Arab American activists and their allies are urging voters to cast ballots as “uncommitted” in Michigan’s Democratic primary on Tuesday in protest of President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. They’re unlikely to change the result of the contest, in which Biden is the only major candidate, but they’re hoping to signal their anger — and send a warning — to Democrats in one of the most critical swing states on the 2024 map.
Michigan is home to more than 300,000 people who claim Middle Eastern or North African heritage, many of them concentrated in the city of Dearborn — one of the largest Arab American communities in the US. These are voters who helped deliver Michigan to Biden in 2020, when his margin of victory in the state was just over 154,000 votes. In Wayne County, where Dearborn is located, as well as Oakland County, where Arab Americans also make up a significant share of the population, voters backed him at rates of about 69 and 56 percent, respectively.
Those days, however, are over. Biden is currently losing to former President Donald Trump in seven major polls conducted in Michigan since the beginning of the war. There are multiple reasons for that, including falling support in the powerful auto workers union, which endorsed Biden glaringly late in the game this year, but Arab Americans and young progressive voters in the state have also cited Gaza as an important factor, and most Michiganders support a ceasefire.
Arab American officials in Michigan have become prominent critics of the US’s support for Israel’s campaign, which has killed about 30,000 Palestinians since the October 7 attack by Hamas. The mayor of Dearborn — Abdullah Hammoud, who has Lebanese ancestry — wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times Wednesday that “We don’t have to imagine the violence and injustice being carried out against the Palestinian people. Many of us lived it, and still bear the scars of life under occupation and…
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