Tucked away in Terry Ahwal’s basement is her personal wall of fame: Here she is at the Obama White House Christmas party. Here’s a thank you note from President Bill Clinton. There she is smiling 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, soliciting money from outsiders, pleading with acquaintances to vote for candidates—he’s now campaigning against the Democrat in the White House.
A Palestinian American who immigrated from the West Bank more than 50 years ago, Ms. Ahwal is furious about the president’s alliance with Israel in the war against Hamas that 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.
“You want my vote? You cannot kill my people in my name. So simple,” she said recently, sitting at the dining room table of her home in Farmington Hills, a suburb of Detroit. Photos from her travels to Jordan, Peru and the Great Lakes decorate her walls. “Whatever Israel wants, it gets.”
Such promises to punish Mr. Biden in November have the power to reshape American politics — if they come true. Michigan is home to 200,000 Arab Americans, and other critical battlegrounds have smaller but large populations. While there are no firm estimates of how many registered voters there are, even a modest number of defections from Democrats could spell trouble for the president’s re-election campaign. Mr. Biden won Michigan by 154,000 voters in 2020. Donald J. Trump won the state in 2016 by 10,700.
There is no shortage of anger and frustration 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 locket in the shape of the disputed land, with a quote from a Palestinian poet: “This land is something worth living for.”
In dozens of recent interviews in the Detroit area, Arab Americans described being consumed by the war, endlessly scrolling through social media for the latest images of the aftermath of the bombings, which began after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7. In discussions in mosques and coffee shops, there was almost unanimous agreement that Mr. Biden and his support for Israel’s right-wing government allowed the disaster. Most shared Ms. Ahwal’s stance against Mr. Biden’s vote.
Ms. Ahwal has spent hours calling and texting friends to urge them to vote “unattached” in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, to register their displeasure. He said he had heard almost no resistance, although there is no reliable poll showing how large the protest vote might be.
But the most important question concerns November. Like Ms. Ahwal, few of those vowing to reject Mr. Biden know for sure whether they will vote for a third-party candidate or support Mr. Trump, now the almost certain Republican nominee.
Ms. Ahwal says she has no illusions that Mr. Trump, who has been even more closely aligned with Israel during his tenure, would push for a cease-fire or be more supportive of the Palestinians. She knows that many voters outside the Arab-American community believe that she and other Biden objections are spitting on themselves, raising the possibility that the same president who banned millions of Muslims from traveling to the US will return to the White House.
“The other person is not going to be better,” she said, declining to name Mr. Trump.
But after long urging fellow activists to “work from within”, Ms Ahwal believes the strategy has failed. The demands, marches and boycotts have produced little change in US policy, he says, as both political parties have offered steady support for Israel. She is angry, not only about Israel, but also about the iron grip that the two parties have on the system. She is also clear about the irony: she is fighting against the very political system she helped create.
That’s the only option he has, he said.
“Nothing works,” he said. “If you’re desperate, what would you do?”
A changed world
Ms. Ahwal had an immediate thought as news broke of Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7: It wouldn’t take long for Israel to retaliate.
As a young child in Ramallah, Ms Ahwal, now 67, attended Catholic school and dreamed of becoming a nun. She often got into trouble for playing marbles with the boys or getting her clothes dirty climbing the neighborhood walls. She was too young to know or care much about politics.
Everything changed in 1967, when Israeli forces crossed into the West Bank in response to a surprise attack. Her family huddled in a basement as reports of war came over the radio. They waited days to hear 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 to come out.
The war lasted only six days, but it profoundly changed life in the region.
“This is what I call an introduction to hell,” Ms Ahwal said. Her parents and nuns at the school discouraged her and other students from protesting, but after witnessing shootings and beatings, Ms Ahwal rebelled.
She told the soldiers, maybe she could get away with it because she was a girl or because she’s a Christian, less likely to be seen as a threat. By the time she was 16, her worried parents sent her to live with a family outside of Detroit.
Even before becoming a US citizen in 1981, he began volunteering for the Democrats. She worked for a Democratic county executive and volunteered with the Arab American Commission on Anti-Discrimination. He energized municipal projects as well as Palestinian rights. He wrote letters to Congress, debated Israeli politicians passing through Detroit, and raised money for the Palestinians.
She volunteered on the Clinton campaign, attracted to his education policies rather 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, sharing their hope for a new era. Within months, her own optimism was shattered.
Scholars cite several factors for the deal’s collapse: Arafat’s failure to accept Israeli and American offers; The assassination of Mr. Rabin by two far-right extremists in 1995. Steady growth of settlements in the West Bank. The second intifada followed the rise of Hamas to power. For Ms. Ahwal, the answer is simpler.
“It was basically a process of delay, a process of stealing land, a process of deception,” he said, accusing the US of not restraining Israel. “What happened is simply that the Palestinians were snookered.”
Frustration turns to anger
A self-proclaimed pacifist, Ms. Ahwal decried Hamas’ attacks on civilians on October 7. However, he saw the Palestinians in Gaza in a weak position, reacting to decades of Israeli control. He saw Mr. Biden’s embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, as a knee-jerk response that set the stage for many civilian deaths.
In late October, Ms. Ahwal went to Washington on a prearranged lobbying trip with Palestinian activists, urging State Department and White House staff members to call for a ceasefire.
“I kept saying it will fix itself – the policymakers will change,” he said.
By Thanksgiving, when little had changed, she felt certain: She could no longer vote for Mr. Biden. She saw no other way to force her party out of decades of foreign policy.
In 2020, Ms. Ahwal had spent hours urging her friends and neighbors to vote for Mr. Biden — the alternative too scary to consider. They had already experienced the travel ban, the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, and the Trump administration’s tacit encouragement of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Mr. Biden’s tenure hadn’t brought much change, but it wasn’t any worse, he thought — until October 7. Now, in addition to the approximately 1,200 Israelis kidnapped or killed that day, there are more than 29,000 dead in Gaza. Entire neighborhoods have been leveled. Settler violence in the West Bank has increased.
Now he calls the president a hypocrite. Like some Arab American leaders in the Detroit area, he rejected recent offers to meet with White House officials. When he recalls decades of peace promises and calls for a two-state solution, he offers a bleak assessment: “I just don’t buy it anymore.”
Mr. Biden has recently sought to assuage that resentment. Last week, the administration said the United States would once again regard new Jewish settlements in the West Bank as “inconsistent with international law.”
But that doesn’t come close to the policies Ms. Ahwal says could change her mind: 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 calculus is full. He understands that withholding a vote for Mr. Biden actually helps Mr. Trump.
She has discussed 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 was raised a Christian and shares his wife’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But he said he was likely to vote for Mr. Biden this fall.
Why; He answers with two words: “Donald Trump.”
“I am very concerned about our democracy,” Mr Morris said.
But like so many other Palestinian activists she knows, Ms. Ahwal has seen little difference between Republicans and Democrats on what she sees as a moral crisis.
She is asked if she is willing to risk a Trump victory in the conflict.
She answers with a different question: Are Democrats willing to risk losing the presidency because of their support for Israel?
Asthaa Chaturvedi contributed reporting from Detroit.
