Dearborn, Michigan – Samraa Luqman wants Arab Americans to be blamed if Democratic candidate Kamala Harris loses to her Republican rival Donald Trump in the United States election.
For too long, Democrats have taken the Arab vote for granted, and it is time for them to pay the price for the United States-backed Israeli war on Gaza and Lebanon, Luqman said.
“I will show up the next day if Harris loses, I will say: It’s because of this community, it is because of Gaza and because of the genocide, that you lost,” Luqman told Al Jazeera in her office in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn.
“Take the credit for your power. I’m all for it.”
The Yemeni American activist is part of a growing electoral bloc that would have been unthinkable a few years ago: Arab Americans for Trump.
President Joe Biden’s unconditional support for Israel amid the horrific atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon has left many community advocates like Luqman so distraught that they are forging an alliance with Trump in the hope of change – any change.
Despite his history of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric, Trump has extended an arm to such disaffected voters – an outreach campaign that culminated in a visit to Dearborn, where he met with dozens of Arab Americans on Friday.
With a pendant depicting the map of historic Palestine and the Dome of the Rock and a Palestinian flag dangling from her necklace, Luqman argued that voting for Trump is a gamble but supporting Harris is a guaranteed loss when it comes to Israel-Palestine.
“Even if he will continue this genocide at a 99 percent chance, I’m going to take that 1 percent chance that he’s going to stop it, as opposed to the 100 percent chance that it’s going to continue under Harris,” she told Al Jazeera.
Trump in turn has promised “peace” in the Middle East with few details on how he would achieve it and even fewer details on whether he would alter the staunchly pro-Israel approach he pursued in his first term.
But for Luqman, supporting Trump is not entirely about the former president, but about holding the current vice president accountable for the Biden-Harris administration’s unprecedented military support for Israel.
“I do not believe that a genocide can ever go unpunished. And for me, it should never, ever be rewarded with a second term,” she said.
“My message to Washington, to Democrats and Republicans, after this election is that if you do what Biden has done, you will not be rewarded.”
While some Harris supporters insist that she will not be a continuation of Biden, she has done little to distance herself from his pro-Israel policies and has promised to keep the flow of American weapons to Israel uninterrupted.
Trump in Dearborn
That chasm between Arab Americans and the Democratic Party has created a space for Trump to exploit.
In a close race, the tens of thousands of Arab voters can be decisive in Michigan, one of a handful of swing states that will decide who the next president is.
Trump made a brief campaign stop in Dearborn, an Arab-majority city that has come to symbolise the Arab and Muslim American experience, on Friday.
For years, Trump’s far-right allies demonised Dearborn with false accounts about the city adopting Islamic law and no-go zones that are inaccessible to the authorities.
And so, the warm welcome he received from voters, businesspersons and activists was as much a shift by him as it was by them.
Albert Abbas, a business owner, read out a statement with Trump standing next to him decrying the “betrayal of those in power”.
While Trump has released a letter promising to “stop the suffering and destruction in Lebanon”, Abbas also demanded action on Gaza.
“I can’t stand in silence when Palestine is being erased,” Abbas said. “Please help us stop the bloodshed. No amount of money or power should be prioritised over human life.”
Dozens of Trump supporters and detractors gathered outside the event.
Holding a Trump flag featuring an expletive about not caring about what others think, Dearborn resident Hassan Hussein Abdullah said “Everybody was happy” when Trump was president.
“If he said he’s going to stop the war, he’s going to stop the war,” Abdullah said. “I believe that Trump is a good man. I believe he’s going to stop the war.”
Protesters with Palestinian flags showed up at the impromptu gathering. Fawzi Mohamad, an Egyptian American dressed in a white thobe, chanted “free Palestine” as Trump’s convoy drove by.
Mohamad expressed bewilderment at the community’s embrace of Trump, quoting his anti-Palestinian policies and rhetoric, including using “Palestinian” as a slur.
“Anyone who votes for Trump or Kamala Harris is ignoring the blood of our children who are being killed in Gaza and Lebanon,” he told Al Jazeera.
At the local Harris campaign office – blocks away from the Trump event – Sami Khaldi, head of the Dearborn Democratic Club, said Republicans have not cared about Arab American issues in previous elections, but Trump is focusing on the community because he is “desperate” for votes.
“He’s the one who moved the US embassy to Jerusalem. He’s the one [who] gave Golan Heights to be part of Israel. At the same time, more illegal settlements were founded when he was president,” Khaldi told Al Jazeera.
“He has been tested, and we know what he stands for.”
Hedging in Hamtramck
Before visiting Dearborn, Trump made a campaign stop last month in Hamtramck, the country’s first Muslim-majority city.
Many supporters have credited Hamtramck’s Yemeni American Mayor Amer Ghalib with opening the channel between Trump and the Arab community.
While the war in Gaza and Lebanon appears to be dominating the political choices of the community in the election, Ghalib had been forging ties with Republicans before the conflict broke out.
The mayor pursued a conservative approach that brought him closer to Republicans amid debates over LGBTQ-themed books in school libraries.
Under his leadership, the city also passed last year a flag neutrality resolution that effectively banned flying the LGBTQ pride flag on city property.
The move caused a backlash from many Democrats and put Ghalib in the same camp as socially conservative Republicans.
It all coincided with the largely socially conservative Arab community across the state raising concerns about the introduction of gender identity topics in public schools and accessibility to books that some deemed as sexually explicit.
Ghalib acknowledged that these issues were a “catalyst” for his shift to the Republican Party, slamming what he called the “aggressive behaviour by the radical left wing” in response to the flag resolution.
“It wasn’t an instant decision that we took in one day,” Ghalib said of his endorsement of Trump during a town hall with Al Jazeera Arabic earlier this week.
“It was a combination of disappointment at the current administration for the past four years [and] since the war started on Gaza.”
Critics of Ghalib, however, have stressed that the president has no say over what goes on at school libraries or municipal decisions.
Layla Elabed, a leader of the Uncommitted Movement that aimed to pressure Biden and Harris to end their unconditional support for Israel, said the controversies about LGBTQ-themed books were instigated by far-right activists.
“I am concerned about the things that my children are learning, but it happens at the very community level,” she said at the town hall.
Ghalib’s endorsement of Trump appears to have rippled through the Yemeni community.
The facade of Sheeba, a Yemeni restaurant in Dearborn, has been covered with Trump signs, including ones that say in Arabic: “For peace, vote Trump.”
Ali Aljahmi, a member of the family that owns the restaurant, said the two main issues driving his support for Trump are the violence in the Middle East and the economy.
There is a strong perception by Trump’s supporters that the economy was far better under the former president partly because of low inflation, although the current unemployment rate is also low at 4.1 percent.
“We believe that Donald Trump is the only one that can bring the peace that we are striving for,” Aljahmi said.
‘Trump wants peace’
In neighbouring Dearborn Heights, Mayor Bill Bazzi – who was born in south Lebanon – has also endorsed Trump.
Bazzi took the stage alongside the Republican candidate at a rally in the Detroit suburb of Novi earlier this month, where an imam from Hamtramck also spoke.
The Dearborn Heights mayor told Al Jazeera that he decided to go “full force” with his backing of Trump after Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney – the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the architects of the so-called “war on terror” – in Michigan.
“Trump wants peace. He doesn’t want wars,” Bazzi, a Marine veteran, told Al Jazeera.
“And I believe his message is correct because when he was president, there were no new wars, and he was trying to withdraw our troops from both Iraq and Afghanistan.”
But Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of the city with the largest Arab American community in the state, Dearborn, has refused to back the former president.
“The architect of the Muslim Ban is making a campaign stop in Dearborn,” Hammoud wrote in a social media post on Friday.
“People in this community know what Trump stands for – we suffered through it for years. I’ve refused a sit down with him although the requests keep pouring in.”
Still, the Dearborn mayor faulted the Democrats’ support for Israeli atrocities for creating “the space for Trump to infiltrate our communities”.
Trump’s record
While many Trump supporters told Al Jazeera that the Trump presidency was a peace era, the facts do not entirely back that assertion.
Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal and ordered the assassination of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, bringing the two countries to the verge of an all-out conflict.
Iran responded to the killing of Soleimani with a rocket attack against bases hosting US troops in Iraq – a historically rare direct assault by a foreign nation against the American military.
Israel also killed more than 220 Palestinians who peacefully protested near the Gaza fence in 2018 and 2019.
Under Trump, the war in Yemen – described by the United Nations as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis at that time – also intensified.
When it comes to Palestine, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu often called Trump the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House.
Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, declaring the holy city as Israel’s undivided capital.
He cut funding to the UN agency for the Palestinian refugees, recognised Israel’s claimed sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights and closed down the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington, DC.
Biden did not reverse any of these policies, except for temporarily resuming funding for the UNRWA before cutting it during the ongoing war on Gaza.
Moreover, Trump pushed to forge relationships between Arab states and Israel without resolving the Palestinian issue – an approach that was also pursued by Biden, albeit unsuccessfully.
And while Trump often slams the Cheneys as warmongers, over the years, he surrounded himself by neoconservative hawks, including his former National Security Advisor John Bolton and close ally Senator Lindsey Graham.
On the domestic front, Trump imposed a travel ban on visitors from several Muslim-majority countries. He also has a history of anti-Muslim statements, including saying that the Quran, Islam’s holy book, teaches a “very negative vibe” and proclaiming that “Islam hates us”.
When confronted with Trump’s record, his Arab American supporters’ response varies.
Some point out that Biden has had a similar approach to the Middle East. Others dismiss Trump’s comments as mere words.
Some have pointed out that hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims have risen over the past year, with a six-year-old Palestinian child fatally stabbed in the Chicago area and three students wearing keffiyehs shot in Vermont.
Bazzi, the Dearborn Heights mayor, played down Trump’s previous statements about Muslims, saying that the former president “has no filter”, but he is trying to build a coalition that includes the community.
“He says things, but I can tell you that he wants to bring this country back together,” Bazzi told Al Jazeera.
Walid Fidama, a lifelong Yemeni American Democrat now backing Trump, said that the former president’s rhetoric has shifted on Arab and Muslim communities, and that’s a welcome development.
At the rally in Novi, Trump described Arab and Muslim Americans as “great people”.
“Bringing Arab leaders and imams to the stage to speak is a hugely positive step that will change how we are viewed as a community,” Fidama told Al Jazeera.
Some activists like Luqman, however, do not try to sugarcoat Trump’s record. Instead, they view their plan to vote for him as a calculated political decision.
She argued that as a term-limited president, Trump is more likely to break the norms in Washington, including unconditional support for Israel.
And even if Trump does not put pressure on Israel to end the war, Luqman said, he is more likely to face opposition in Washington.
She noted that while Republicans have been staunchly pro-Israel, Democrats have failed to pressure Biden – a president from their own party – to change course in his backing of the war.
And there is the long-term game – breaking away from the Democratic Party to prove that the community could be a swing vote in future elections, Luqman said.
“If we exert our political muscle, and we show that we have an impact that will cause reverberations in the elections, it will show that we have the strength and the voter bloc to make a change, and that – in and of itself – is going to have both parties trying to appease us,” Luqman told Al Jazeera.
