‘This is personal’: Dearborn’s Arab Americans suffer the pain of war
Abdullah Hammoud, the 33-year-old mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, feels the painful weight of a war being fought 6,000 miles away.
He feels it in every corner of his city.
He feels it through the anguished stories told while eating breakfast at AlTayeb Restaurant, visiting Ronnie Berry’s Halal Meats, and in late-night conversations with his closest friends.
He feels it when he sees cars and houses freshly draped in the Palestinian flag.
He feels it during normally joyful moments: at the lighting of his town’s Christmas tree, where the mood felt remarkably somber and subdued; or on Halloween night, when far fewer children than usual walked through the neighborhoods of his city.
“The high level of Islamophobia has parents concerned,” said Mr Hammoud. “A lot of people aren’t in the mood to have fun.”
He pauses for a moment. “Not if bombs fall in Gaza.”
Dearborn, a suburb of about 110,000 people bordering Detroit, has one of the highest percentages of Arab Americans among U.S. cities. Census figures show that roughly 54 percent are Arab-Americans, a figure that experts say is a significant undercount. When he took office in 2022, Mr. Hammoud — the son of Lebanese immigrants, raised in the city’s working-class east side — became the first Arab-American Muslim mayor in Dearborn’s history.
But all is not well in Dearborn right now. This is a community that is suffering intensely from witnessing the carnage caused by the war between Israel and Hamas.
The recent lull in fighting brought a respite, but Mr. Hammoud, like many in Dearborn, believed it would only be temporary. And it stirred strong emotions, giving residents a chance to step back and better feel the weight of the disaster: the dead and the missing, the injured and the displaced. It also highlighted the potential for a diplomatic solution, which the mayor indignantly said should have been the focus all along.
“There is a lot of sadness, anger and fear in this community right now,” Mr. Hammoud said recently, his voice sad and insistent, as he drove through Dearborn in his black Ford F-150 truck. “You can’t help but be concerned when the entire town tells you that they stay up every night watching the news, trying to understand how much more death and destruction is taking place.”
“We feel like things are happening every day,” he added. “This is personal for me. And it is personal for a large majority of my city.”
‘Sometimes the people here differ very much’
Mr. Hammoud’s rise to mayor symbolizes how today’s Dearborn differs sharply from its past. Orville Hubbard, the mayor from 1942 to 1978, was an outspoken segregationist who prevented black residents from buying homes in his city, and he used a racial slur when referring to Arab Americans. As the population of Middle Eastern immigrants increased in the 1980s, another mayor leveraged his ability to solve the city’s “Arab problem.”
Today, Dearborn exudes a proud, unabashed Arab-American spirit. It is visible in the predominance of businesses in the city with Arabic script, many of which also make a point of displaying the American flag. It is visible in the groups of older women in chadors and teenage girls wearing hijabs walking confidently through a local shopping center. It is visible in the domed mosques, smoky hookah bars and bustling markets selling Iranian pistachios and Aleppo pepper.
It can even be seen at the ballot box. In 2022, Dearborn began offering Arabic-language ballots in its elections.
However, it would be a mistake to view the community as monolithic, says Sally Howell, professor of history and Arab American studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
“The majority are Muslim,” said Dr. Howell, “but there are Arab Christians in Dearborn. There is a working class, a professional class, Republicans and Democrats. The Arab community in Dearborn reflects the full diversity of political views and cultural identifications, all of which takes place within this enclave.”
Tensions in the Middle East between rival Muslim countries are sometimes echoed in Dearborn, Dr. Howell, causing schisms and tense relations. And last year, divisions emerged among Arab-American residents when many began pushing to ban books with LGBTQ themes or stories from public schools.
“Sometimes people here have very strong differences of opinion,” said Dr. Howell. “But overall,” she added, “they get along well.”
Case in point: Arab Americans from Dearborn united to counter anti-Muslim protesters who repeatedly came to the city in the wake of the September 11 attacks and the Iraq War, sometimes visibly armed and on at least one occasion carrying a severed pig in hand. head – a serious insult to Muslims.
One target of the protesters was the Islamic Center of America, led at the time by Imam Hassan Qazwini, 59, an Iraqi-born cleric who fled Saddam Hussein’s persecution and came to the United States in the 1990s. Imam Qazwini said he has never seen Dearborn’s Arab Americans coalesce around an issue as they do over the war in Gaza.
“The community is seething,” he said, “and completely united.”
United by fear
In Dearborn, war is not an abstraction. Most people in the city, Mr. Hammoud said, have firsthand experience of such pain, or have family and friends in the Middle East who know all too well the costs of war.
Home to the Ford Motor Company, the city has always been shaped by waves of newcomers from foreign lands. The allure of the auto assembly line attracted a significant wave of Arab immigrants as Dearborn emerged in the 1920s.
More recently, the mayor said, Arab immigration in recent decades was “the result of war.”
“The Lebanese civil war and the fighting there against Israel brought with it a large Lebanese population,” he explained. “The wars in Iraq brought with them a large Iraqi population. The Yemenis are the latest arrivals. They are here because of the war.”
Mr. Hammoud’s mother fled Lebanon to the United States in the 1970s to escape the civil war, and his mother-in-law was born in a Palestinian refugee camp. Mr. Hammoud worked as a volunteer for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in Jordan. More than a hundred employees of the employment agency have been killed in Gaza.
Fear is now the unifying emotion in Dearborn. Concerns about Islamophobia, anti-Arab intolerance and the violence they can cause are part of everyday reality. These fears increased in mid-October when police arrested a man from a nearby suburb who had made online threats against Palestinians in Dearborn. The Thanksgiving weekend shooting of three Palestinian-American students in Vermont heightened the sense of danger. Investigators have not determined whether it was a hate crime.
Another reality: the feeling of being loose. Arab Americans have long faced tides of discrimination as they tried to gain acceptance in the United States. Still, the 2020 presidential election gave the Dearborn community the belief that it had gained a foothold in national politics and the centers of power. Arab-American support in Dearborn and across Michigan, a critical swing state, helped President Biden enter the White House.
But Biden’s support for Israel has left many Arab Americans angry and adrift.
“To whom should we turn?” said a congregant at the Islamic Center of America, one of the largest mosques in the United States, as Mr. Hammoud attended Friday prayers.
The question hung in the air. The council said there was no right answer. ‘I hear some say they will vote, but it will be a write-in. People will write to Gaza.”
Mr. Hammoud’s group of close friends and advisors includes a small group of Arab Americans in their late 20s and early 30s who grew up in Dearborn, left the comfort of their families and a tight-knit community for college and returned home, with the intention to make the city a better place.
Recently, he and three of this group gathered at a local café. Everyone had a personal war story. Mariam Jalloul’s was typical. She recalled that at the age of 12, she was visiting family in Lebanon when deadly fighting between the Israeli army and Hezbollah left her Beirut suburb in the crossfire. She remembered the thunder of the falling bombs, the shaking of her shelter and the certainty that she would not live. “Well, if the building collapses and we all die,” she remembered thinking, “at least I’ll be with my mother and sisters. I am not alone. We all go out together. ”
Over the Yemeni chai, with the smell of roasting cardamom in the air, Mr. Hammoud and his friends searched for solutions and comfort.
“Before,” Ms. Jalloul said, “it felt like Arab Americans were becoming part of the fabric of American society. We were listened to and taken seriously.”
The friends agreed that the war had been a reality check. “Was all that progress just theater? Was it lip service?” Mrs. Jalloul thought.
“Can this country be something for us?”