The United States’ complicity in the Gaza genocide over the past 13 months has been unconscionable. The situation is likely about to get significantly worse.
With Donald Trump returning to the White House in January, Israel will have even more room than before to wreak havoc on the Gaza Strip. Even settlers committing violence in the West Bank are unlikely to suffer the same wrist slaps the Biden administration has given them in recent months.
Trump is a loose cannon when it comes to Israel–Palestine — during his first term, he decided to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and he later affirmed Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a Syrian territory that has been under military occupation by Israel since 1967. He also bypassed Palestinians because, for decades, the choice Israel had was to end its occupation of Palestinian territories and achieve normalization with surrounding Arab states or continue the occupation and remain shunned by most of them. By pushing normalization without working to end Israel’s occupation, Trump took away the little power Palestinians had to negotiate, since it really all rested on their relations to more powerful Arab states.
When it comes to Gaza, there is no telling what Trump will do. The only thing that’s certain is that his policies will not be good for Palestinians.
Some Arab Americans seem to think they will be. Polls from October indicated that Trump led the demographic by a small margin. On Nov. 5, Trump received over 42 percent of the vote in Dearborn, MI, where more than half the population is of Middle Eastern descent. In doing so, Trump increased his vote share in the city by 12 percent from 2016 and beat Harris in the state by an impressive six points. To put that in perspective, Trump lost to President Biden in Dearborn by 40 points in 2020.
Bishara Bahbah, the chairman of Arab Americans for Trump and himself a Palestinian American, swears that the president-elect “promised an end to the war, an end to the killing of civilians, and a lasting peace in the Middle East based on a two-state solution.” Bahbah apparently sees hope in Trump for a future unplagued by Israeli occupation and the murder of Palestinians with impunity. He and the other Arab-American voters he represents do not see clearly.
It takes a significant amount of cognitive dissonance for dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s complicity in the Gaza genocide to turn into hope that Trump will be any better. Trump is the only presidential candidate who used “Palestinian” as an insult to demean his political opponent. He, not Biden or Harris, hosted a rally at which Rudy Giuliani insisted that “the Palestinians are taught to kill us at two years old.”
Additionally, Jared Kushner — Trump’s son-in-law and a senior adviser in his first administration — has stated that, were he in Israel’s shoes, he “would just bulldoze something in the Negev, [and] try to move [Palestinians] in there … so you can go in and finish the job.” Kushner also insists that a Palestinian state would be “a super bad idea,” and would “essentially be rewarding an act of terror.”
Trump’s pick for U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has argued that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” Steve Witkoff, who Trump appointed to serve as special envoy to the Middle East, said that attending Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s July speech to Congress was a “privilege.” In May, International Criminal Court prosecutor Amir Khan filed for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Netanyahu has clearly been holding out for a Trump victory. Why? He understands that whatever miniscule guardrails the Biden administration has placed on his execution of genocide in the Gaza Strip will disappear once Trump moves into the Oval Office. Trump’s apparent urgency to end Israel’s onslaught says more about his fears of the conflict plaguing his administration than it does about his commitment to facilitating meaningful peace between Israel and the Palestinians. What Trump really wants is an end to the atrocious image Israel has cultivated for itself through a year of genocidal violence. If he can achieve that through other means, he has no need for or interest in Palestinian rights.
I share other Arab-American voters’ disgust with the Biden–Harris administration for its facilitation of the genocide in Gaza, and the fact that Biden has failed to reverse any of Trump’s legally dubious recognitions of Israeli sovereignty over occupied territories is discouraging. Beyond that, the Democrats’ refusal to give Palestinian-American Ruwa Rowan — an elected Democratic representative — a slot to speak at their convention in August was a slap in the face to all of us Palestinians. It communicated that, no matter how much we fall in line behind the Democratic Party, they will always consider us too controversial to fully embrace.
In that sense, I understand not wanting to vote for Harris. I understand because I voted third-party myself. I did so with the stipulation that, if I were voting in a swing state, I would have chosen Harris. But I am even sympathetic to my fellow Arab and Palestinian Americans who voted outside two-party boundaries in places that were competitive. While I disagree with the decision, I recognize that either major party choice would have continued the U.S.’ policy of arming and defending Israel as it turns Gaza to rubble. It is not a privilege for Palestinians to vote conscientiously. It is the only thing we have. But whereas Harris would have been bad for Palestinians, Trump will be disastrous.
I find it hard to grasp how anyone who professes support for Palestinian rights could cast a ballot for Trump. Not only is his rhetoric violent and racist toward us, his track record as president was abysmal. Any Arab American holding out hope that the president-elect will bring peace to the Middle East or justice to Palestinians is, to put it mildly, grossly misled. Trump is a strongman; the way he imagines peace being accomplished is through force. Netanyahu adheres to the same philosophy. I would place my bets on Trump encouraging Israel to win peace through the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip and the continued occupation — maybe even annexation — of the West Bank. Expecting anything better from him is wishful thinking.
