become more robust.

“This year has been difficult, given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon, it is devastating,” Harris said during an late rally in East Lansing, home to Michigan State University. “And as president, I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure, and ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom, security and self-determination.”

Activists were hopeful, they said, but worried that it was still too little – and coming way too late in the campaign. Former President Bill Clinton had already deepened the wounds, calling Gaza the “hardest issue here,” before effectively arguing Israel’s actions in Gaza were, if not justified, then understandable.

“I understand why young Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan think too many people have died, I get that,” Clinton said. “But if you lived in one of those kibbutzim in Israel, right next to Gaza, where the people there were the most pro-friendship with Palestine, most pro-two state solution of any of the Israeli communities, were the ones right next to Gaza. And Hamas butchered them.”

Clinton’s remarks were the capper, multiple operatives told CNN, on a campaign that seemed unable – or unwilling – to see how its broader strategy of trying to lure moderate Republicans by embracing former Rep. Liz Cheney and her father, Iraq War architect and former Vice-President Dick Cheney, was further undermining its case with Arab Americans.

“If there’s one person Muslims and Arabs hate more, or about the same as Donald Trump,” Shahid said, “it’s probably Dick Cheney.”

Zogby, who said he is now planning to run for a vice chair slot on the Democratic National Committee, also questioned the campaign’s decision to lean on Liz Cheney, describing it as a slap in the face to Arab Americans.

Still, Zogby added, for all the missteps and slights, he is “not happy with my community” – and said Trump’s early round of policy and personnel moves predicted darker days to come.

“There’s going to be a reckoning for this,” he said of Arab American support for Trump. “Those who said, we’re going teach Democrats a lesson, or maybe Trump’s better in a second term, well, they’re already getting their reckoning, and he’s not even started this term.”

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CNN’s Danny Freeman and Yon Pomeranz contributed to this report.