President Joe Biden’s unequivocal support for Israel and its ruthless response to Hamas’ murderous October 7 attack that killed 1,400 Israelis has reportedly made him the most beloved politician in the Jewish state. That is no surprise. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s popularity was already sharply declining after prosecutors charged him with corruption; his attempt to hamstring the Supreme Court faced strong backlash; and now, a catastrophic security failure to anticipate Hamas’ assault. But, back home, Biden has outraged some potentially key voting blocs: African Americans, Muslim and Arab Americans and young people.
It is a risk which the president seems willing to take and there are reasons for it. The New York Times’ Peter Baker, in a 2,500-word report, traces the 80-year-old Biden’s support for Israel to childhood conversations with his father about the Holocaust. The senior Biden, the president wrote in one of his memoirs, told him, “The world was wrong – failing to respond to Hitler’s atrocities against the Jews – and we should be ashamed.” He developed, in his words, a “rock-solid and unwavering support” for Israel.
One of Biden’s first official trips after he became a senator in 1972 was to Israel, just before a major Arab-Israeli war in 1973. “Mr. Biden has told the story of meeting Meir repeatedly in recent days — sometimes more than once in the same day — relating how she reassured him about Israeli resilience by saying that Jews had ‘a secret weapon’ in their struggle for Israel: ‘We have nowhere else to go,’” Baker reported.
Meir’s disdain for Palestinians was well known by then. Four years earlier, the Sunday Times and The Washington Post quoted her as saying, “There were no such thing as Palestinians. … It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them.” They did consider themselves a people and Israel did take their country away from them.
Also, the president has a 40-year friendship with Netanyahu, who grew up in Philadelphia and became one of Israel’s most hawkish prime ministers. The two leaders hugged on the tarmac when Biden flew to Tel Aviv on October 18 to personally express solidarity with Israel after the Hamas cross-border massacre.
But what about the Palestinians? Baker reported no significant rapport between Biden and their leaders that would have made him an honest broker in a conflict that goes back 75 years. The result? “Even some younger members of Mr. Biden’s own staff privately do not understand why he has been so willing to back Mr. Netanyahu even as Israeli forces besiege Gaza, cut off food and fuel and pound the Hamas-run coastal enclave with bombs that Hamas officials in Gaza say have killed thousands of people,” Baker reported.
As proof of bias, critics noted that Biden quickly cast doubt over a Gaza Ministry of Health statement that Israeli bombing, at that time, had killed 6,747 Palestinians. (The number was more than 8,000 at the time of writing.) Hamas responded by releasing the “names, national ID numbers and other information” of the victims, The Washington Post’s Hannah Allam and Michelle Borstein reported.
Some African American columnists have denounced the president’s full embrace of Israel – including literally. Karen Attiah, The Post’s Global Opinions editor, cast it in a wider context: “Black writers and civil rights leaders have a long history of seeing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of the Black struggle for freedom and resistance to violent imperialism,” Attiah wrote. She cited Malcolm X, who “criticized Zionism as colonialism;” Muhammad Ali, “who visited a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and declared support for the Palestinian cause;” and Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party.
In 2014, “Palestinians gave protesters of U.S. police brutality advice on how to deal with tear gas,” Attiah wrote. “After all, police in the United States were using the same tactics and equipment against protesters that the Israeli security forces were using. In 2020, Palestinians drew murals of George Floyd in solidarity with those in the West protesting police brutality.”
Elie Mystal warned in The Nation, “Biden risks labeling himself as a president who is in favor of colonization, and one who will turn a blind eye to ethnic cleansing and war crimes— and those are tough labels to shake once they take hold in communities of color.” Some of them “will simply not pull the lever for any president, in any party, who stands aside while an oppressed people is besieged, starved, and bombed into oblivion.”
Mystal cited an NPR/PBS poll taken shortly after the Hamas attack showing that while 72 percent of European Americans support Israel, only 51 percent of “nonwhites” did. Also, overall, 65 percent of Americans support Israel but only 48 percent of the Gen Z generation did.
African Americans are about 40 million or about 12 percent of the U.S. population and they are known to influence the outcome of elections. If it is uncertain that they are turning against Biden, not so Arab and Muslim Americans. They number only about four million or 1.3 percent of the population but are concentrated in some key states where they also can make a difference in elections.
“There are over 200,000 Muslims living in Virginia; there are 150,000 Arab Americans; in 2020, Biden won that state by around only 500,000 votes. In Michigan, there are over 350,000 Muslims; 200,000 Arab Americans live in the state; Biden won that state by around only 150,000 votes. Any significant weakening of this support puts Virginia in play and makes Michigan functionally unwinnable for Biden,” Mystal predicted.
The Post’s Perry Bacon reported that some Arab Americans (and progressives) were already saying they would not vote for the president because of “real, serious disappointment with the actions of the Biden administration over the past few weeks. This is how I feel too.” Bacon added, “There is also surprise and a sense of betrayal …. his administration’s actions over the past few weeks have been both very old-guard (strongly aligning with Israel’s government) and without enough regard for the views of Arab Americans and others who are deeply hurt by the killing of so many Palestinian civilians.”
Disaffection is already being put into action. In Minnesota, which has 50,000 Muslims, human rights professor Hassan Abdel Salam started an online petition asking them not to vote for Buden. By Monday, 3,700 had signed it, HuffPost reported.
In Virginia, with 169,000 Muslims, Yasmine Taeb, legislative and political director of MPower Change Action, said her advocacy group will not endorse candidates in this month’s crucial elections and will do no voter outreach.
Obviously seeking to respond to such concerns, Biden met Friday at the White House with five Muslims and Arabs whom senior administration staffers handpicked. It was not clear what the session achieved. An unnamed invitee told The Post, “It’s our jobs, given the position we are in, to go and speak truth to power, to the most powerful man in charge, on behalf of the children under the rubble who cannot.”
But the sense of betrayal of a loyal constituency remains strong. A poll by the Arab American Institute think tank showed that support for Biden had plummeted 42 percent to 17 percent, Al Jazeera reported Tuesday. And that even as they know that, if they withhold their votes, Donald Trump could win next year. As far as Osama Siblani, publisher of The Arab American News in Dearborn, Mich., was concerned, “My argument is, ‘Let him win,’” he told The Times.
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