US election 2024: Arab Americans united in grief, divided over strategy | News about the 2024 US election

Dearborn, Mich. – For more than a year, she and other Arab Americans have been at a “collective funeral,” says Layla Elabed.

“We mourn. We are frustrated. We are angry. We are heartbroken. We feel betrayed,” Elabed said, finally taking a breath as she reflected on Israel’s raging wars against Gaza and Lebanon.

And now, with bombs still raining down, she added that Arab-American voters are being urged to pause in their grief and vote Tuesday for presidential candidates who have no plan to “stop the killing.”

It's a feeling that resonates across the large Arab-American community in the battleground state of Michigan, where Elabed was a leader of the Uncommitted Movement, which aimed to put pressure on U.S. President Joe Biden and his vice president and Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, to to end their unwavering support for Israel.

Harris has vowed to continue arming Israel, while her Republican rival Donald Trump has a staunchly pro-Israel record despite his claims that he wants to bring “peace” to the region.

Elabed was wrapped in a shawl with Palestinian embroidery known as a “Tatreez” and told Al Jazeera that she left the top of the ticket bare.

“I'm skipping it because neither Vice President Harris nor Donald Trump has adopted a policy that clearly says the bombs will stop,” said the Detroit-area resident, who is a mother of three and the 12th of 14 children of Palestinian immigrants .

However, other Arab Americans make different choices.

Some support Harris, arguing that the Democrat remains a better choice than Trump on domestic and foreign policy despite her promise to keep U.S. arms flowing to Israel.

Others see Trump's unpredictability and self-proclaimed status as an anti-war candidate as an opportunity to break away from the Democratic Party and punish Harris.

Elabed belongs to the third camp: those who argue that none of the candidates deserve the community's votes.

But even within this approach there are divisions. Some are calling for skipping the presidential race altogether, while others are promoting Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

“We have to respect ourselves”

Overall, however, there appears to be little enthusiasm across the board, underscoring the dilemma facing Arab Americans as they struggle to agree on a strategy that could help sway the election and the US-backed Israeli wars that have so far killed more than 300,000 people, 43,000 people in Gaza and nearly 3,000 in Lebanon.

Alissa Hakim, a Lebanese-American university graduate, said she had “no hope at all” for the vote.

Hakim cast her first vote in a presidential election in 2020, voting for Biden, who she believed would be better than Trump. But after four years and a war that many experts described as genocide, the 22-year-old firmly rejected the “lesser of two evils” argument.

“The hurdle for our presidential candidates is so low that you want us to vote for you just because you are not the other person,” said Hakim, sitting in a Yemeni cafe with a laptop with stickers of the map of historic Palestine .

“I realized that we need to respect ourselves more than just selling our voice to whoever says the nicer words,” she told Al Jazeera.

While Hakim is still undecided, she said her vote would certainly not be for Trump or Harris.

In Dearborn, a city of 110,000 known as the capital of Arab America, both major campaigns are trying in different ways, but their efforts appear to be failing to produce a decisive result.

As election day approached, Al Jazeera examined dozens of neighborhoods in the city's heavily Arab east side. The number of school board candidate signs and Lebanese and Palestinian flags far outnumbered those of the two major presidential candidates.

According to city election data, Biden won more than 80 percent of the vote in predominantly Arab counties in Dearborn in 2020, helping him win Michigan.

This time, however, Harris faces an uphill battle in the local community. Even Arab Americans who supported the Democrat in interviews with Al Jazeera expressed frustration with her positions and acknowledged the shortcomings of her campaign.

Last week, former President Bill Clinton said at a Harris rally in Michigan that Hamas is “forcing” Israel to kill civilians. In comments that sparked outrage among Arab and Muslim groups, he also suggested that Zionism was older than Islam.

Harris has also refused to meet supporters of the Uncommitted Movement after her campaign rejected the group's request to allow a speech by a Palestinian representative at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.

At a campaign stop in Michigan on Sunday, Harris was asked if she had one final point to make to Arab Americans. She said she hoped to “win” the community's votes and reiterated her position on the “need to end the war” against Gaza and secure the release of dozens of people held captive in the besieged territory.

“Difficult pill to swallow”

Ali Dagher, a local Democratic activist who signed a letter from prominent Arab Americans supporting Harris, said the community was “shocked” and “deeply depressed” over the carnage in Gaza and Lebanon.

Dagher told Al Jazeera that Harris' support came in collaboration with other groups, including civil rights activists and labor organizations, that view Trump as a threat.

“Another Donald Trump presidency would be a greater threat, not only to international politics … but also at the domestic level – in terms of human rights, civil liberties and the environment,” Dagher said.

He acknowledged that voting for Harris was a “very hard pill to swallow,” but said the decision was made on the premise that Arab American Democrats would work with their allies to bring about change US policy toward Israel and Palestine.

But some Arab Americans favor a complete split from Democrats, arguing that working within the party system has proven futile.

“You don’t do the same thing over and over again and expect different results,” Hamtramck Mayor Amer Ghalib said at an Al Jazeera town hall in Dearborn earlier this week.

Ghalib, one of the local Arab-American officials who supported Trump, said he opened communication channels before the war broke out to end the split with the Republican Party after years of political engagement only with Democrats.

Arab Americans have not always been considered a Democratic electorate. Many Arab voters in the Detroit area supported Republican President George W. Bush in 2000. But the U.S.-led war on Iraq in 2003 and the so-called “war on terror” shifted community support toward the Democratic Party—and not just at the presidential election level.

Numerous Arab-American politicians in southeast Michigan have been elected to public office as Democrats, including Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and several county commissioners and state legislators.

But the same Democratic officials, including Tlaib and Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who have both served in the Michigan House of Representatives, have refused to publicly support Harris on the war — signaling further change.

Campaigns target Arab voters

Harris welcomed the support of former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney – an architect of the post-9/11 era who drove Arab Americans to the Democrats – and campaigned alongside his daughter Liz Cheney.

That embrace didn't sit well with many in the region, and Republicans are trying to capitalize on that discontent.

“Kamala is campaigning with the Muslim-hating warmonger Liz Cheney, who wants to invade virtually every Muslim country on the planet,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan in October. “And let me tell you, the Muslims of our country, they see it and they know it.”

A Republican-affiliated campaign is aggressively targeting Arab Americans in Michigan with ads and text messages highlighting Harris' ties to the Cheneys and her pro-Israel stance.

“I volunteer to help elect pro-Israel candidates. Our records indicate that you support Vice President Harris. This is great,” said a text message sent to Dearborn residents Sunday.

“We need them to continue Biden's policy of sending aid to Israel so that it can continue to confront terrorism in the Middle East. Do you agree?”

Conversely, Emgage PAC — a Muslim political group that supports Harris — has sent mailings to Detroit-area voters highlighting Trump's pro-Israel policies and his close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“What is happening is trauma”

But given the “impossible choices,” many voters say they are unconvinced by either effort.

When Trump met a group of Arab Americans in Dearborn on Friday, Leila Alamri, a local health expert, brought a Palestinian flag to the gathering before the Trump event.

She said her message was about the Palestinians and not the US election, adding that she would not vote for either of the two main candidates.

“We are only here to represent the people of Palestine. We are not here to support one candidate or the other,” Alamri told Al Jazeera.

Wissam Charafeddine, a local activist who supports Stein of the Green Party, said the community feels humiliated by those in power and faces the “catastrophe” of withdrawing from the political system.

“What is happening is trauma,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Every single person who lives in this area has been directly affected by this war in some way – either through the death of a family member or friend, or through the destruction of a home or property. This is different from the shared trauma of witnessing a genocide of children and women before their eyes every day.”