Last month, I was in Dubai for a reporting trip and met a Palestinian American woman named Alaa’ Odeh at a dinner party. She is from North Carolina but lives in Dubai, where she works as a strategy and public policy consultant. She had spoken passionately about her efforts to raise money to support people struggling to survive in Gaza, where she has mentored young Palestinians over the past decade. As I was leaving the dinner, we exchanged details and promised to keep in touch. As often happens when Americans meet abroad these days, we talked about the U.S. election, unfolding as the war in Gaza spreads to Lebanon.
In our conversation I did something I’ve never done before: urge someone to vote for a particular candidate. Odeh said she felt genuinely torn. Could she support Kamala Harris given the Biden administration’s unstinting support of Israel, whatever the cost to civilians in Gaza? Surely, I suggested, with so many issues at stake she would set aside those concerns and cast her crucial swing state ballot for Harris, given the stark choice between her and Donald Trump. It seemed, I suppose, obvious to me. My mind was already made up: I would be voting for Harris.
But as soon as I uttered the words I felt a hot bolt of shame. As a journalist I have a longstanding aversion to publicly supporting candidates, even if privately I have my preferences. But this was something else: a sense that I had no business telling this person, whose family experienced dispossession and exile, who was watching people from her family’s homeland die every day, how to vote, no matter the stakes from my perspective. Odeh was gracious. If she was shocked or offended, she did not let on. She sent me a warm email a few days later saying how much she enjoyed hearing about my work.
Over the past few weeks, I keep going back to that moment as the horrors in Gaza and Lebanon have escalated. A year into the war, Israel is undertaking a pitiless siege of northern Gaza, halting the already anemic flow of humanitarian aid while relentlessly attacking hospitals, crumbling apartment buildings and schools used as shelters by the displaced, asserting that Hamas fighters are hiding among medical workers and other civilians.
This siege has produced indelible images, like the body of a teenager named Shaaban al-Dalou engulfed in flames as the encampment where he and his family sheltered in tents next to a hospital in Deir al-Balah. On Wednesday, a medic named Abdulaziz al-Bardini in the same city wailed and sobbed as he discovered that the battered body he was transporting was his own mother, Samira. She was killed in an Israeli strike on a car in the Maghazi refugee camp, The Associated Press reported.
Dozens of people, including at least 25 children, died when Israeli forces struck an apartment building in which some 150 people had taken shelter in Beit Lahia on Tuesday, the Palestinian Civil Defense said. A State Department spokesman called it “a horrifying incident with a horrifying result.” The top United Nations humanitarian official issued a stark warning last week: “The entire population of North Gaza is at risk of dying.”
Against the backdrop of this widening catastrophe, surely the most consequential presidential election of my lifetime, between two candidates offering starkly different visions of America, is grinding to a photo finish. Every conversation I have is filled with anxiety and fear that Trump will win and plunge the United States, and the world, into chaos with his dystopian vision of a dog-eat-dog world of zero-sum competition.
I obviously fear this too. The other day I was trying to explain to my wife, who is a therapist for people experiencing grief and loss, this agonizing feeling I have been having, to locate its source and meaning. It was less the anxiety over a possible second Trump term than a debilitating combination of despair and paralysis in the face of the catastrophe in the Middle East, and the fear that no matter who wins, the unbearable suffering will continue.
“You’re despairalyzed,” she declared, apparently coining a neologism that instantly named the feeling. Usually I despise portmanteaus, but I have clung to this diagnosis like a life raft, sharing it with anyone I’ve met.
I was a little surprised to find myself feeling this way. I was an early and enthusiastic supporter of replacing Joe Biden with Kamala Harris, and I had high and perhaps unrealistic hopes that she might chart a different course on the issues that matter the most to me.
I have never been a single-issue voter, at least not when the issues are defined in an atomistic way. Abortion, health care, inequality, the rights of queer people to live in dignity, the climate crisis, the unfairness of the criminal justice system — these are all important to me. But what lies beneath each of them is a deeper question that I suppose does make me a single-issue voter: Who is protected under the iron dome of American belonging, and who is forced to stand outside it?
Elections are always about what matters to voters. But they also reveal who matters. Looking back as we barrel toward Election Day, it is clear that the past year has provided some depressing answers to this question.
The divide between who is in and who is out in presidential elections is usually metaphoric. But last month it became quite literal for Dr. Ahmed Ghanim, a Democratic activist and former candidate for Congress in the suburbs of Detroit. He was sitting in the audience of a private event for Harris, with special guest Liz Cheney, killing time with emails and messages on his phone, when a woman asked him to come with her.
“I followed her, thinking that they might change my seat or something,” Ghanim told me. Instead, he found himself face to face with security officials who told him he had to leave.
“I’m going to leave, but I want to know why you are kicking me out,” he says in a video of the end of the encounter he captured in a cellphone video.
“Unfortunately this is no longer a conversation,” one of the security officials says, moving to escort him out of the building. And so he left, bewildered. The campaign later said it regretted what happened, but Ghanim said it offered no explanation for his expulsion.
Ghanim’s story is that of a classic immigrant striver. He had come to the United States from Egypt in 2002 after finishing medical school. His country was suffocating under the rule of Hosni Mubarak and felt like a dead end. America was the opposite. “I wanted to live in a free country where I can express myself and be active and voice my concerns,” he told me.
He quickly got involved in community affairs. He told me with evident pride that he had attended a summit of Muslim entrepreneurs in Washington where he had heard Barack Obama speak, and had moderated a social media discussion with Hillary Clinton during the Arab Spring. He plunged into politics, he said, volunteering on Democratic campaigns. Spurred on by the bloodshed in Gaza, he mounted a primary challenge this year against Representative Haley Stevens, who represents his district. He lost, by a lot, but still felt there was room for him to have influence in the party.
“Even though a lot of my views were not aligned with the Democratic Party, I felt like I’m part of the Democratic Party,” he said. “They listen to me.”
Now, he said, that has changed.
“This is the first time ever that I’ve experienced real-life racism and profiling on this scale,” he said. “It was shocking to me. It didn’t happen to me in 2002, when the emotions were very high after 9/11. But it happened to me inside my safe house, inside my city, in Royal Oak, Mich., in 2024.”
He said the Trump campaign had contacted him, asking if he would be willing to make an anti-Harris advertisement, but he immediately rejected the idea. I asked him how he plans to vote. He told me he hasn’t decided yet. There is still time, he said on Wednesday, for the Harris campaign to win him over.
Ghanim’s story reminded me of the experience of another American immigrant who aspired to public life whom I have written about this year: Adeel Mangi, a Pakistani American from New Jersey who, if confirmed, would be the first Muslim American federal appellate judge. Republican activists ginned up an Islamophobic smear against Mangi, claiming that his glancing involvement in an academic center at Rutgers Law School was evidence of his antisemitism. A conservative newspaper called Mangi “Hamas’s favorite judicial nominee,” in an opinion article that included an illustration superimposing the Hamas flag over his eyes.
The charge was absurd — Mangi had done pro bono work on religious freedom cases, and a number of prominent Jewish organizations rushed to his defense. But it quickly became clear that some Democratic senators would not vote for him. His nomination remains stalled.
Mangi’s story filled me with rage and sorrow. I could not help identifying with this dignified man of my own generation, from a background not commonly represented in the most exclusive corridors of power. He had done everything right: sterling education, spotless career, a record of generous service to public causes. As he stood on the precipice of joining the highest echelon of his profession, he was smeared not because of anything he had done but because of his faith. He had built his life on an American creed that anything was possible, no matter who you are or where you come from. And now members of the same party that had nominated him to the judicial elect were casting him out.
Since Oct. 7 there has been a sharp increase in reports of antisemitism. There has also been a huge spike in reports of Islamophobia of a kind unseen since Sept. 11. That wave, amid the war on terror, had significantly ebbed in the past decade. Indeed, when then-President Trump signed an executive order in 2017 barring people from several Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States, it was heartening to see huge protests erupt in many cities. But that didn’t mean prejudice against Muslims disappeared, Saher Selod, research director at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding who has written books about Islamophobia, told me.
“It never went away, so it’s always there,” she said. “Muslims are held accountable for any violence that another Muslim does.”
She explained that Muslim-Americans labor under a set of perceptions that are just barely below the surface in the best of times: They are inherently violent, misogynistic, homophobic. They are seen, she said, as “incapable of having the same values of the rest of society, and that is something that’s inherent to you.”
It has been hard to watch this unfold in ways large and small. The Democratic National Committee declined to allow a Palestinian American speaker on the convention’s main stage, a key demand of the Uncommitted movement, even as it welcomed a parade of Never-Trump Republicans. The crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protest on college campuses have been harsh and disproportionate. Whether Harris wins or loses, it is hard to escape the feeling that the past year has produced a tragic victory for Trump’s scapegoating of Muslims, leaving many Arab and Muslim Americans feeling expendable.
The Harris campaign has the support of many Muslim and Arab American leaders and groups, and of many Democrats who have been vocal critics of Israel’s conduct in the war, including Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“My commitment has always been to ensure that we deny Trump the opportunity to enter the White House again and terrorize not just Muslims and Arabs in so many marginalized communities,” Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, one of the most prominent Muslim elected officials in the country, told me. She has endorsed Harris and has worked to turn out voters skeptical over Gaza. But there was an edge of sadness and resignation in her voice.
“There has been an earnest outreach, but an outreach without any policy changes or promises really does fall short,” she said. “It does create confusion and frustration and alienation, just to be frank. And, I think, a lot of pain, in that we have come so far as a Muslim community, as an Arab community, and we did fight for these hard wins that we’ve had in getting folks elected into office and pushing for policy change to fight against discrimination and marginalization. And yet it still persists.”
Another Minnesota Democrat, Keith Ellison, the state attorney general, said he understood the pain and frustration his fellow Muslim Americans were feeling, but it was unrealistic to expect a split on foreign policy from a sitting vice president.
“She has said repeatedly and over and over again that she demands a cease-fire,” Ellison said. “She demands humanitarian assistance be sent out immediately. She says, yes, Israel has the right to defend itself, but it matters how they do it. The problem is that it’s not so much a lack of compassion or a lack of concern but the enormity of the suffering that, quite honestly, it feels like our country can’t stop.”
But more-famous surrogates for the Harris campaign have struck a lecturing tone. Speaking before a roaring crowd at a rally for Harris in Philadelphia, Barack Obama had some tough words for Muslim American voters.
“If you’re a Muslim American and you’re upset about what’s happening in the Middle East,” he asked from the stage in his unmistakable baritone, “why would you put your faith in somebody who passed a Muslim ban and repeatedly suggested that you weren’t part of our American community?”
Bill Clinton, speaking this week to an audience in Michigan, a state with a large concentration of Arab Americans, weighed in with a lecture of his own, blaming Hamas for the continuing carnage in Gaza, urging the crowd to see it from the Israeli perspective and offering a rambling history lesson going back to biblical times.
“What would you do if it was your family and you hadn’t done anything but support a homeland for the Palestinians, and one day they come for you and slaughter the people in your village?” he said.
In my conversations with Muslim and Arab American voters, Democratic activists and lawmakers for this column, I was struck by their anguish.
Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian American Democrat and Georgia state House representative, had been proposed by the Uncommitted movement to deliver a short vetted speech at the Democratic National Convention in which she would urge a vote for Harris. Ultimately, according to the movement, the party declined to let her speak.
“You know what? I’m not even mad. I’m disappointed,” she told me. “Because folks should know better, and they should know what it takes to build our coalition and maintain our coalition.”
Meanwhile, the gyre widens in the Middle East. A growing number of scholars are coming to share the view that the slaughter in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide. South Africa was back at the International Court of Justice this week, submitting some 750 pages of evidence to support its genocide claim against Israel.
“The problem we have is that we have too much evidence,” South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands told Al Jazeera.
An editorial in the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz declared this week that “Israel is sliding into ethnic cleansing; its soldiers are carrying out the criminal policies of the messianic, Kahanist right; and even the opposition on the center and center left isn’t making a peep. This consensus behind ethnic cleansing is shameful, and every public leader who doesn’t demand an end to the de facto expulsion is supporting this crime and has become a party to it.”
A major party to this war is the government of the United States, which has stood firm in its support of Israel, providing weapons and cash in record numbers even as the scope and scale of the killing have become clear.
A couple of weeks ago the Biden administration delivered what was reported as a rare ultimatum to the Israeli government: Increase the flow of aid or else. But the actual wording of the letter, which said failing to increase aid “may have implications” for military aid to Israel, amounts to little more than a potential rap on the knuckles.
Benjamin Netanyahu might find ample reason not to take these mild threats too seriously: In September, ProPublica reported that Secretary of State Antony Blinken brushed aside detailed evidence provided by U.S. government agencies that the Israeli government was deliberately blocking humanitarian aid, a violation of international and American law. The Knesset this week passed two bills banning the U.N. agency that provides and coordinates much of the humanitarian aid in Gaza and the West Bank.
Hospitals have been frequent targets of Israeli attacks in Gaza — an examination by The Washington Post in May found that of the 36 hospitals in Gaza that are tracked by U.N. humanitarian affairs, “only four have not been reported damaged by munitions, raided by the Israel Defense Forces or gone out of service.” Medical workers from abroad have been a crucial lifeline as Gaza’s health system has collapsed under constant Israeli bombardment, but the Israeli government recently curtailed the number allowed to enter Gaza. Medical volunteers have also been an important source of independent eyewitness accounts of the humanitarian crisis. International journalists are barred from Gaza, and as of this writing, at least 134 journalists and media workers have been killed since Oct. 7, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a vast majority in Gaza.
Last week I reached out to Odeh, the Palestinian American woman I had met in Dubai. The feeling that I had transgressed in my offhand urging that she vote for Harris had only intensified. I wanted to apologize. She replied instantly. This time, I did what I should have done in the first place: I listened instead of speaking.
“I understand and I do agree Trump would be more of a disaster for the country,” she wrote in a message. “I did not take offense. I just feel like a vote for someone or a party is support and confidence in that person. I do not have this.”
She told me that in the end she had decided not to vote. Many people in her life, she said, were voting for Jill Stein, but she decided against it.
“I also remember watching Bush/Clinton debates when I was a kid and being excited to vote one day,” she said. “So you can imagine how opposite of my values not to vote is. But I couldn’t put my little vote (or voice) behind anyone.”
I told her I understood and respected her choice. I offered her the most valuable thing I have: solidarity.
One place I have often turned to in times of despair is the work of the playwright, novelist and activist Sarah Schulman. Her years in the trenches of the movement to save the lives of people dying of AIDS as a member of ACT-UP give her ideas and writing a sturdiness and bracing practicality. She has written a new book, “The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity,” which will be out next spring.
In it she writes: “Solidarity is the essential human process of recognizing that other people are real and their experiences matter. It is based in learning to evaluate the state of the world by the collective, and not only by our own individual experience. Solidarity is the action behind the revelation that each of us, individually, are not the only people with dreams.”
Kamala Harris was never the candidate of my dreams. I could not help projecting my admittedly unrealistic hopes for a better path forward for America onto her — that’s politics. It is no surprise that those hopes have been tempered by the ways Harris has chosen to seek a path to victory, one that includes largely supporting Israel’s pitiless war, ceding ground to the right on immigration and touting endorsements from one of the chief architects of the war on terror.
Still, on Tuesday, I’ll cast my vote for Harris. I hope with every fiber of my being that she wins.
The post Whatever Happens Next, Trump Has Already Won a Tragic Victory appeared first on New York Times.
