A father rushed into Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, begging Dr. Thaer Ahmad to save his young daughter’s life. But the doctor couldn’t bring himself to tell the truth. “The air strike happened five minutes ago. It’s only been five minutes,” the father yelled. The girl in his arms, who seemed about ten years old, was wearing pajamas and looked asleep. The hospital carts were all full, so the doctors put her on the ground to check for a pulse. The child had died from blunt force trauma. Ashy gray residue from the rubble and debris caused by the explosion covered her limp body. Ahmad couldn’t hear a heartbeat. He didn’t know what to say. So his colleague stepped in. “Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un,” he told the family, who were already sobbing.
The thirty-five-year-old Palestinian American doctor volunteered at Nasser Hospital’s emergency room for most of January. While under an Israeli siege, Ahmad treated patients with limbs blown off and severe fractures. The facility became a makeshift shelter for hundreds of civilians, who slept on fraying mattresses in the hallways. The building shook as shrapnel burst through windows and plumes of smoke rose outside. When Israeli forces raided Nasser Hospital—alleging that they were pursuing Hamas—tanks surrounded the facility. Fear sank in for Ahmad. U.N. officials visited the hospital after Israel’s military operation and found dead bodies in the corridor. They described the facility as having transformed from a “place of healing” into a “place of death.”
So when Ahmad returned to the U.S. in late January—haunted by what he had seen—he desperately wanted his government to stop funding Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Instead, the Biden Administration has signed off on at least $12.5 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7, with the State Department authorizing billions more in potential arms sales in August. Since its founding, Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid; the U.S. has typically provided between $3 billion to $5 billion to Israel annually in military aid since the 1980s, according to an analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations. Many of the combat aircraft and munitions that are killing Palestinians in Gaza are American made.
In April, Ahmad had the chance to meet the man in charge of the administration that released this military assistance. President Joe Biden was holding a closed-door session at the White House during Ramadan—and Ahmad was invited. Like many Arab and Muslim Americans, he was skeptical about the outreach. “It just felt like this was supposed to help with the campaign,” he said. It didn’t feel like a serious conversation. The federal government had approved weapons agreements just days earlier—the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets, according to the Washington Post.
Ahmad went to the meeting. But he walked out after a few minutes. His conscience and respect for that father at Nasser Hospital, whom he struggled to tell about his daughter’s death, would not allow him to stay. Before leaving, Ahmad called for a permanent ceasefire and handed Biden a letter from an eight-year-old orphan. Worried that American-made bombs would kill him and his patients on his next trip, Ahmad looked Biden in the eyes and warned him that an invasion of Rafah would be a bloodbath. As he left, Biden said that he understood.
Vice President Kamala Harris has since replaced Biden as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. Ahmad views her as an extension of the current president’s Gaza policy. “She’s obviously gone along with it,” he said. “That would suggest that she’s not going to break from that. … I’m not optimistic.”
Harris’s statements expressing empathy for civilians in Gaza have led some to believe she may be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than Biden. But in matters of policy, there’s been no clear distinction between the two. The biggest demand from voters concerned with Israel’s attacks on Gaza is to restrict or altogether cut off military aid to Israel. But Harris said in an August 29 CNN interview that she would not change U.S. policy on sending weapons to Israel. Her national security adviser has also said on social media that she does not support an arms embargo. On July 24, Harris refused to preside over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks before Congress, but she met him at the White House the next day. “I will not be silent,” she said, in remarks after the meeting—taking what appeared to be a firmer tone than Biden. But she has at times dismissed concerns from pro-Palestinian activists. When protesters disrupted Harris’s August 7 speech in Michigan, saying “We won’t vote for genocide,” she addressed them directly. “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking,” she said.
As Israel decimates Gaza, the Biden Administration, including Harris, have drawn criticism from Muslim, Arab, young, and progressive voters. “Not only are we not seeing any sort of change, but we’re seeing pushback at even the suggestion of change. That speaks volumes,” Ahmad said. These voters accuse the White House of providing unconditional military and diplomatic support for a genocide. Some legal scholars argue that providing these arms to Israel is illegal; the Leahy Law bans the U.S. from providing assistance to foreign security forces committing gross human rights violations. The U.K. is already concerned about liability. In September, the British government suspended exports of some weapons to Israel—noting that their use could violate international humanitarian law.
The Palestinian death toll has surpassed 40,000, per Gaza’s health ministry—and a Lancet article estimates a total of at least 186,000 deaths as a result of Israeli actions; while the Lancet’s death toll includes deaths from Israeli military action, it also estimates “indirect deaths” drawing on factors such as disease and food shortages. Gaza’s ability to count the dead has also been hampered by Israeli attacks on hospitals and health-care staff.
South Africa filed a genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice in December. Since then, at least thirteen countries have formally requested or stated an intention to join the case. They argued that Israeli actions and statements indicate a desire to “bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnic group.” Israel has denied the charges, dismissing the case as anti-Semitic. At a time when U.N. experts were already warning of a “grave risk of genocide,” the Biden Administration repeatedly vetoed U.N. resolutions calling for a ceasefire. They also issued strong declarations of support to Israel, even as the latter’s officials made extreme statements, such as calling for another Nakba, and for Gaza to be flattened.
Voters are watching Harris’s engagement on Gaza closely. And they don’t all agree. For Shifa Abuzaid, a twenty-nine-year-old attorney who lives in Houston and has lost relatives in Gaza, the switch to a different candidate isn’t enough. “Kamala and Biden are one and the same … the same policies, the same party, the same agenda,” she said. “I don’t really celebrate this.”
In light of Harris’s position on an arms embargo, Leila Giries, an eighty-four-year-old Palestinian American in California, is still considering voting for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein. She was initially energized by Harris’s statements calling for a ceasefire. If Biden had remained the nominee, she would have definitely voted for Stein because of his reluctance to act on his own warnings. “Damn that red line,” she said. “They’re going to destroy the whole country, and his red line did not materialize?”
Earlier this year, the Uncommitted movement sent a warning to the Biden Administration: its approach to Gaza could cost them votes in swing states, especially Michigan.
The campaign paid off. More than 100,000 Democratic primary voters cast an uncommitted ballot in the state. (Biden won Michigan in 2020 by just 154,000 votes.) And more than 700,000 voters chose an uncommitted option in primaries across the country. That means thirty uncommitted delegates—the highest number ever—went to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But after the Harris campaign refused to meet the movement’s demands, its leaders announced that she had made it impossible to endorse her. They blamed her unwillingness to consider withdrawing military support from Israel, in addition to smaller requests that she didn’t meet.
For weeks, Uncommitted organizers asked for a Palestinian American speaker on the main stage. When Democratic leadership refused, activists staged a sit-in in front of Chicago’s United Center on August 21 and slept outside overnight. They argued that a speaking slot was the bare minimum, and the refusal to offer one signaled little hope for policy change. “Not only will our voices not be heard as we play the part of good Democrats, it’s unlikely that we will actually shift anything to get us to the point where we can stop using our tax dollars to embolden a fascist and far-right government as they drop thousands of bombs on innocent men, women, and children,” said Layla Elabed, a Palestinian American who helped lead the campaign, during a press conference the following morning.
Elabed had struck a more hopeful tone in the days leading up to the Democratic National Convention. She had briefly spoken with Harris hours before the August 7 campaign rally in Michigan. She sobbed while asking Harris for a meeting and to consider an arms embargo. Elabed couldn’t stop thinking about two of her community members from Gaza, who had each lost more than 100 family members. “Will you meet with us? Because Michigan voters want to support you, and we need a policy that is going to save lives,” she recalled telling the vice president. Harris spoke with genuine concern, she said. After the Democratic National Convention, the group said they had invited Harris to meet with them and Palestinian families who have been directly impacted by September 15. But the deadline passed without a meeting. Days later, the Uncommitted Movement announced they would not endorse Harris, but also urged a vote against Trump. His “agenda includes plans to accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of anti-war organizing,” they wrote in a statement.
The Uncommitted Movement has been hesitant to explicitly call on its supporters to withhold votes from Harris. They have instead recommended that voters avoid choosing a third-party candidate in swing states, fearing that it could help elect Trump. Elabed said in an interview before the Democratic National Convention that it’s important to keep pressuring the White House to deliver a better policy. “We can’t be absent from pushing our electeds,” she said. “We just can’t be absent from those conversations, even if we know that the demand that we have is not the policy of the administration.”
But for some activists, Uncommitted hasn’t used its political leverage wisely. By urging voters to vote against Trump and also not vote third-party, the movement is effectively supporting Harris, said Nerdeen Kiswani, a cofounder of Within Our Lifetime (WOL). “(That) does effectively endorse her, albeit with cowardice,” Kiswani wrote on social media. She had previously criticized the movement’s focus on featuring a Palestinian American speaker at the convention. “We should be organizing against the butchers of our people, not begging them to let us speak next to them,” she said. Kiswani and others worried that the demand for a speaker—even if granted—could have undermined the larger demand to pull military support.
A small group of Muslims that officially endorsed Harris in late September revealed a deep fissure in the community. Among them were several Muslim lawmakers, as well as Emgage Action—the political arm of a national group focused on Muslim voter mobilization. “This endorsement is not an agreement with Vice President Harris on all issues, but rather, an honest guidance to our voters regarding the difficult choice they confront at the ballot box,” Emgage Action wrote in a statement.
While the Harris campaign celebrated the endorsement, the announcement drew outrage from many Muslims. “Imagine aligning yourself publicly with the party of genocide. Not our community,” wrote a group called Abandon Harris, on social media.
Like WOL, Abandon Harris, which initially launched as Abandon Biden, has been more explicit in calling on voters not to support the vice president.
“Make no mistake. You have choices,” said Hassan Abdel Salam, who co-founded Abandon Harris. “We now declare that the only option for people of conscience is to abandon Harris, to punish her and the party so that they know that they can never put genocide on the ballot,” he said at a rally in Chicago on the first day of the Democratic National Convention. They are instead urging voters to pick third party candidates that align with their morals. A survey of Muslim voters published by the Council on American-Islamic Relations on August 29 found that almost one-third planned to vote for Stein, with the Green Party; a similar proportion said they supported Harris.
Despite differences in strategy, all these groups want Harris to commit to stop funding Israel’s military. Uncommitted organizers believe it will be difficult for the vice president to win the election without pushing for an arms embargo.
Calling for a ceasefire rings hollow if the U.S. continues to supply bombs, they argue. “It’s like a bartender telling someone at a bar to sober up while they’re giving them free drinks,” said Waleed Shahid, a progressive political strategist who helped create the Uncommitted campaign. “What are the signals that we can get from the party and from her campaign that she is going to turn the page and stop supplying American bombs to Israel?”
While Palestinian activism has a long history in the U.S. that predates October 7, the Uncommitted movement’s success is just one example of how momentum is growing. The Democratic Party may risk alienating a part of its base or be forced to change its policies to win them back. Almost 40 percent of voters nationwide said they were less likely to vote for Biden because of how he handled the war in Gaza, according to The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. The war in Gaza is the top issue for 71 percent of Muslim swing voters in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan who plan to vote for a third party candidate, write in a candidate, are undecided, or do not plan to vote, according to a July 31 poll by the Emgage Foundation, Change Research, and the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU).
It’s unclear exactly how these voters’ criticism of Biden will translate to Harris as she takes on Trump. But without any policy change on Gaza, she could risk losing key constituents.Several polls indicate that Americans across the country have reservations about sending arms to Israel. Several polls indicate that Americans across the country have reservations about sending arms to Israel. A YouGov/CBS poll taken in June found that 61 percent of adults in the U.S. believe their government should not be sending weapons and supplies to Israel, compared to 39 percent who think it should. Among Democrats the divide is even larger: 23 percent are in favor of sending weapons and supplies, compared to 77 percent opposed. Another poll published by the Arab American Institute (AAIUSA) on Oct. 2 found that Trump and Harris are virtually tied among Arab American voters across the country—with 42% preferring Trump and 41% choosing Harris. Ending arms shipments to Israel could get Harris more voters; the poll finds that 56% of all Arab American voters would be more likely to support her if she ended weapons transfers and implemented a ceasefire; that includes 37% of Trump voters and 57% of third-party voters. “ In our thirty years of polling Arab American voters, we have not witnessed anything like the role that the war on Gaza is having on voter behavior,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute.
Harris’ policy on military support for Israel could be decisive in swing states, too. A YouGov/IMEU poll conducted between July 25 and August 9 found that more than one-third of Democratic and Independent voters in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if they agreed to withhold weapons to Israel. That’s compared to 7 percent or lower who say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who supports such restrictions.
Mass protests in the U.S. criticizing Israeli attacks on Gaza have brought hundreds of thousands of Americans to the streets. In June, the NAACP called on Biden to stop sending weapons to Israel. In July, seven major labor unions, including United Auto Workers (UAW), sent a letter to Biden, calling on him to “immediately halt all military aid to Israel.” UAW also called for a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention, although it previously endorsed Harris for president. As of September 26, Harris was leading Trump in several polls; the American economy and immigration policy also ranked as top concerns for American voters.
Many progressive voters feel the Biden Administration’s attempts to help Palestinians don’t go far enough. The president has set aside $1 billion for additional humanitarian aid in Gaza. But far-right Israeli settlers have been blocking humanitarian assistance. The Israeli government may be implicated, too. A ProPublica investigation published in September found that Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected conclusions from two of the main U.S. government agencies dealing with humanitarian assistance that Israel deliberately blocked supplies. Under U.S. law, supplying military aid to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid is illegal.
What’s more, a pier constructed by the U.S. in Gaza to facilitate the transport of aid repeatedly fell into disrepair; the Pentagon has since dismantled it, citing a successful mission, despite U.N. experts’ continued warnings of famine.
While the U.S. announced in May that it had halted the shipment of heavier American bombs used in dense urban areas, that has only remained in effect for 2,000-pound bombs. The ban on 500-pound bombs was temporary. It’s unclear whether the U.S. has stuck to its restrictions on larger bombs. Reuters reported on June 29 that the American government had sent Israel thousands of 2,000-pound bombs since October 7. While U.S. officials didn’t specify a timeline, weapons experts told the news outlet that the contents of the shipments suggested that supplies had been replenished.
In late May, Ahmad woke up to news that children and adults had been burned alive by an Israeli air strike at a refugee camp near Rafah. Ahmad had wanted to help but wasn’t able to return. “I wish I had stayed there and at least been able to do something with my hands, as opposed to being here and watching everything unfold and not being able to do anything about it,” he said. Ahmad had signed up for another trip with MedGlobal and hopped onto a flight to Egypt, armed with medical supplies. But Israel had seized the border. Doctors inside Gaza were trapped—and those outside couldn’t get in. Later attempts to return were unsuccessful, too. Ahmad said the official guidance from the World Health Organization is that Israel will not allow doctors of Palestinian heritage to enter Gaza.
Stuck in the U.S., Ahmad spends his time advocating for Palestinians. He lives in what’s considered Chicago’s “Little Palestine” and protested at the Democratic National Convention in his city. At an August 22 press conference, he joined Uncommitted organizers in condemning Democrats’ reluctance to feature a Palestinian American speaker. “Why is that so controversial? Is it because their words may be too powerful or that people may see them as human beings?” A day before the event, he wrote in an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune that Harris’s “change in rhetoric has yet to be complemented with clear and concise policy changes.” Over the last few months, he has traveled across the country, meeting with congressional staffers, raising money for maternal care, and sharing what he’s seen in Gaza’s emergency rooms on panels. Ahmad also joined more than forty American health-care workers who volunteered in Gaza in signing a letter to Biden and Harris; they urged the U.S. to withhold military, economic, and diplomatic support for Israel. The letter spoke of preteen children shot in the head and chest, and operations performed without anesthesia.
Despite Ahmad’s efforts, it still feels like the White House is not willing to listen. So he understands why people may think engagement is a waste of time. They feel helpless. But he is not among them. “You never know what may tip the scales,” he said. He was one of many to testify before Chicago’s City Council. As he spoke about the challenges of pregnant women in Gaza, a council member began crying. A month later, Chicago approved a resolution that called for a permanent ceasefire and the immediate release of all hostages. “It’s a wake-up call. We need to build political power here,” he said.
Shahid, the progressive political strategist, pointed out that the increasing public support for Palestine online and among young Americans has not yet been reflected in Congress. “Palestine has won the internet, but it has definitely not won Capitol Hill. … Winning public opinion is the first step, and then the second step is translating public opinion into political power,” he said.
Democrats have not taken decisive action on restricting aid to Israel. But some party leaders have expressed concerns. U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi was among more than thirty congressional lawmakers who signed a letter to Biden, urging him to consider a ban on sending more offensive arms to Israel. They wrote to the president after the Palestinian death toll had surpassed 30,000—spurred by an Israeli air strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers, including an American citizen. Lawmakers also wrote that they were “greatly concerned” by the same weapons transfer as Ahmad, which the Washington Post reported on during Ramadan.
Some Democratic strategists say this is an unprecedented moment for pro-Palestinian advocacy. In other words, it’s just the beginning. “In these big movement moments, things change. Organizations die. Other organizations start. Some people decide this is their life’s work,” Shahid said. “In a year or so, I imagine the landscape of Palestinian rights advocacy in the U.S. will look dramatically different.” In the meantime, the fabric of Palestinian society is unraveling: Israeli air strikes are wiping out entire families. They’re destroying homes, schools, hospitals, and water systems. Gazans are dying from famine and disease. And in the U.S., rising Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian discrimination have cost lives. The November election will clarify how much power the Palestinian cause has at the ballot box. “You’re going to see a lot of people potentially move away from the (Democratic) party because the party is not moving with them,” said Elabed, of the Uncommitted campaign. “It’s going to send a message to voters that (the White House) is OK with risking our democracy in order to align with Benjamin Netanyahu.” Despite the possibility of another Trump presidency, many Palestinian Americans say they can’t bring themselves to vote for a leader in an administration that helped supply the bombs that killed their relatives.
Reliving the Nakba
Leila Giries was eight years old when she fled her village of Aiyn Karim, near Jerusalem. She remembers climbing over a mountain in the middle of the night in May 1948. She clung to her parents. By morning, crowds of people struggled to find their loved ones. “It was total chaos,” she said. They were told they could return to their homes within a few weeks. But “the two weeks turned into seventy-five years.” This was the beginning of what Palestinians call the Nakba, the displacement of about 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel.
In the shadow of the Holocaust, Western powers supported designating parts of Palestine as a Jewish state—citing centuries-old religious claims and intending for it to provide safety for Jews fleeing persecution. But some scholars argue that Israel’s creation was a colonial endeavor—pointing to statements from early Zionist leaders, as well as the control Israel has maintained over the local population that remained in Palestine. Theodore Herzl, the founder of the political Zionist movement, believed Jews would provide “an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” In the years that followed, Israel took over large areas of Palestinian land and access to occupied territories. The blockade of Gaza has meant that Israel controls the flow of key resources like water and electricity; the strip’s hospitals, for example, routinely lack essential equipment and medicine. Israel has also served as a key ally for American and European interests—ideologically and in providing access to the region’s natural resources.
The new state came at a cost, which is still being borne today. Many Palestinians became refugees and fled to other countries—creating a painful and lasting sense of loss. “That’s why the people in Gaza are dying on the spot. They know once they leave, they’re not coming back,” Giries said. Netanyahu has said Israel has no intention of resettling the Gaza Strip. It’s also unclear where Palestinians with destroyed homes would return.
The past few months have felt unbearable for Giries, who has lived in California since 1958. The lines between past and present are blurring. She can’t bear to watch scenes of Palestinian families fleeing. “I cannot. When I see them, I close my eyes,” she said. “It brings back the memories … it’s reliving 1948 every single day when I see the bombing, when I see the people leaving.” Her kids don’t want her to obsess over the news, but sometimes she catches a glimpse. In those moments, she’s left in tears. Giries’s family left almost all their possessions behind when they fled Aiyn Karim, but they kept the key to their home. Today, it hangs in a frame in her living room.
In the lead-up to the formation of Israel, Zionist leaders described Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Giries said the history of Palestine cannot be erased, nor can the scars from the Israeli occupation. In the decades that followed, the state expanded illegal settlements and demolished tens of thousands of Palestinian homes. Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem, have for years accused Israel of enforcing a system of apartheid and Jewish supremacy against Palestinians. The Israeli government rejects those allegations. But on July 19, the ICJ declared that Israel is enforcing apartheid in occupied territories and called for Israel to withdraw its forces from Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
About 1,200 people died in Israel during the October 7 attack, in which Hamas took at least 230 people hostage. The deaths included roughly 800 civilians, 70 foreigners, and more than 300 security forces. Israel said that its attacks on Gaza are in pursuit of Hamas, but rarely provides definitive proof of this—and has, at times, provided faulty evidence. (One video posted by Israel’s Defense Forces claimed to show a list of terrorist names in Arabic, but it was just a calendar of the days of the week.)
Even before October 7, Palestinians faced the impact of occupation every day, in addition to deadly attacks. Between 2008 and 2021, violence in the region killed 5,739 Palestinians and 251 Israelis, according to the U.N. (twenty-three Palestinians for each Israeli.) That’s why many Palestinian Americans have been politically engaged since long before last October.
Thaer Ahmad, the doctor who walked out of the meeting with Biden, became more involved back in 2008. Israeli attacks during Operation Cast Lead killed more than 1,300 Palestinians, while rocket fire by Hamas killed thirteen Israelis. Human Rights Watch documented the Israeli army’s extensive use of white phosphorus against civilians. Israel denied that the use of munitions containing the toxic agent violated its legal obligations. A 2009 U.N. report on Israeli attacks noted that, similarly to its conduct now, the military often bombed “safe” cities they had told Palestinians to evacuate to. “I’m very familiar with when these wars happen and Gaza gets destroyed,” Ahmad said. After 2009, he returned to Gaza four times to help train physicians before his latest medical mission in January.
Other Palestinian Americans have turned to courts in their pursuit of justice. In November, Monadel Herzallah, a sixty-three-year-old Palestinian American living in California, sued Biden. He accused the president of assisting a genocide that killed five members of his family. Other plaintiffs in the case include three Palestinians living in Gaza and five American citizens with family in the strip. In January, a lower court dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds; the judge still urged the White House to examine their support of Israel’s military siege, noting that “it is plausible that Israel’s conduct amounts to genocide.” A federal appeals court affirmed the dismissal in July.
This wasn’t the first time that Herzallah lost relatives to Israeli bombs. Fifteen years earlier, Israeli attacks killed Herzallah’s nephew, so he protested outside the Israeli consulate in San Francisco. He returned to that same spot to protest earlier this year. Israeli air strikes killed Herzallah’s nephew’s two brothers in November and more of his loved ones. Among them was his four-year-old niece, Ward, whose name means “flower” in Arabic.
As the case made its way through the legal system, Herzallah said more than two hundred of the plaintiffs' family members have been killed. And he’s not hopeful about Harris’s run for president. He said he’s turned off by her repeated statements that Israel has the right to defend itself. “That by itself is really an indication for me about what the presidency of Harris would look like.”
Some Palestinian Americans have lived under Israeli military occupation. Tariq Haddad’s early childhood was spent in his grandmother’s home in southern Gaza. Even playing outside could be dangerous. During a game of chess in 1987, soldiers shot rubber bullets at him and his cousins. He escaped and hid in a chicken coop for hours.
His cousins were sometimes arrested and beaten by police. “Many of my cousins were jailed for years for nothing—for essentially protesting the occupation.” So much was out of his family’s control. Sometimes, they couldn’t shower or do the laundry because of Israel’s tight control over the water supply. They stumbled through checkpoints, which made their journeys hours longer. His grandma once woke up to Israeli soldiers eating in his family’s kitchen because they were using it to scope out the area. “Every aspect of your life is controlled by military occupation,” he said. “That was very formative as a teenager: seeing the unfairness of it all, seeing the dehumanization.”
Haddad moved to the U.S. in 1989, but most of his family remained in Palestine. He always worried about their safety. That concern was warranted. About ten years ago, Haddad couldn’t bring himself to celebrate his son’s birth because it fell on the same day as an Israeli attack on northeastern Gaza. A few days later, an Israeli air strike killed fourteen of Haddad’s family members. Grieving and angry about Washington’s support of Israel, he wrote a letter to then President Barack Obama. It said that generic calls for ending violence would not be enough, and that the U.S. must confront the system of occupation and apartheid instead. “Somebody from his administration sent me a cookie-cutter response,” Haddad said. “Nothing that was personal, nothing that meant anything.”
Fast-forward to 2024, and Haddad, a forty-nine-year-old cardiologist in Virginia, has lost more than 130 relatives to Israel’s assault on Gaza since October 7. The U.S. State Department reached out for a conversation in January, but Haddad refused to meet with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “I feel 150 percent vindicated in that decision. I feel that it was absolutely the right thing because I did not allow them to use my voice for political grandstanding.”
Haddad is still hopeful that progress will come. He believes that any transformation will require people to change how they vote. “When it starts to hurt people in Congress … that’s when this will change,” he said. “The reason [Muslim and Arab voters] are taken for granted is the prevailing thought of Democrats that they’re less bad than the other side and therefore they really don’t have to do anything.” For Haddad, the Uncommitted campaign has helped send a message to the Democratic Party that it can’t take voters for granted.
That’s a vision that some older Palestinian Americans share, too. May Seikaly was looking forward to representing the Uncommitted movement as a delegate at this year’s Democratic National Convention. But the seventy-nine-year-old Palestinian American’s health is failing her. The blood clot in her heart makes it hard to be active. She had to pull out. “I wish I was twenty years younger,” she said. “I get tired very, very fast. … I’m so passionately committed to my people that seeing what is happening is draining me and making me feel the incompetence of my situation.” Though her condition has deteriorated in recent months, she visited the University of Michigan’s encampment in May. Amid tents sprawled on the lawn, she shared stories with students about her collection of Palestinian oral histories. She has interviewed hundreds of displaced Palestinians over the decades; that work is now publicly available at Stanford University.
Seikaly earned a Ph.D. from Oxford University and was a Wayne State University professor before retiring. She dedicated her life to studying Palestine because she worried her lived experience might not be taken seriously. Her family fled during the Nakba, when she was three years old. But remnants of that life are all over her Ann Arbor home. Palestinian embroidery, called tatreez, peeks out everywhere, in pillow covers and artwork framed on the wall. Some pieces were made by her mother, others by Palestinian refugees she met in Lebanon’s camps. Seikaly doesn’t yet know how she will vote in the election.
She believes what Israel is doing is a continuation of the Nakba. “What I see today is them trying to complete the story. The story is to annihilate us,” she said.
Other Palestinian American Nakba survivors agree. Giries, in California, feels that the Nakba never stopped. “Now it’s more bloody because they have more sophisticated weapons,” she said. “Now it’s even worse. It’s much worse.”
Both elderly women feel they have done their part and are looking to younger generations to carry on pro-Palestinian advocacy. “My grandkids, they are carrying the torch,” Giries said. Seikaly never married or had children, but she views her students as her legacy.
‘America’s Fingerprints are All Over This Crisis’
Layla Elabed grew up in a blue-collar union family in Detroit. She encouraged her relatives, community members, and friends to vote for Biden in 2020. That included her fiancé, who had never voted before. He always reminds Elabed that he voted for Biden because of her. “Never again,” he says today. If policies on Gaza don’t change soon, she fears that the Democratic Party has “agreed that they’re going to alienate their core constituents.”
Elabed is one of many Palestinian Americans who cling to their belief in democratic institutions, even if they’re shaken by the White House’s Gaza policy. She is one of the main activists behind the Uncommitted campaign, and her sister is U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib. “We are building something that is beyond the November election,” she said.
For some community leaders, electoral politics can only go so far—partly because of the influence of powerful lobbying groups. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent more than $20 million to unseat U.S. Reps. Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. Both lost their races.
Hannah Shraim, a law student, applauds the work of Uncommitted activists, but is wary of how much even progressive lawmakers can accomplish. She’s critical of politicians who said they were fighting for the Palestinian cause but still endorsed Biden—even after concerns about his age and competency emerged. That includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Senator Bernie Sanders, who called to restrict military aid to Israel, but later rallied behind Biden and Harris. She took particular issue with Ocasio-Cortez’s comments at the Democratic National Convention that Harris was “working tirelessly for a ceasefire” even as the State Department approved $20 billion in arms sales to Israel in August.
“I personally don’t believe in these forms of compromise,” said Shraim. “I feel fully comfortable calling out politicians who engage in that decision-making, because politicians should not be placed on a pedestal.” For her, the focus on who will be president is misguided. “Any person in the position of the presidency is compromised because they need to bend—regardless of what their personal views are. They need to bend in order to conform to the American establishment,” she said. Shraim’s skepticism of electoral politics is shared by larger pro-Palestinian activist groups, such as Within Our Lifetime (WOL) and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM). WOL disrupted a rally that included Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders in June, taking issue with their endorsement of Biden—even though they referred to the bombing of Gaza as a genocide. “Endorsing Biden is endorsing the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” WOL wrote on social media.
For her part, Shraim is focused on organizing in the greater Washington D.C. area. She grew up attending protests for Palestine with her family. Al Jazeera always played on the television at their home in Maryland, and she used to be a lot more careful about disclosing her Palestinian identity. She feared being doxxed.
It wasn’t until college that Shraim became more vocal. She gave a speech supporting a resolution calling for the university’s divestment from companies that benefit from the Israeli occupation. Wearing a keffiyeh, she spoke about how the Nakba and the creation of Israel affected her family. Her grandfather, who was seven at the time, became a refugee. “Not only does my grandfather not have a right to return to his land today, but he never saw a land that he could call his home that is free,” she said.
Weeks later, Shraim was doxxed on Canary Mission—a website that hosts a blacklist of pro-Palestinian activists. “That experience radicalized me, in the sense that it didn't matter what I tried not to do, or how I tried to protect myself. My identity as a Palestinian inherently is a threat,” she said. “I realized, what is the point of self-preservation as my people end up being extinguished as a result of my silence?”
For Shraim, Harris’s tougher rhetoric on Israel isn’t enough. “For Harris to come out with flowery statements, it does nothing for me. What we want is principled decision-making,” she said. Shraim takes particular issue with Harris meeting Netanyahu. She points out that the International Criminal Court has requested an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister. And she’s also outraged by Washington’s continued military assistance. “If America decided to stop funding Israel, the genocide would not be able to continue. It’s not a hard equation to follow,” she said.
That’s a concern shared even by those who work in the Biden Administration. Dozens made that clear in anonymous letters and dissent memos. Back in January, Tariq Habash, a Palestinian American, left his job as an adviser at the Education Department because of what he saw as the U.S. facilitating violence against Palestinians.
Habash is a lifelong Democrat who has volunteered for numerous campaigns, including Biden’s. He describes himself as a firm believer in creating change through governance, even if “some people might scoff at that.” At first, Habash thought Biden would realize unconditional military support for Israel is immoral—not just because of the high civilian casualties, but also because it could destabilize the region. “I was very wrong,” he said.“I was not able to do anything to make the situation better … and as soon as that became clear to me, I had to leave.”
In the months since Habash quit, the war is spreading across borders. On September 18 and 19, thousands of pagers blew up in Lebanon in an attack that has widely been attributed to Israel; the detonating devices killed at least 30 people and injured almost 3000, according to Lebanese authorities. Days later, on Sept. 23, Israel launched a full-scale assault on Lebanon; officials reported that the attacks killed more than 490 people, including at least 90 women and children. The continued bombing across Lebanon, including in Beirut, has killed hundreds more and displaced more than one million people, and the Israeli army has declared preparations for a possible ground invasion. Later in September, Israeli airstrikes hit power plant and sea port facilities in Yemen, a day after the Houthis said they fired a ballistic missile at Ben Gurion International Airport.
Israel has also claimed responsibility for the assassinations of several high-profile Hezbollah members, including its leader Hassan Nasrallah, on September 26, and the group’s senior commander Fuad Shukr, on July 30; the attacks injured a total of more than 160 people and killed at least two children, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. A day after Shukr’s death, Hamas’s political leader and chief ceasefire negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in Iran by an air strike. Iranian officials and Hamas blame Israel for the attack, although Israel has not publicly claimed responsibility.
Habash’s relatives were all supportive; some said they were proud of his decision to quit, while others urged him to think carefully about sacrificing his career. Habash still considers himself a Democrat, but hopes that the party realizes it’s “losing people who really believe in democratic ideals.”
Foreign policy is rarely the most important issue for American voters, but Washington’s support of Israel has permeated American discourse in unprecedented ways. It’s similar to the Vietnam War, said Youssef Chouhoud, an associate professor of political science at Christopher Newport University and an expert on Muslim minorities in the West. In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection—partly because the Vietnam War was so unpopular. A 1968 Gallup poll, conducted three years into the war, found that 53 percent of Americans said sending troops to Vietnam was a mistake. This time around, it’s taxpayer money and not soldiers that has raised concerns. “Americans aren’t on the ground, but America’s fingerprints are all over this crisis,” Chouhoud said.
There are signs that the Democratic Party’s support for Israel is wavering. “Simply taking for granted the aid that we send to Israel is not the default position across the board for politicians anymore,” said Chouhoud. “More politicians are questioning both the amount and conditionality of aid we send over to Israel.” A growing number of congressional Democrats, including allies of the president, have suggested they are open to limiting military aid. In September, Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced resolutions to try and block the sale of more than $20 billion in offensive weapons to Israel—arguing that sending more weapons is immoral and illegal. Democratic Party chapters in Washington State and New Mexico have passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire and restricting military aid.
In the meantime, many Palestinian Americans are politically organizing as they grieve—and fearing for the safety of family members in Gaza. The American government has been of little help.
Dr. Yamaan Saadeh couldn’t eat or sleep properly for months, thinking about relatives stuck in Gaza. Lawmakers ignored him until his case got media attention. He eventually met members of the Biden Administration. “They were not helpful at all for my family or anybody’s family unless they were American citizens,” he said. He was able to get his family out on his own. But the guilt of knowing other Palestinian American families still have countless loved ones in Gaza weighs heavily on him. He later listened to the community’s call to boycott the White House meeting during Ramadan. “I wasn’t sure what to do. … Part of me is like, I don’t trust these institutions and I don’t trust these people,” Saadeh said. “But on the other hand, you recognize that these are also levers that we can push on a little bit.”
In Texas, Shifa Abuzaid, the twenty-nine-year-old Palestinian American organizer, tried her best to use those levers to help her family in Gaza. But it didn’t pay off. Government officials refused to help her after she testified at Houston’s City Council, wrote to the mayor, and reached out to the State Department, she said.
Abuzaid has lost several relatives to Israeli attacks since October 7. She and her family started GoFundMe pages that raised tens of thousands of dollars, which was enough to evacuate about a dozen family members to Egypt. The family prioritized those who could work to raise money for more evacuations. “We quite literally had to make a list and be like, OK: who do we save first? That is the position I don’t wish upon any family ever,” she said. “They’re gut-wrenching decisions.”
Her testimonies at the City Council were typically met with a brief “thanks for coming.” “Nobody says sorry for your loss, what can I do,” she said. Houston Mayor John Whitmire often says the city doesn’t get involved in international affairs. But she pushed back: “This is not an international issue. It’s a local issue. There are families here that are being impacted.” In June, Whitmire spoke at a Jewish community center, saying, “When some of your enemies challenged me to do a proclamation for a ceasefire, I would not respond.”
“He called us enemies. So he has taken a stance on an international issue,” Abuzaid said. Every day without a permanent ceasefire feels agonizing. “How do you go to work every day? How do you contribute to society knowing that your elected officials don’t—for lack of a better word—give a shit?” Abuzaid said. “They’re using your money without your consent—taking it from your paycheck and sending it to Israel to kill your family. What do you do? You certainly don’t vote for them.”
* The online edition of this article has been updated as news around the war and the election develops.
