The war in Gaza turned this longtime Michigan Democrat against Biden
Hidden in Terry Ahwal’s basement is her personal wall of fame: here she is at Obama’s Christmas party at the White House. Here is a framed thank you note from President Bill Clinton. There she is, grinning next to Jennifer Granholm, the former governor of Michigan.
President Biden, Ms. Ahwal says, will not appear on her wall.
After a lifetime of working in Democratic politics – running local campaigns, asking strangers for money, begging acquaintances to vote for candidates – she is now campaigning against the Democrat in the White House.
Ms. Ahwal, a Palestinian American who emigrated from the West Bank more than 50 years ago, is furious about the president’s alliance with Israel in its war against Hamas, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. She doesn’t even have a better candidate in mind, but she swears there’s nothing Mr. Biden can do to get her back now.
‘Do you want my vote? You cannot kill my people in my name. It’s that simple,” she said recently, sitting at the dining room table of her home in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills. Photos from her travels to Jordan, Peru and the Great Lakes adorn her walls. “Whatever Israel wants, they get.”
Such promises to punish Biden in November have the power to reshape American politics — if they hold up. Michigan is home to 200,000 Arab Americans, and other key battlefields have smaller but significant populations. While there are no hard estimates of the number of registered voters, even a modest number of Democratic defections could spell trouble for the president’s reelection campaign. Mr. Biden won Michigan by 154,000 voters in 2020. Donald J. Trump won the state in 2016 by 10,700 voters.
There is no shortage of anger and disappointment directed at Mr. Biden in and around Detroit, where Palestinian Americans often display maps of pre-1948 Palestine and keys to family homes seized or abandoned during Israel’s war of independence. Ms. Ahwal regularly wears a pendant in the shape of the disputed land, with a phrase from a Palestinian poet: “This earth is something worth living for.”
In dozens of recent interviews in the Detroit area, Arab Americans described being consumed by the war as they endlessly scrolled social media for the latest images of the aftermath of the bombings, which began after Hamas captured Israel on October 7 attacked. coffee shops, there was almost unanimous agreement that Mr. Biden and his support for Israel’s right-wing government enabled the destruction. Most shared Ms. Ahwal’s position against voting for Mr. Biden.
Ms. Ahwal has spent hours calling and texting friends to urge them to “voluntarily” vote in the Democratic primary on Tuesday to register their discontent. She said she had heard virtually no resistance, although there are no reliable polls indicating how large the protest vote might be.
But the more consequential question is about November. Like Ms. Ahwal, few of those vowing to reject Mr. Biden know for sure whether they will sit out the election, vote for a third-party candidate or support Mr. Trump, now the all-but-certain Republican nominee.
Ms. Ahwal says she is under no illusions that Mr. Trump, who had even closer ties to Israel during his time in office, would push for a ceasefire or provide more support for the Palestinians. She knows that many voters outside the Arab American community think she and other Biden opponents are making fun of themselves, increasing the likelihood that the same president who banned millions of Muslims from traveling to the U.S. will return to the White House.
“The other person won’t be better,” she said, declining to say Trump’s name.
Yet, after long urging fellow activists to “work from within,” Ms. Ahwal believes this strategy has failed. Petitions, marches and boycotts have brought little change in U.S. policy, she says, as both political parties have offered steadfast support for Israel. She is angry, not only about Israel, but also about the iron grip the two parties have on the system. She is also clear about the irony: she is fighting the political system she helped build.
This is the only option she has, she said.
“Nothing works,” she said. “If you are desperate, what would you do?”
A changed world
When news of Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians arrived on Oct. 7, Ms. Ahwal immediately had a thought: It wouldn’t be long before Israel would retaliate.
As a young child in Ramallah, Ms. Ahwal, now 67, attended Catholic school and dreamed of becoming a nun. She often got in trouble for playing marbles with the boys or staining her clothes while climbing the walls in the neighborhood. She was too young to know or care much about politics.
That all changed in 1967, when Israeli forces invaded the West Bank in response to a surprise attack. Her family huddled in a basement as war reports filtered in on the radio. For days they waited for news from her father, who was stuck in Jerusalem, where he worked as a carpenter. The room smelled of urine; the children were instructed to wait before they were allowed to go outside.
The war lasted only six days, but profoundly changed life in the region.
“That’s what I call an introduction to hell,” Ms. Ahwal said. Her parents and the nuns at the school discouraged her and other students from protesting, but after witnessing shootings and beatings, Ms. Ahwal rebelled.
She mouthed off to soldiers, and maybe got away with it because she was a girl or because she was a Christian, which made her less likely to be seen as a threat. By the time she was 16, her worried parents sent her to live with relatives outside Detroit.
Even before she became a U.S. citizen in 1981, she began volunteering for Democrats. She worked for a Democratic county executive and volunteered with the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee. She put energy into municipal projects and Palestinian rights. She wrote letters to Congress, debated Israeli politicians passing through Detroit and raised money for Palestinians.
She volunteered for Clinton’s campaign because she was more attracted to his education policies than foreign policy. But in 1993, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, shook hands on the White House lawn as part of President Clinton’s peace negotiations, Ms. Ahwal was there and shared their hopes for a new era. Within months, her own optimism disappeared.
Scholars cite many factors underlying the deal’s demise: Arafat’s inability to accept Israeli and American offers. The assassination of Mr. Rabin by two right-wing extremists in 1995. Steady growth of settlements in the West Bank. The second intifada was followed by the takeover of Hamas. For Ms. Ahwal, the answer is simpler.
“It was really just a process of delay, a process of land theft, a process of deception,” she said, blaming the US for failing to contain Israel. “What happened is that the Palestinians were playing snooker.”
Frustration turns to anger
Ms Ahwal, a self-described pacifist, backed away from Hamas’ attacks on civilians on October 7. Yet she saw the Palestinians in Gaza in an impossible position, responding to decades of Israeli control. She viewed Biden’s embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, as a knee-jerk reaction that paved the way for many civilian deaths.
In late October, Ms. Ahwal went to Washington for a previously scheduled lobbying trip with Palestinian activists, urging State Department and White House officials to call for a ceasefire.
“I kept saying he would correct himself – the policymakers will change,” she said.
By Thanksgiving, when little had changed, she knew for sure: She could no longer vote for Mr. Biden. She saw no other way to force her party to break with decades of foreign policy.
In 2020, Ms. Ahwal had spent hours urging her friends and neighbors to vote for Mr. Biden — the alternative was too frightening to consider. They had already experienced the travel ban, the move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and the Trump administration’s tacit encouragement of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Biden’s term had not brought meaningful change, but it wasn’t worse, she thought — until October 7. Now, in addition to the approximately 1,200 Israelis kidnapped or killed that day, more than 29,000 people have died in Gaza. Entire neighborhoods have been razed to the ground. Settler violence in the West Bank has only increased.
She now calls the president a hypocrite. Like some Arab-American leaders in the Detroit area, she has turned down recent offers for meetings with White House officials. When she thinks back on decades of peace promises and calls for a two-state solution, she makes a grim assessment: “I just don’t believe in it anymore.”
Mr. Biden has recently tried to address this dissatisfaction. Last week, the administration said the United States would again consider new Jewish settlements in the West Bank as “contrary to international law.”
But that doesn’t come close to the policies that Ms. Ahwal says could change minds: labeling Israel an apartheid state, freezing military aid, supporting a Palestinian-led peace initiative. Only the latter move seems even remotely likely.
Ms. Ahwal knows her political analysis is loaded. She understands that withholding a vote for Mr. Biden effectively helps Mr. Trump.
She has debated her vote with her husband, Bob Morris, 72, the son of a longtime United Auto Workers union leader. Mr. Morris’s father was Jewish, but he was raised Christian and shares his wife’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Still, he said he would likely vote for Biden this fall.
Why? He answers with two words: “Donald Trump.”
“I am very concerned about our democracy,” Mr Morris said.
But like many other Palestinian activists she knows, Ms. Ahwal sees little difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to what she sees as a moral crisis.
She is asked if she is willing to risk a Trump victory over the conflict.
She responds with another question: Are Democrats willing to risk losing the presidency because of their support for Israel?
Asthaa Chaturvedi contributed reporting from Detroit.