The depth and scope of racism now directed at Arab Americans is staggering. Many liberals are looking for somebody to blame for Kamala Harris’s dismal showing in the recent election and have found the perfect scapegoat in Arab Americans (along with Muslim Americans more broadly, anti-Zionists of all backgrounds, and, unbelievably, the Palestinians currently suffering a genocide).
It’s empirically untrue that Arab Americans cost Harris the election, but that’s not what I want to focus on here. There’s no need to rationalize the community’s voting choices (to the extent that they can even be understood) using the same common sense that led us into this mess in the first place. Electoral common sense has precisely zero benefit to anybody serious about improving the world. We don’t need to appease liberal angst or plead for liberal approval according to the parameters they impose upon us. Our aim, however distant or far-fetched it may seem, is to vanquish rather than accommodate oppression—the aim, in other words, is to win. The American liberal is a natural-born loser.
(To put it more bluntly: even if Arab Americans were responsible for Harris’s loss, we still would have nothing to apologize for.)
So a lot of liberals are mad at us. Let them stay that way. Nothing we say will assuage their anger, no matter how gentle or reassuring or contrite the message. Their tranquility is beyond our power. Anyway, it’s critical in this moment to brush aside their petulance and reaffirm the value of Palestinian life and the dignity of all oppressed people around the world.
It’s easy to lose sight of the basics in all the hullaballoo, as we defend ourselves, as we ward off shame, as we fight for acceptance, as we grieve, but the first (and only) point to remember is that the current administration, the one we were supposed to vote for as an act of humanity, is overseeing a genocide. There’s nothing controversial about that genocide, either. We have reams of video evidence. We have on-the-ground reporting. We have direct testimony. We have legal rulings. We have expert analysis.
And yet we also had repeated assurances from Kamala Harris that she intended to continue (and expand) this incomprehensible brutality.
You don’t vote for genocide. Ever. No matter what else is happening in the election. It’s a timeless principle. That liberals (and no small number of self-identified leftists) rejected the principle speaks poorly of their intellect and imagination. They’re both the product and progenitor of a rotten political culture and it’s a waste of time trying to nudge them away from the messianic certainty that a procession of lesser evils can gradually unearth a decent government. No country imprints this kind of exceptionalism onto people more effectively than the United States.
But…
What about reproductive rights? What about education? What about the well-being of transgender people? Black people? Immigrants? The working class? These things are all deeply important. Turning to the Democrats as a vehicle for positive change, or as a more pliable oppositional force, isn’t a realistic option. It is a strategy without evidence. Nor is the strategy convincing. Too many people have pegged Democratic campaigners, from centrists to progressives, as purveyors of empty rhetoric and the Party itself as a billion-dollar syndicate in which donor money ends up circulating among the same insider networks.
We have to keep connecting the well-being of life across the globe to that of the communities treated as expendable inside the United States. Abandoning Palestinians to genocide for lower prices at Safeway is a grotesque calculation, all the more so because it won’t actually decrease the cost of groceries. All capitalist parties, domestic and international, are enemies of the downtrodden. There is no such thing as a more compassionate ruling class.
U.S. society is so in love with the idea of elections as self-empowerment that its elite has most people believing that justice is finite, a commodity limited to select groups who earn it through obedience. The elite want us to think that justice is finite because they have none to offer. The finitude of justice corresponds to a scarcity of resources for which we must struggle while those elites live in abundance.
The upshot, manifested through electoralism, is a set of impossible choices. Why should we have to choose between abortion access and imperialism? Why does inflation need to be mitigated through the blood of Arabs? Why must a decent judicial system be contingent on genocide? Anybody accepting this logic has been duped into fighting the wrong enemy.
To the Arab Americans Who Abandoned Harris:
You did the right thing—morally and strategically. Tune out anybody who berates you for refusing to endorse a genocidaire.
Moral questions aside, you didn’t merely repudiate Harris; you also honored the wishes of her campaign, which repudiated you. Harris and company made it clear that your support was unwelcome. Why else would members of her team proclaim that they can win the election without Arab Americans? Why else would they send notorious Zionist stooge Richie Torres as a surrogate to Michigan, home to Dearborn, the cultural hub of Arab America? Why else would they ignore, ridicule, or shout down anyone raising concern about Gaza? Why else would they kick Arabs and Muslims out of campaign events?
The Democratic Party all but told you to fuck off, so there’s no reason to plead a case to belligerent liberals.
Another reason not to plead a case is that in the liberal imagination you belong to a demography of undifferentiated brutes who exist only to expedite their fantasies of political salvation. Basically, they think you’re too stupid to make your own decisions. You don’t understand the nuances of genocide as they do, even when it’s your own family being slaughtered. You’re too fanatical to appreciate the complexities of power. You’re too moralistic for democracy.
At best you’re an occasionally-useful nuisance who must forever be subject to their guardianship. You have two roles in American society: 1) make life easier for liberals and 2) stay out of the way otherwise.
Liberals are way too gleeful when pointing out all the awful things conservatives have in mind for you, as if they’re fine with the awfulness so long as it won’t be attributed to them.
Liberals can tolerate you only when you behave: vote (as per their demands), show up for diversity photoshoots, ease up on the religion, and don’t make too much noise about Palestine. They see you as children to be marshalled into civic duty every few years according to their own convenience. The moment you reject their delusions of lesser evilism, even when the supposedly lesser evil is incinerating your kin and leading the world to the brink of catastrophe, they no longer feel obliged to maintain decorum. It’s now obvious that liberals were itching for an excuse to unleash a lot of deep-seated animosity. All it took was your principled rejection of genocide.
You did what everyone should do in response to brazen disrespect: tell the offending party to take a hike. Rather than being an occasion for rage and sanctimony, this rejection of the Democratic Party should be a model of resoluteness for all communities who suffer its treachery. Don’t buy the notion that a refusal to be insulted and mistreated will lead to negative consequences for other disempowered people. The negativity arises from the political culture that thought-leaders are determined to maintain.
Common wisdom teaches us to side with the more powerful party to any given conflict, but it’s well past time that people see what’s everywhere in front of them—all the bloodshed, all the poverty, all the prejudice, all the precarity, all the homelessness—and put the blame exactly where it belongs, with members of the ruling class irrespective of party affiliation. Only when we collectively refuse to condemn one another for problems from above will our mordant political culture begin to resemble something functional. Electoralism impedes this possibility.
An Opening for Something Better?
For most Arab American voters, the calculation was simple (and unimpeachable): Democrats are overseeing the Zionist genocide; therefore, they refused to vote Democrat.
It’s lamentable that some Arab Americans supported Trump, especially the opportunists touting themselves as “community leaders” who shared a stage with him in Dearborn. (The supposedly progressive candidate, Harris, refused to be seen with members of the same community.) Those who defected to Green Party candidate Jill Stein had the right idea, but she was never more than a cipher for discontent. Arab Americans, like everyone concerned with Palestine’s liberation, need something more substantive than hostile participation in a dead-end system.
The massive Democratic failure opens some radical possibilities that can only be developed outside the mythic parameters of U.S. democracy. If we can’t pursue radical possibilities now, after this disaster of an election in which deeply vulnerable people were viciously renounced by purported allies and defenders, then there’s nothing left to do but wait out the decline of our planet. These electoral spectacles aren’t the sign of a healthy political culture; they’re an ugly business that benefit nobody outside of a corrupt and hermetic ecosystem aggressively devoted to its own proliferation.
Everyone else, the great majority of people throughout the United States, ends up with a whole lot of disaffection. Republicans have proved somewhat capable of exploiting this disaffection—they’re certainly more capable than Democrats—but they have limited appeal to the ever-growing number of Americans on the periphery, whose impulse is to avoid the spectacle altogether. (The viewpoints of this enormous demographic are scarcely represented among the pundit classes.)
Ignoring professional activists, public intellectuals, sitting politicians, and would-be presidents isn’t simply a survival mechanism; it is an active statement that we deserve something better and are willing to create it ourselves. Let the technocrats swap business cards and donor money. Their main concern is and always will be the status quo. Their occasional fit of conscience is marketing, nothing more.
We can never lose sight of what brought us to this moment: bipartisan support of the century’s most hideous atrocities, which would have ended months ago without the constant supply of American weapons. There’s no coming back from what we’ve witnessed. The system that allowed it to happen, that encouraged it, must become a target of opposition.
We’ve known for a long time that electoralism is coercive, anesthetizing, and mendacious. Now we know that it’s genocidal, as well.
It’s not enough for Arab Americans to have rejected Kamala Harris, or for others to limit the scope of that rejection. In the end Harris was incidental. We rejected genocide. In turn, we rejected the material ramifications of American exceptionalism. The election is over. Now we have to realize the gravity of that decision.
the horror of genocide, the horror of possibly the worst intentional urban destruction in history, can not be placed against anything else, for anyone, let alone Arab Americans. These are not “normal” times even for a capitalist free fire zone like the US, and the standard narcissism of US identitarian liberal politics that seems working class free, along with a poisonous dose of genocide has done it’s work. Of course, the dems will blame everyone but themselves and, frankly, they don’t really care, it’s mostly about wealth/power for both parties. Good work, btw!
Liberals were already pointing the finger at “the unsophisticated voter” ie Arab-American electorate, before the elections. As you indicate in passing, the Dem defeat had nothing to do with Arab-Americans. If the Harris campaign hadn’t so completely shut down the Gaza issue and rebuffed Palestinian-Americans perhaps they might have won enough of the hundreds of thousands of Uncommitted Arab-American votes in Michigan to close her 90,000 vote deficit there. But that is a moot point. Trump’s lightning victory was so sweeping that he was declared the winner before Michigan’s votes could be tallied.
Anyway, the responsibility for Arab-Americans staying home or voting for Jill Stein is entirely the Biden administration’s including the VP for arming and enabling the genocide and Kamala’s campaign for all the reasons you state.
I think your analysis re the hoarding of justice and hope and the manufactured scarcity of both is spot on. There is an abundance of justice to be had.
Naive. Those that voted for Trump WANT USA to be on top. You are not putting your thumb on the sick, reprehensible, war mongering, soldier loving and flag wrapping blue and white collar murderous AmeriKKKan.
This wasn’t a vote against war and warring and war weapons and all the red white and blue dual use education and financialization of this hegemony.
This is a Jewish project for the Century of the Jew and that Wailing Wall White House, now under Kushner-Trump LLC.
We love those fucking missiles.
Biden approves Ukrainian strikes deep into Russia with US missiles – NYT — RT Russia & Former Soviet Union
Stupid senile fucker shouldn’t even be in office.
Democrats have begun styling themselves as “resistance”
Resistance is Palestine, Palestine is resistance. Anything else is astroturfing.
I can’t believe democrats who say things like “I hope those Arabs who voted for Trump (or didn’t vote for Harris) realize what a mistake they made” or something similar. Really? Biden & by extension the Democratic Party & Harris were the party in charge aiding and abetting shooting children in Gaza in the head by drones, in short genocide. The Democrats sent Bill Clinton to Michigan to campaign for Harris, & he told the “Arabs” basically Zionists have the right to kick Palestinians out of their home and that murdering those children should be understood as revenge.
Unbelievable.
always so many good maxims to live by:
“Electoral common sense has precisely zero benefit to anybody serious about improving the world.”
“You don’t vote for genocide. Ever.”
Liberals are “both the product and progenitor of a rotten political culture and it’s a waste of time trying to nudge them away from the messianic certainty that a procession of lesser evils can gradually unearth a decent government.”
“You did what everyone should do in response to brazen disrespect: tell the offending party to take a hike.”
I forgot “There’s no such thing as a more compassionate ruling class.”
Apparently, the deal was vote Harris to continue the status quo, supplying the tools of war to Israel, no matter what atrocities they commit against an innocent people. And cover for Israel at a diplomatic level.
Or vote for Trump, who probably won’t be any different and might be worse.
I very much doubt that for Palestinians in Gaza things can get much worse than they are.
My question is, how low can America go? Its credibility in most of the world is rock bottom. Double standards and hypocrisy are the order of the day.
Good riddance to Joe (I’m a Zionist) Biden and Kamala (no change) Harris.
I know this is off kilter, but must be told. Unfortunately the Irish Times is behind a firewall.
This article from Today’s Irish Times Nov 18, ‘24 by Dr Isabelle Defourny, who is president of Médecins sans frontières (MSF) and Christopher Lockyear, secretary general of MSF.
‘Israel is perpetrating atrocity upon atrocity in northern Gaza
Dehumanising language suggests we are witnessing the execution of Generals’ Plan’
We have visited Gaza at different moments since October 2023 and witnessed suffering beyond imagination, some of it in a zone which Israel unilaterally declared as “humanitarian” while regularly attacking it. Our colleagues say the situation is even worse in the north of Gaza – an area which we couldn’t access. It is a nightmare.
For weeks now people in the northern Gaza districts of Beit Hanoun, Jabalia and Beit Lahia have been facing one of the most vicious and violent attacks since the beginning of the war. The area is being heavily bombarded by Israeli forces, who indiscriminately attack entire areas, thereby accepting massive civilian losses.
Recently it was reported that dozens of Palestinians were killed or injured by an Israeli strike on a multistorey residential building in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza.
Israeli forces are issuing evacuation orders that cannot be obeyed. Among those who try to leave, many people are reportedly exposed to arbitrary detention, while others are being shot at and bombed as they flee. That evacuation orders began being issued 48 hours after the start of the military operation in Jabalia refugee camp last month shows that Israeli forces had no intention to spare civilians.
Until recently several of our own colleagues and their family members were still trapped in these districts. Two of them are still unable to flee. They are terrified and fear for their lives, and with good reason: on October 10th our colleague Nasser Hamdi Abdelatif Al Shalfouh was tragically killed by shrapnel injuries to his legs and chest in Jabalia. On October 14th a Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) physiotherapist and his son were injured by shrapnel. On October 24th an Israeli attack on a building killed Hasan Suboh, another MSF staff member, in Khan Younis.
After two weeks of complete siege Israeli forces are now allowing some trucks to move humanitarian supplies within northern Gaza. But they are still preventing enough aid from reaching the area to meet the massive needs, effectively reducing lifelines for thousands of people.
Since October the level of aid allowed in north Gaza, as well as the whole strip, has never been so low. Hospitals are under evacuation orders or directly attacked. In early October Israeli forces besieged the three main hospitals in north Gaza – Indonesian, Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan – while hundreds of patients were reported to be inside.
On October 22nd one of our medical staff found shelter inside besieged Kamal Adwan hospital, and described the situation inside as disastrous, with an overwhelming number of patients and a critical lack of supplies. This was before the hospital was attacked and stormed by Israeli forces between October 25th and 28th, then repeatedly bombed over the last weeks.
Condemned to death
In north Gaza medical infrastructure has been dismantled or rendered only partially functioning. This leaves hospitals unable to treat the injured. Critically injured patients are therefore condemned to death; we heard harrowing stories of patients dying because of the lack of electricity. During the last weeks of October and the first week of November the number of medical consultations at the MSF clinic in Gaza City has more than doubled, linked to the arrival of displaced people from north Gaza.
While the attacks on northern Gaza look particularly ruthless they appear as the logical continuation of the strategy adopted so far by the Israeli forces in Gaza. Since the start of the war, in response to the brutal massacre carried out by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, we have watched in horror as Israeli forces began an indiscriminate bombing campaign. This campaign has been waged while issuing evacuation orders that were built on the lie of the existence of “safe zones”.
People in Gaza are asked to make an impossible choice between staying, in defiance of the evacuation orders, being assimilated to legitimate targets and killed, or prevented from meeting basic needs; or leaving and risking their lives, be it during their trip or at the new destination. All Gaza crossing points have been closed since May 2024.
Over recent weeks conversations in Gaza have been intense about the so-called “Generals’ Plan” or “Eiland Plan” within the Israeli forces. This is a plan which consists of wiping Palestinians from the northern part of Gaza by either killing them, forcing them out, or starving to death those who stay. The way the ongoing offensive in the north is being waged, and the dehumanising language that Israeli authorities have been using towards Palestinians, reinforce the idea that we are witnessing the execution of this plan.
Atrocity is piling on to atrocity at a level unlike anything we have seen in our experience working in some of the most acute humanitarian crises of the last decades. Israel has killed over 43,000 people, including nearly 14,000 children, and has injured more than 100,000 others, according to health authorities in Gaza.
Our medical teams have witnessed first-hand the horrors of this relentless bombing campaign; children with burns across their whole bodies and faces, many with crushed limbs after being buried under the rubble for hours, others who had to face amputations without anaesthesia, and body after body being brought to our medical facilities.
The Israeli forces have failed repeatedly and consistently to spare the people of Gaza and continued their annihilation of the strip, making it uninhabitable. The magnitude of destruction is shocking: houses, water and electric systems, schools, university, mosques, churches, hospitals, public archives, historical sites all levelled, adding up to more than 66 per cent of the existing buildings, according to the United Nations. All the components of a society have been destroyed.
In January 2024 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered that Israel desist from the killing of Palestinian people, end their forced displacement, ensure their access to humanitarian assistance, and take all measures within its power to end the destruction of life in Gaza. Ten months later no tangible effort has been made to prevent a genocide. Israeli forces continue killing people in scores and deliberately obstructing the delivery of aid.
The vote by the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, on October 28th to ban United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa) is the latest devastating blow to being able to provide relief to Palestinians. It’s past the time that Israel stopped openly disregarding the ruling of the ICJ and its allies ended their support to Israel’s campaign of destruction of the Palestinians of Gaza.
Israel is perpetrating atrocity upon atrocity in northern Gaza
https://www.e-pages.dk/irishtimes/51017/article/2158901/10/1/render/?token=b8ce0516bc85c438bb47eadc3b071938&vl_platform=ios&vl_app_id=ie.irishtimes.ereader&vl_app_version=5.4.4
The Middle East is in Turmoil, America has a lot to answer for. Yes?
‘Genocide or Not, Israel Is Perpetrating War Crimes in Gaza’
Many Israelis are outraged at their actions in Gaza being characterized as genocide. But ask them what should be done to the enemy and they’ll say: Obliterate, block aid, and go on bombing and killing
Ofri Ilany
Nov 15, 2024
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-11-15/ty-article-opinion/.highlight/genocide-or-not-israel-is-perpetrating-war-crime-in-gaza/00000193-3181-d348-afbf-f5e17d3e0000