By heeding the siren song of third-party candidates or staying home on Election Day, Arab and Muslim Americans would be repeating a historic blunder.
In 2000, we were angry and alienated. Sanctions and bombing against Iraq, and the use of “secret evidence” to deport Arab immigrants, marred Bill Clinton’s presidency. But then as now, Palestinian suffering especially inflamed us.
At the Camp David Summit in July 2000, Clinton failed to secure an agreement realizing the goal of Palestinian statehood implicit in the 1993 Oslo accords. Worse, by Election Day that year, the second intifada against Israeli occupation was well underway, causing overwhelming and disproportionate Palestinian civilian casualties.
Anger is blinding many to the overwhelming dangers posed by former President Donald Trump.
Many Arab and Muslim Americans expressed their discontent with the Clinton administration, which they had once strongly supported, by abandoning its vice president, Al Gore, who ran as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2000. Some, especially in the American Muslim community, voted for George W. Bush, who condemned secret evidence. Others stayed home. And many liberals such as myself voted for Ralph Nader, an Arab American icon. Our defections from the Democrats were misguided: Al Gore lost one of the closest elections in U.S. history, and the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq was a direct consequence.
Today, opposition in my community to Vice President Kamala Harris stems mainly from the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s brutal war of vengeance in Gaza. Anger is blinding many to the overwhelming dangers posed by former President Donald Trump, and to the fact that Harris would govern better — or at least not as harmfully — on every issue we care about most.
Unable to stomach either candidate, many Arab Americans may stay home or vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein — choices that could potentially sway the result, particularly in the state of Michigan. But anything other than a vote for Harris will be, in effect, a vote for Trump. There are over 300,000 Arab Americans in Michigan. President Joe Biden won there in 2020 by about half that, just over 150,000 votes. Arab and Muslim Americans will also be a significant factor in Pennsylvania, Georgia and elsewhere. With the election so close, every voter and nonvoter will most likely contribute to the outcome.
Many in our community have the same concerns as a quarter century ago. We don’t want to be taken for granted. We want to “punish” Democrats’ excessive support for Israel and register dissent about U.S. complicity in Palestinian suffering. We want a better Middle East policy. We want to cast a vote we can live with.
I said all that in 2000 and embraced the folly of voting for Nader. I still sympathize with the impulse today. But a Trump victory probably won’t teach the Democrats a lesson about taking the community for granted or the dangers of excessive support for Israel. Instead, it will almost certainly constitute another devastating self-inflicted blow against our own interests and priorities.
There isn’t a single major issue for us on which Harris’ stated positions aren’t markedly preferable. Take immigration: One of Trump’s first steps after his inauguration in 2017 was his “Muslim ban,” prohibiting entry into the United States by nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries. While that hideously discriminatory policy was reversed by Biden, Trump vows to reinstate it. Syrian, Yemeni, Sudanese and Afghan immigrants are likely to lose their temporary protected status or “humanitarian parole” and face Trump’s promised “bloody” mass deportations.
Trump’s deeply held and draconian attitudes toward law enforcement and civil liberties also bode extremely poorly for us.
A major Trump-inspired threat to Arab and Muslim American civil liberties is already underway. Republicans are pursuing legislation to punish universities that don’t sufficiently silence pro-Palestinian protests by stripping them of federal support and, eventually, even accreditation. Trump reportedly told donors, according to The Washington Post, that he would deport pro-Palestinian protesters, who he said were part of a “radical revolution” that has to be “stopped now.” He reportedly promised that if re-elected, he would “set that movement back 25 or 30 years.”
The Biden administration’s policies on Gaza have been indefensible. But Harris has been the most outspoken senior official about the need for a cease-fire and the suffering of Palestinian civilians. And she has been categorical about the necessity of establishing a Palestinian state, which would help pave the path for an end to Israel’s occupation. Trump, by contrast, has expressed only doubt about the practicality of Palestinian statehood and actively worked to prevent it as president. In January 2020, he issued a “peace plan” that invited Israel to annex an additional 30% of the occupied West Bank, including the Jordan Valley, which would leave any Palestinian entity entirely surrounded by a greater Israel. Trump moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognized Israel’s sovereignty in that city and approved Israel’s annexation of the occupied Golan Heights from Syria. For all their faults, it’s impossible to imagine Harris or Biden doing any of that. And any notion that Trump would have been more sympathetic to Palestinians, or restraining of Israel, after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks or the subsequent Gaza war can only reflect a serious misunderstanding of his basic attitudes. This is a man who has repeatedly deployed the word “Palestinian” as if it were a damning slur against his opponents. Although the U.S. census historically and currently designates people with origins in the Middle East and North Africa, along with Europe, as “white,” Trump and his MAGA movement don’t pretend to consider us “real Americans,” at least not the ones they purport to represent. To them, we are the “enemy within.” The idea that things couldn’t get worse is remarkably naïve. They certainly could, especially for Palestinians. And helping to re-elect — even through inaction — a president who is on record endorsing Israeli annexation of much of the remaining West Bank would be a major step in that direction. Anger, however justified, is not a political strategy. Arab and Muslim Americans need to face the stark reality that, like everyone, we have a binary choice on Nov. 5. There is an understandable desire to demonstrate our outrage by withholding support from Harris, but, however emotionally satisfying, that would come at the expense of our clear shared interests, including securing Palestinian rights. An experiment in American fascism, which is Trump’s undisguised agenda, cannot be a reasonable corrective to any grievance — not even the unspeakable carnage in Gaza. Arab and Muslim Americans must vote with our heads, not our hearts, and help elect the imperfect but demonstrably and clearly preferable Kamala Harris.
Hussein Ibish
Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. 
