The Gaza Cease-Fire Movement Faces A Big Test In Michigan

In public comments and ominous polls, the warning signs abound: President Joe Biden’s support for the Israeli invasion of Gaza has cost him deeply among Arab Americans, a critical constituency in Michigan. Given Michigan’s importance as a key swing state, that attrition alone could cost Biden the election.

But with Biden likely to face former President Donald Trump, an Islamophobe, in the general election, Democratic partisans are wondering whether Arab Americans and their progressive allies are really prepared to withhold their votes in protest of Biden’s Israel-Palestine policy.

Community leaders in metropolitan Detroit, including the Arab-American mecca of Dearborn, insist that they are dead serious. Tuesday’s Democratic presidential primary in the Great Lakes State gives these pro-Palestine activists their first chance to prove it.

After considerable deliberation over the best way to make their voices heard, Michigan-based critics of Biden’s unconditional support for Israel settled on a campaign to get people to fill in the “uncommitted” box on the Democratic primary ballot, a unique feature of the midwestern state’s elections.

The Listen to Michigan initiative, a political nonprofit that sprung up earlier this month to spearhead the project, has outlined a goal of exceeding 10,000 “uncommitted” votes — the margin that allowed Trump to carry the state against Hillary Clinton in 2016. (Biden, however, beat Trump by more than 150,000 votes in 2020.)

“We protested. We demonstrated. We wrote to our representatives. We’ve called our representatives. We posted on our social media about this issue in order to hopefully get a permanent cease-fire. We haven’t had that yet,” said Layla Elabed, campaign manager for Listen to