As liberals cry over Trump's victory, Muslim Americans count the dead in Gaza
Within hours of Donald Trump being announced as the 47th president of the United States, Zaineb Haider received a text message from an old contact - a white woman.
It was probably intended as a message of support, with the sender likely checking in on Haider after the Democratic nominee and sitting Vice President Kamala Harris lost in a landslide defeat on Tuesday's US presidential election.
But the subject and tone infuriated the 24-year-old, Haider told Middle East Eye.
"The message asked if I was feeling okay [about Trump] coming back to office," she said.
"I told her: 'I haven't been fucking okay for an entire year'."
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For more than 13 months, Israeli forces have killed at least 43,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the vast majority of them women and children, with schools, hospitals, universities and critical infrastructure specifically targeted by Israeli air strikes and shelling.
The incessant Israeli attacks have also come amid a campaign aimed at deliberately starving the Palestinian people, with over 1.8 million in Gaza experiencing "extremely critical" levels of hunger, according to the Integrated Food Security Classification (IPC).
Haider said she immediately recognised the message for what it was: liberal's shedding tears and only expressing concerns about the future of minorities and others after Trump's re-election, not what came before his resounding victory.
According to Haider, a community activist and organiser in Newark who has watched with horror as US-made bombs have decimated Gaza, it was beyond absurd that her acquaintance actually thought she would be especially bothered by a second Trump presidency.
"On the surface [it appears] she reached out to check in on me, but she was actually looking for support and for a window to vent about a Trump presidency," Haider said.
'For the liberal progressives: if you're upset about an election loss but not a genocide, you need to check your beliefs'
- Sara Abdelaziz, New York resident
For many Muslims and Arab Americans, the war on Gaza has dramatically changed the way the community relates to the US political system.
And recent revelations that a prominent pro-Palestine grassroots group received more than $400,000 from a Democratic-aligned PAC that explicitly prevents beneficiaries from endorsing a candidate other than Harris, has further demoralised the community's trust in the electoral system and those within it.
For many others, who like Haider find themselves at odds with the liberal establishment on matters of the economy, foreign policy or immigration, the war has only solidified their views that both parties are not moved by Palestinian suffering.
According to data, tens of thousands of Muslims and Arab American voters actively voted against Harris via a third party or for Trump. Others simply didn't think their vote even mattered.
In Haider's case, she didn't think the bus trip to the polling station was worth the hassle.
"I had no interest in taking part in the circus," she said, noting that several friends in her circle, some of whom had taken part in the pro-Palestine encampments during the spring, had boycotted the vote, too.
Others, she said, including family members, voted for a third party, and for the first time, even Trump himself.
The statistics back her word. Though much of the discussion of Trump's victory has focused on how he won several swing states, Haider points to the changes in voting patterns in New Jersey and neighbouring New York. Results show that there were historic gains for the Republicans in both states, the biggest in a generation.
The fear of Trump
Over the past year, Muslim and Arab Americans, along with young Americans of all backgrounds, watched as the Biden-Harris administration obfuscated and shielded Israel from its crimes in Gaza.
With the war in Gaza coinciding with a fraught race to the White House, many liberal commentators said Harris's inability to break with Biden's unconditional support for Israel would likely cost her the election.
But with the Democratic Party establishment deeply tied to the military industrial complex that allows Israel to annihilate the Palestinians, the liberal establishment doubles down on Trump as the more dangerous option, in an attempt to retain the Arab and American vote.
"What I think is it's important for people to know - especially young people - that as wrong as Biden and Harris are on this issue, Trump is even worse," Senator Bernie Sanders said just days before the election.
Now with Harris emphatically losing the election, several commentators have sought to pin the blame on the Muslim and Arab community.
But multiple polls show Gaza was part of an assemblage of several points of discontent with the Democratic Party, which led voters from many different communities, including white voters, to abandon them.
The discontent with the Democratic Party was felt especially amongst youth, with poll after poll showing their resentment on a variety of issues.
In a survey conducted by the University of Chicago, 57 percent of young adults said democracy is not working in the US today.
The same poll, released in October, found that 50 percent of young adults disapprove of the way the Biden-Harris administration was handling the war. This poll followed another earlier one in May which found views amongst young Americans growing increasingly unfavourable towards US militarism or Israel's war on Gaza.
Though its too early to tell how these shifting sentiments altered youth turnout at the election, observers and organisers say these certainly added to the volley of disaffection against the Democrats, especially given the manner in which students were treated over the spring.
'All Kamala had to do was pick up the phone'
At more than 100 colleges and universities, including Ivy Leagues, students who took action in demanding their institutions disclose and divest from weapons companies or from the Israeli state found themselves accused of antisemitism, harassed by administrators and slapped with suspensions.
Academics, too, who dared to speak out about Gaza were ceremoniously flung out the door, suspended or even fired from higher institutions of learning. It has also incensed Black Americans, too.
The Biden-Harris administration framed these pro-Palestinian protests as antisemitic, and released a strategy in May to quell these protests.
Students also saw how easily their campuses became extensions of the US and Israeli military state.
'This is a genocide and nothing less than a genocide'
- Nasser, Arab American who has lost 150 family members in Gaza
Surveillance increased, checkpoints were set up at entrances, riot police and undercover security drifted through campuses, and access became selective and privileged.
For many, the coming war on civil liberties and authoritarianism liberals say Trump will bring to the US on his return to the White House is already here.
"Liberals are losing their minds and blaming Muslim, Arab, and anti-genocide voters for the outcome. They refuse to take the responsibility. They have shown us who they really care about. And it’s not their constituents," Mariam Abu Tarboush, with American Muslims for Palestine (AMP-Detroit), told MEE.
"All Kamala had to do was pick up the phone and stop Israel from continuing its genocide against the Palestinians, and she would have won. Ronald Reagan did it. Instead of trying to win the Muslim/Arab vote she remained staunch in her support of white supremacy, apartheid, and genocide," Abu Tarboush said.
"They made their bed, now it’s time for them to lie in it. Maybe next time they will take us seriously," Abu Tarboush added.
'This is a genocide and nothing less'
Nasser from Union, New Jersey, who previously told MEE that more than 150 members of his family were killed in Gaza, said he was shocked by the way people are responding to Trump's re-election.
Nasser, who asked to be identified by his first name only, said that Americans "were worried about protecting their democracy and freedoms" while his family in Gaza - including women and children - were being exterminated with American blessings.
Since he last spoke to MEE, a further five members of his family, located at the Jabalia refugee camp, were killed by Israeli strikes. These fatalities included two children, aged eight and 12. Earlier in October, his cousin's daughter, a 26-year-old nurse, became the sixth family member to be picked up by the Israeli army and taken prisoner. They haven't heard from her since.
"This is a genocide and nothing less than a genocide. And these people are giving them the green light to do it," Nasser said.
It's stories like these that prompts Sara Abdelaziz, a student from New York City, to ridicule the liberals torn by the election result.
The 21-year-old said she had found that many liberals seemed to think it was perfectly legitimate to frame Trump as a danger to "women's rights" in the US as a key election issue while simultaneously accepting that Palestinian women were undergoing C-sections without anaesthesia in makeshift tents in bombed-out refugee camps as not specifically relevant to the Harris campaign.
"Liberals jump for 'women's rights' but refuse to listen to the voices of Palestinian women who suffer under the occupation. The fight for women’s rights cannot be selective or limited to convenient narratives," Abdelaziz, who also boycotted the vote, told MEE.
"Arabs, Muslims and pro-Palestinian communities understand full heartedly that these politicians and elections will never offer us liberation," the 21-year-old Abdulaziz said.
Abdulaziz, like many others, said anyone who has experienced the brunt of US foreign policy understood the struggle for justice and equality was not hinged on one political candidate.
"For the liberal progressives, if you’re upset about an election loss but not a genocide, you need to check your beliefs."
The red wave in New Jersey and New York
Like Abdelaziz, several others, including those who have campaigned for candidates in Congressional races in New York, told MEE that they had refused to participate in the elections.
Data shows that while Harris managed to easily trounce Trump in New York City, Trump managed to gain around one-third of the vote. This represents a major jump from 2016 and 2020 when he managed to secure 23 percent and 18 percent, respectively.
In other places, the results showed a wider rift.
A short drive away from Manhattan, in Passaic County in New Jersey, the liberal elite woke up to find that a long-time Democratic Party stronghold had switched to Trump.
Palestinian organisers in Paterson, known as "Little Ramallah" for its large Palestinian-American community, told MEE that several voters in Passaic county appeared to have cast their lot with Trump, the Green Party, or just avoided the vote altogether.
Results show that Trump has managed to close the gap with Democrats across all of New Jersey - the closest it has been since 1992. Observers say the state might actually be considered a swing state come 2028.
Understanding how Trump managed to do so will be a topic of discussion and debate for months and years to come.
But most organisers and activists tend to agree that any analysis that considers the administration's failure on Gaza, the rising cost of living, and Harris's overall inability to inspire any confidence to Americans, wouldn't be far off the mark.
Voters also pointed to how it took Harris months to do an interview with the media. And when she finally did, and when voters searched for a sign she would address questions irking the American electorate, she struggled to provide any answers.
Haider, from Newark, said Trump appeared to lean into these chasms, especially on questions over the economy, which Harris appeared hesitant to tackle head on. She says Trump's campaign also understood the rhetorical power of talking about the war in Gaza to the discerning voter.
The New York Times reported in late October that "undecided voters in swing states were about six times as likely as other swing-state voters to be motivated by the war in Gaza".
'This is a failure of the Democratic Party'
Haliema Twam, civic engagement and advocacy manager at Palestinian American Community Center (PACC) in Clifton, located in Passaic County, said the Harris campaign made little attempt to assuage the deep concerns and hurt of the Muslim and Arab-American community when it came to the crisis in Gaza.
"The staffers who work on political campaigns know more than the general public about political issues. They know about Palestine. They just didn't think it was an issue that would matter to Americans," Twam told MEE.
"And they took the approach that Palestine was never going to overshadow guns, or climate, or criminal justice reform, but as we saw in this election, it completely overshadowed those issues, even if they are not admitting it, and if they clearly lost in the areas that got them the vote in the first place.
'[Democrats] took the approach that Palestine was never going to overshadow guns, or climate, or criminal justice reform, but as we saw in this election, it completely overshadowed those issues'
- Haliema Twam, PACC
Twam said that in Michigan and Pennsylvania, the Democrats had amassed Muslim support over the years because of Trump's Muslim ban, and because he moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. But the support has since devolved.
While Muslims were being beaten by delegates at the Democratic National Convention, and refusing to have a Palestinian-American elected official address the convention with an innocuous speech, and later thrown out from Harris campaign rallies, Trump was meeting imams and community leaders.
Add in the Republican Party's fear-mongering over the Democrats' effort to keep LGBTQ issues at the forefront of political discourse in lieu of economic concerns or the massive spending in foreign wars, and older Arab-American and Muslim voters also concerned with "traditional family values" were willing to take a chance with Trump.
"This is a failure of the Democratic Party overall. It's been a building up of failure over time," Twam said, adding that while no one was expecting a second Trump presidency to be a cakewalk, and few anticipating that his outreach was anything but political opportunism, it did offer a moment of pause and temporary relief.
"I think people figured out that things are not going to be a whole lot more worse than what we are already experiencing," Twam said.
Haider agrees. She says that if liberals see this as the end of American democracy and want to mourn it, that's their prerogative.
"But it is not an equivalent tragedy to what has happened in Palestine," Haider said.
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