The War in Gaza Turned This Longtime Michigan Democrat Against Biden

Tucked down in Terry Ahwal’s basement is her personal wall of fame: Here she is at the Obama White House Christmas party. Here is a framed thank-you note from President Bill Clinton. There she is grinning alongside Jennifer Granholm, the former governor of Michigan.

President Biden, Ms. Ahwal says, will not appear on her wall.

After a lifetime of work in Democratic politics — running local campaigns, asking strangers for money, begging acquaintances to vote for candidates — she is now campaigning against the Democrat in the White House.

A Palestinian American who emigrated from the West Bank more than 50 years ago, Ms. Ahwal is furious over the president’s alliance with Israel in its war against Hamas that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. She does not even have a better candidate in mind, but she vows there is nothing Mr. Biden can do to get her back now.

“You want my vote? You cannot kill my people in my name. As simple as that,” she said recently, sitting at the dining room table of her home in Farmington Hills, a Detroit suburb. Photographs of her travels to Jordan, Peru and the Great Lakes decorate her walls. “Everything Israel wants, they get.”

Such promises to punish Mr. Biden in November have the power to reshape American politics — if they hold. Michigan is home to 200,000 Arab Americans, and other crucial battlegrounds have smaller, but sizable populations. While there are no firm estimates of how many are registered voters, even modest numbers of defection from Democrats could spell trouble for the president’s re-election campaign. Mr. Biden won Michigan by 154,000 voters in 2020. Donald J. Trump won the state in 2016 by 10,700.

There is no shortage of fury and disappointment directed at Mr. Biden in and around Detroit, where Palestinian Americans often display maps of pre-1948 Palestine and keys to family homes seized or abandoned during the Israeli war of independence. Ms. Ahwal regularly wears a pendant in the shape of the contested land, with a line from a Palestinian poet: “This earth is something worth living for.”

In dozens of recent interviews in the Detroit area, Arab Americans described being consumed by the war, endlessly scrolling social media for the latest images of the aftermath of the bombings, which began after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7. In conversations in mosques and coffee shops, there was nearly unanimous agreement that Mr. Biden and his support for Israel’s right-wing government have enabled the devastation. Most shared Ms. Ahwal’s stance against voting for Mr. Biden.

Ms. Ahwal has spent hours calling and texting friends to urge them to vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary on Tuesday, to register their discontent. She said she had heard almost no resistance, although there is no reliable polling indicating how big the protest vote may be.

But the more consequential question is about November. Like Ms. Ahwal, few of those vowing to reject Mr. Biden know for sure whether they will sit out the election, vote for a third-party candidate or support Mr. Trump, now the all-but-certain Republican nominee.

Ms. Ahwal says she is under no illusions that Mr. Trump, who was even more closely aligned with Israel during his tenure, would push for a cease-fire or be more supportive of Palestinians. She knows that many voters outside the Arab American community think that she and other Biden objectors are spiting themselves, increasing the chance that the same president who banned millions of Muslims from traveling to the U.S. will return to the White House.

“The other person is not going to be any better,” she said, refusing to say Mr. Trump’s name.

Still, after long urging fellow activists to “work from within,” Ms. Ahwal believes that strategy has failed. Petitions, marches and boycotts have produced little change in U.S. policy, she says, as both political parties have offered steadfast support for Israel. She is angry, not only about Israel, but also the iron grip the two parties have on the system. She is also cleareyed about the irony: She is fighting against the very political system she helped build up.

This is the only option she has, she said.

“Nothing is working,” she said. “If you are desperate, what would you do?”

A changed world

Ms. Ahwal had an immediate thought as news of Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians came in on Oct. 7: It would not be long before Israel took revenge.

As a young child in Ramallah, Ms. Ahwal, now 67, attended Catholic school and dreamed of becoming a nun. She often got into trouble for playing marbles with the boys or sullying her clothes as she climbed the walls in the neighborhood. She was too young to know or care much about politics.

That all changed in 1967, when Israeli forces crossed into the West Bank in response to a surprise attack. Her family huddled in a basement as reports of war trickled in on the radio. They waited for days to hear news from her father, who was stuck in Jerusalem, where he worked as a carpenter. The room reeked of urine; the children were instructed to wait to go outside.

The war lasted just six days, but changed life in the region profoundly.

“That’s what I call introduction to hell,” Ms. Ahwal said. Her parents and the nuns at the school discouraged her and other students from protesting, but after witnessing shootings and beatings, Ms. Ahwal rebelled.

She mouthed off to soldiers, perhaps getting away with it because she was a girl or because she is Christian, less likely to be seen as a threat. By the time she was 16, her worried parents sent her to family living outside Detroit.

Even before she became a U.S. citizen in 1981, she began volunteering for Democrats. She worked for a Democratic county executive and volunteered with the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee. She poured energy into municipal projects as well as Palestinian rights. She wrote letters to Congress, debated Israeli politicians passing through Detroit and raised money for Palestinians.

She volunteered for the Clinton campaign, drawn to his policies on education rather than foreign policy. But in 1993, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, shook hands on the White House lawn as part of President Clinton’s peace negotiations, Ms. Ahwal was there, sharing their hope for a new era. Within months, her own optimism dissipated.

Scholars cite many factors for the demise of the agreement: Arafat’s failure to accept Israeli and American offers. Mr. Rabin’s assassination by two right-wing extremists in 1995. Steady growth of settlements in the West Bank. The second intifada followed by Hamas’s ascent to power. For Ms. Ahwal, the answer is simpler.

“It was just basically a process of delaying, a process of land theft, a process of deception,” she said, blaming the U.S. for not restraining Israel. “What happened is just the Palestinians were snookered.”

Frustration turns to ire

A self-described pacifist, Ms. Ahwal recoiled at Hamas’s attacks on civilians on Oct. 7. Still, she saw Palestinians in Gaza in an impossible position, reacting to decades of Israeli control. She viewed Mr. Biden’s embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, as a knee-jerk response that set the stage for many civilian deaths.

At the end of October, Ms. Ahwal went to Washington for a previously scheduled lobbying trip with Palestinian activists, urging staff members at the State Department and White House to call for a cease-fire.

“I kept saying he will self-correct — the policymakers will change,” she said.

By Thanksgiving, when little had changed, she felt certain: She could no longer vote for Mr. Biden. She saw no other way to force her party to break from decades of foreign policy.

In 2020, Ms. Ahwal had spent hours urging her friends and neighbors to vote for Mr. Biden — the alternative was too frightening to consider. They had already lived through the travel ban, the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv and the Trump administration’s tacit encouragement of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Mr. Biden’s tenure had not brought meaningful change, but it was no worse, she thought — until Oct. 7. Now, in addition to the roughly 1,200 Israelis kidnapped or killed on that day, there are more than 29,000 people dead in Gaza. Whole neighborhoods have been flattened. Settler violence in the West Bank has only grown.

She now calls the president a hypocrite. Like some Arab American leaders in the Detroit area, she rebuffed recent offers for meetings with White House officials. When she thinks back to decades of promises of peace and calls for a two-state solution, she offers a grim assessment: “I just don’t buy it anymore.”

Mr. Biden has recently sought to assuage this discontent. Last week, the administration declared that the United States would once again consider new Jewish settlements on the West Bank to be “inconsistent with international law.”

But that doesn’t get close to the policies Ms. Ahwal says could change her mind: labeling Israel an apartheid state, freezing military aid, supporting a peace initiative led by Palestinians. Only the last move seems even remotely likely.

Ms. Ahwal knows her political calculus is fraught. She understands that withholding a vote for Mr. Biden is effectively helping Mr. Trump.

She has debated her vote with her husband, Bob Morris, 72, the son of a longtime United Auto Workers union leader. Mr. Morris’s father was Jewish, but he was raised Christian and shares his wife’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Still, he said he was likely to vote for Mr. Biden this fall.

Why? He answers with two words: “Donald Trump.”

“I am very concerned about our democracy,” Mr. Morris said.

But, like so many other Palestinian activists she knows, Ms. Ahwal has come to see little difference between Republicans and Democrats on what she sees as a moral crisis.

She is asked if she is willing to risk a Trump victory over the conflict.

She answers with a different question: Are Democrats willing to risk losing the presidency over their support for Israel?

Asthaa Chaturvedi contributed reporting from Detroit.