Palestinians Can't Afford To Wait For The Next U.S. Election

In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election, I exchanged daily voice messages with a close relative in Lebanon who had fled her home soon after the Israeli army began leveling entire buildings with American weapons. That these arrived courtesy of a Biden-Harris administration that had already sunk more than $22 billion into Israel’s “war of self-defense” — straining even the Pentagon’s resources — had long since alienated many would-be supporters of the Democratic ticket. So when my relative asked what would happen on election day, I told her that many American opponents of Israel’s genocidal campaign had chosen to sit out the election or, at most, lend their votes to anyone but Vice President Kamala Harris.

Not long after the first results began rolling in, it became clear that Harris had alienated a significant proportion of what had been the Democrats’ base. Among Arab and Muslim Americans, her repeated refusal to break with the Biden administration’s unquestioning support of Israel pushed tens of thousands of voters toward Green Party candidate Jill Stein or even Donald Trump.

Progressives abandoning the Democrats over their ongoing support for Israel certainly wasn’t the only factor that swung the election for Trump, or even the most pivotal. For one thing, the president-elect’s margin of victory, both in the national popular vote and in states that President Joe Biden had won in 2020, outstripped the number of Democratic voters who had cast “uncommitted” protest ballots in the spring primaries.