Arab Americans Won’t Be Shamed into Voting for Joe Biden

I grew up in the Arab American community.  I have a large extended family who claim the identity (along with my nuclear family).  I know the community well, both personally and sociologically, and both in its working class and professional iterations.  It is my opinion that liberals who expect Arab Americans to forget about Biden’s endorsement of Zionist genocide when November comes around are profoundly mistaken.  

Sure, some Arab Americans will concede and vote Biden for the usual reasons (fear, guilt, shame, hopelessness, habit, peer pressure).  Maybe just as many will choose Trump or sit out the election altogether.  

Crude analysis of Arab American voting patterns misses the larger point, however.  Palestine is not a “fad” issue to us, something that draws our attention only when it is in the news, or a discourse machine for shits and giggles.  It is a central feature of our communitarian identity (despite, or possibly because of, a wide range of viewpoints).  Many of us were born in Palestine.  Many of us still have family there.  Many of us intend to return when it is liberated.  Nearly all of us, from Oman to Morocco, grew up hearing about it. 

No matter what individual Arab Americans choose to do in the privacy of the voting booth (or from the privacy of our homes), the tired (and tiresome) tactic of lesser-evil browbeating in public discourse will not persuade us to forget about Palestine.  

Tell us about “reproductive rights” all you want:  we know about the women in Gaza who endured C-sections without anesthesia.  

Tell us about the future of our children all you want:  we’ve already seen the dead babies in abandoned incubators. 

Tell us about loan relief all you want:  we’ve already counted the billions this government sends to Israel. 

Tell us about the Supreme Court all you want:  we don’t see it doing anything to stop the onslaught of Zionist recrimination. 

Tell us about democracy all you want:  we see how “democracy” works in this country, which systematically prevents its citizens from determining how the state conducts its foreign policy, and often punishes its citizens for expressing dissent. 

Tell us about big bad scary Trump all you want:  nobody in this moment looks more callous and evil than Joseph R. Biden.  

It is my hope that in abandoning Biden, Arab Americans won’t simply default to Trump.  This is an opportunity for the community to reassess its relationship with a political apparatus that has long viewed us with contempt or indifference.  It is a moment to consider stronger alliances with the few viable revolutionary forces in U.S. society, those deprived of relief and compassion by the spiteful managers of a rotting empire:  Black and Indigenous nations, trans and queer people, migrants and refugees, the unhoused and indigent, the infirm and disabled, the exiled and incarcerated. 

Trump is a black hole of narcissism and corruption.  And Biden isn’t changing his mind, whatever remains of it.  The party he represents is devoted to practices of extraction and dispossession.  If we want to participate in a meaningful politics, then it will have to be outside the strictures of mainstream civic life (except perhaps at the local level).  We’ll have to embrace those parts of ourselves that tastemakers consider disreputable—precisely the things, in other words, we normally try so hard to transcend. 

I don’t know my community, or any community, well enough to predict how everything will shake out, but my best guess is that immigrant aspirations of upward mobility (and all the reactionary sentiments they entail) will eventually overwhelm the skepticism now on display.  Palestine has attracted a newfangled rightwing audience in addition to its traditional leftist supporters and so it’s easy to picture ever-growing anxieties about cultural degeneracy further empowering the new paleoconservative pundit class.  Many of us in the community will fight against this trend. 

But there’s no doubt that the Arab American community is undertaking a real-time assessment of its priorities and its position in a deeply antagonistic polity.  Whatever happens or doesn’t happen, it won’t be because Joe Biden and his platoon of online dingbats convinced us of anything.  If liberals think they can berate us into abandoning Palestine, then their greatest accomplishment will have been finding the perfect balance between arrogance and delusion. 

Part of the problem is old-fashioned Orientalism.  Democratic thought-leaders are no less stereotypical of Arabs then their Republican counterparts.  They’re forever trying to shoehorn Arab Americans into a self-defeating logic of appeasement.  That logic doesn’t cohere to any reality that Arab Americans inhabit; it is deployed to satisfy the thought-leaders’ own assumptions and prejudices. 

For instance, liberals imagine that Arab Americans will get some perverse satisfaction when Biden loses this November, as if we like to tear down civilization for the fun of it.  But I don’t think it’s true that Biden’s loss will produce any real satisfaction.  Most of us won’t be satisfied until that unrepentant war criminal is sitting in prison.