Carlos Osorio/AP Photo
People protest Israel’s war on Gaza, February 8, 2024, in Dearborn, Michigan.
DEARBORN, MICHIGAN – When I met Abbas Alawieh for coffee in Dearborn, it was day 128 of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. The night before we spoke, while he slept, he had a nightmare.
Earlier that day, news had broken of Israel’s horrifying murder of a six-year-old Palestinian girl named Hind Rajab, her family, and the Red Crescent workers sent to rescue her. The rescuers had approval from the Israel Defense Forces, which means someone higher up in the IDF also approved their execution. Hind’s last moments were spent pleading for help inside a car full of her dead relatives. “I’m so scared, please come,” she told the dispatchers.
In his nightmare, Alawieh tries to rescue Rajab, but is killed in the attempt. “I woke up screaming from it,” he says.
Alawieh explains to me that he isn’t sharing the story to draw sympathy. He’s simply placing a magnifying glass on a terrifyingly common experience. People all across Michigan, living in Arab and Muslim American communities with deep ties to the Middle East, are having their own version of that nightmare, terror-stricken by the fate of so many civilians and loved ones whose bodies have been torn to pieces by U.S.-made bombs.
Since Hamas’s deadly sweep into southern Israel that left 1,139 people dead, including 695 Israeli civilians and 373 security forces, Israel has been on a rampage. Conservative estimates put the Palestinian death toll close to 30,000, though thousands remain trapped and likely crushed under building rubble. The denial of food and other necessities into Gaza, the destruction of nearly every residential building, hospital, and university, and the indiscriminate bombing of civilians can all be credibly described as war crimes, not to mention violations of U.S. law governing the use of foreign aid.
Activist pleas for peace and an end to Israeli occupation and apartheid have fallen on deaf ears inside the administration. So anti-war Michiganders are turning to one remaining point of leverage: the February 27th presidential primary.
For three years, Alawieh served as chief of staff to Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) and helped draft her Gaza cease-fire resolution, the first one offered in Congress. Today, he’s back home in Dearborn, as an adviser to the Listen to Michigan campaign, which he explains is “urging voters here to check the uncommitted box” in the primary, “as a message to Joe Biden that you can count us out for his seemingly unlimited support for [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s genocidal war.”
The idea is to pressure Biden toward endorsing a cease-fire and reconsideration of U.S. funding for the Israeli military by focusing on what the president appears to value most: his own political fortunes. If the grassroots campaign can get enough voters to snub Biden in Michigan, a must-win swing state in November, then maybe they can persuade him to use America’s enormous influence as Israel’s main military and diplomatic sponsor to stop the annihilation campaign.
Listen to Michigan believes they are asking Biden to do both the morally right and the politically popular thing. Local and national polls show that nearly 70 percent of the public, and 80 percent of Democrats, favor a cease-fire. A new poll from a research outfit from Dearborn finds that even majorities of Jewish Democrats support a cease-fire.
For a community still processing the trauma of the war, the campaign is noteworthy for its clear-eyed deployment of an almost transactional politics. Voters are channeling their electoral power toward a desired policy outcome, and the operation whose job it is to get Biden re-elected has to bear the burden of earning their support, not with words but with actions.
“This is a protest vote to show Biden and all the other people in power that we aren’t OK … funding these atrocities with our tax money,” says Ahmed Ghanim, a medical worker and co-founder of Metro Detroit Political Action Network. “This is a very peaceful and civil way to voice our concerns, because Biden can stop this war.”
IN UNDER TWO WEEKS, THE UNCOMMITTED EFFORT has experienced some important successes, leveraging an option that has been available on Michigan presidential primary ballots for many years. Listen to Michigan has picked up support from over 30 elected officials in Michigan, including Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who was able to take his city’s mushrooming sense of betrayal to the New York Times op-ed pages this week. Hammoud argued that it’s not too late for Biden and the Democrats to “choose the salvation of our democracy over aiding and abetting Mr. Netanyahu’s war crimes.”
More support for Listen to Michigan has come from Our Revolution, the campaign organization founded by Bernie Sanders, which is urging its 87,000 Michigan members to vote “uncommitted.” The Detroit Metro Times has endorsed an uncommitted vote. Listen to Michigan has also placed a six-figure mail and digital ad buy for the week leading up to Election Day, including a testimonial from a Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq.
In a recent video posted to X, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib officially gave her support, arguing that it’s “important to create a voting bloc, something that is a bullhorn to say enough is enough.” (Tlaib’s sister Layla Elabed is Listen to Michigan’s campaign manager.) Former Michigan Rep. Andy Levin, part of one of Michigan’s most prominent political families, is offering similar support to the campaign. “I am working with some people who feel like they will never vote for Joe Biden, but there are many, many, many I feel will vote for Joe Biden on Nov. 5 if he changes course,” Levin told The New York Times. “This is the best way I can help Joe Biden.”
Levin was himself a casualty of an AIPAC-led campaign to deny him re-election in 2022. Now he is working alongside his former colleague Tlaib to send a message about the tragedy in Gaza that threatens Biden’s second term and his legacy, along with millions of Palestinian lives.
For a community still processing the trauma of the war, the campaign is noteworthy for its clear-eyed deployment of an almost transactional politics.
In one sense, the movement is working. Biden’s allies have been blitzing Michigan from every angle. In the last two weeks, both the campaign and White House sent emissaries to Dearborn to try to smooth things over. These efforts both face-planted spectacularly.
But in another sense, organizers know they still face an uphill climb to turn a community’s anger and passion into actual protest votes, and to turn those votes into action from a reluctant chief executive, who has shown no inclination to abandon his position on the war.
Two weeks ago, Biden told reporters that the response from Israel has been “over the top,” which is a remarkable way to describe the mass murder of 30,000 people. The president has also reportedly been calling Netanyahu an “asshole” in private, as if the U.S. was an innocent bystander.
“You’re not acting like there’s a genocide going on that you’re funding,” Alawieh says, reflecting on his message in the meeting with White House officials. Instead, they suggested that the U.S. might “someday help with some rebuilding.”
“I wanted to scream, I did scream in that meeting,” he adds. “You know, this is an ongoing trauma that you’re inflicting. And you’re trying to engage with us as if it’s just another policy idea that may make our lives a little bit more convenient or a little bit less convenient. But this is a matter of life and death for people like us.”
I ask Alawieh if he could pinpoint when it became clear that cease-fire supporters would need to escalate their dissent. But instead of a single moment, he describes months of loud and repeated cries going unanswered.
In the aftermath of October 7, it became clear that “even saying that the killing should stop was unacceptable,” Alawieh says. Biden pledged unconditional support for Israel right out the gate. Within days, the White House press secretary called cease-fire demands “repugnant” and “disgraceful.” And at crucial moments in the early days, the White House neglected talk of annihilation from top Israeli officials while the president cast doubt on Palestinian death tolls. Alawieh says that this “signaled that what was to come wasn’t the usual massacre,” but something “potentially genocidal.”
With local and global opinion in their favor, organizers spent the first four months of Israel’s assault staging protests, making phone calls, and shutting down traffic across the country and around the globe, demanding that Biden use his power to end the killing, just as he did during Israel’s deadly 2021 assault. Biden ignored every plea.
Ghanim got involved in the Listen to Michigan campaign because he “was surprised how elected officials” at every level “don’t listen to their constituents.” His own congresswoman, Democrat Haley Stevens, who defeated Levin in that 2022 election, and the state’s two senators, Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow, “never responded to us on the cease-fire resolution,” Ghanim said.
Realizing that old-fashioned protest wasn’t enough, organizers needed a new approach that would make Biden rethink the math. They would need to make the administration’s foreign policy a political liability.
Robin Buckson/Detroit News via AP
Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud on election night, Tuesday, November 2, 2021
WHAT BETTER PLACE TO BEGIN THAN DEARBORN, MICHIGAN, home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the U.S.? Detroit’s neighbor to the west was key to Biden’s 2020 victory, when voters mobilized impressively for the then former vice president. Biden won the city 74-24 on his way to beating Donald Trump by just 154,000 votes statewide. But Trump narrowly won the state in 2016, and there’s no reason to think he can’t do it again.
Recent surveys now show Arab American support for Biden falling off a cliff, dropping from 59 percent to a shockingly low 17 percent. Biden will likely need to win Wayne County, which includes Detroit and Dearborn, by a wide margin in November to have any shot of holding Michigan. A recent poll now shows Trump leading Biden in Michigan 45-41, with Biden’s support for Israel diminishing Biden’s support with Arab, Muslim, and younger voters.
“We did this because no presidential candidate has earned our vote,” Dearborn Mayor Hammoud recently told Middle East Eye. “If [Biden] continues this course, he will be remembered for sacrificing American democracy in 2024.”
Listen to Michigan isn’t manufacturing Biden-nauseated voters out of thin air. He was already tanking with those voters due to his support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza. But instead of scattering their fury to the wind, Listen to Michigan is turning all that resentment into a single organized fist that has a fighting chance of dragging U.S. policy back from the brink of moral degeneracy.
As Ghanim notes, the pro-cease-fire movement is giving both Israel and the U.S. a real path to peace and security. “We see this as the only way to attain peace and free the hostages to go back to their homes in Israel,” he says. “This is the only way to save the children in Gaza.”
Ghanim also draws a connection between extravagant war funding and the fate of Palestine with places like Detroit and Flint, echoing a long tradition of Black and Palestinian solidarity.
“You see the people here in Detroit and other cities, they are suffering,” Ghanim says. “They take money from working moms and hardworking people in Detroit and Flint and send it to Israel … Warmongers and defense contractors buy bigger yachts for their families while they are carpet-bombing children.”
LAST WEEK, MICHIGAN GOVERNOR AND BIDEN SURROGATE Gretchen Whitmer took the time to “encourage people not to lose sight” of what’s at stake, stressing that “a potential second term for the former president [Trump] would be very hard on all the communities that are still being impacted by what’s happening overseas.”
This has become the company line for Biden loyalists. Funnily enough, Listen to Michigan agrees. But they throw it in reverse: Why does Biden keep doing things that make Trump winning more likely?
“[Biden] is on track to deliver Trump the presidency because he’s alienated a group of people here in Michigan and he’s doing nothing to win back their support,” Alawieh says, adding that the president “has created a political problem that threatens to lose Arab and Muslim Americans, many young voters, and others, potentially for a generation to come.”
In a sensible world, the threat of losing the election would spark honest self-reflection among Democratic Party elites. We do not live in that world, at least not yet. Biden and his team continue to suggest that they just have a messaging problem with pro-cease-fire voters, and that those voters just need to be persuaded to act rationally. But holding their nose for Biden is only rational if you think the universe is fixed and unchanging, and people cannot alter events.
Listen to Michigan’s very rational strategy understands that voters disgusted with Biden are unlikely to be moved by the fear of Trump in the distance when the current president is picking up the tab for genocide.
“There is no number of TV ads that will convince my friend whose family is trapped in Gaza right now” to vote for Biden, Alawieh says. But, he adds, that might change “if Biden were to take a radically different approach than the one he’s taken.”
Listen to Michigan argues that campaigns have one job: to give people a compelling reason to vote for them. The Biden campaign is failing this task among their community of voters, despite having an entire machinery devoted to it.
“The Democratic Party is lucky that we’re mobilizing voters towards a specific policy end that they could satisfy,” Alawieh says. “They could come out for a cease-fire, they could come out and place basic conditions on military funding.”
