While Americans voted in their next president on Tuesday, the message to us Palestinians remained as clear as ever: America’s promises of freedom and justice don’t include us. But the election does have an outsize stake in our safety and survival.
For my family and millions of Palestinians, this moment is all too familiar: the fear, the helplessness, the resigned certainty that nothing ever really changes.
And still it hurts, because the stakes in this election couldn’t be more personal. For us, the election of Donald Trump isn’t just a blip on the political radar or a shift in foreign policy. It’s a challenge to sustain existence while the world seems intent on erasing us. It’s about surviving 77 years under occupation and over a year of ongoing genocide — the very genocide I barely survived last December, when my family and I, including my elderly parents and 3-year-old son, were buried under the rubble of what was once our home after it was struck by an Israeli-fired, U.S.-made missile.
The trauma of that night, in both its physical and emotional toll, of my son’s small, fragile hand clinging to mine, comes back to me now as Trump prepares to take power once more.
The date: Dec. 7, 2023. Our bones were crushed beneath layers of concrete and twisted metal as we spent hours in the dark, buried together and praying to be pulled out in one piece. The trauma of that night, in both its physical and emotional toll, of my son’s small, fragile hand clinging to mine, comes back to me now as Trump prepares to take power once more.
After surviving the strike and escaping the war, my son stopped asking when we could go home. He’s learned that “home” is just something we remember, something that crumbled with our walls that night. At 3 years old — or, per the language of Gaza, two wars old — he already knows to duck when he hears a rumble overhead, instinctively reaching for my hand.
Our suffering in light of this election isn’t some ambiguous concept. Every missile that reduces our homes to rubble, every sanction that chokes our economy, traces back to Washington. Policies that might seem like distant concerns of foreign affairs to many Americans have left millions of Palestinians trapped in unending trauma, where survival itself has become our only form of resistance.
The Palestinian people have spent generations waiting for an American president who would care enough to hold Israel accountable — to see our humanity and put an end to this constant brutality.
I’ve seen how American political leaders toy with the idea of change, how they dress up their campaigns with grand ideas about peace and justice. Yet each president brushes off our reality. Barack Obama promised hope and “change we could believe in,” yet we got more bombs. Joe Biden offered a different approach, pledging unyielding support for Israel, leaving us to live through even more horror. Vice President Kamala Harris’ niceties included no concrete promises to protect Palestinians, but she did pledge to continue financial support for Israel. And Trump’s bluntness, as he promises to come back swinging, reminds us not to hold out hope for change.
For decades, bipartisan U.S. policies have reinforced Israel’s impunity, from unconditional military aid packages to diplomatic shielding at the United Nations, allowing the erosion of Palestinian rights to go unchallenged. Trump’s brazen support for Israel isn’t a deviation but a natural progression of a legacy in which U.S. presidents have continually prioritized geopolitical alliances over Palestinian lives.
But Trump’s comeback — and the Democratic Party’s own failure to champion any real justice for us — unveils a stark truth: America’s entrenched political system is built upon the erasure of our suffering. Every administration carries the same legacy of apathy, emboldening Israel’s destructive agenda and casting aside our pleas. It’s a bipartisan moral failure that reduces our lives to collateral damage, sacrificed to preserve strategic alliances. This isn’t about just one election or one president. It’s a policy anchored in decades of American complicity in our oppression.
America’s unwavering support for Israel reveals a deeper collapse of the ideals the country claims to stand for. Principles like freedom and justice now barely flicker, distorted into tools of control, hollowed out by years of hypocrisy. When those ideals ring hollow for people like us — oppressed and silenced — the democratic values America champions feel like just another weapon turned against us.








