Arab Americans are facing vicious pushback for refusing to abandon Palestine, but people interested in a better world should follow our lead instead of mourning the neoliberal order.
Originally published in Steven Salaita.
The depth and scope of racism now directed at Arab Americans is staggering. Many liberals are looking for somebody to blame for Kamala Harris’s dismal showing in the recent election and have found the perfect scapegoat in Arab Americans (along with Muslim Americans more broadly, anti-Zionists of all backgrounds, and, unbelievably, the Palestinians currently suffering a genocide).
It’s empirically untrue that Arab Americans cost Harris the election, but that’s not what I want to focus on here. There’s no need to rationalize the community’s voting choices (to the extent that they can even be understood) using the same common sense that led us into this mess in the first place. Electoral common sense has precisely zero benefit to anybody serious about improving the world. We don’t need to appease liberal angst or plead for liberal approval according to the parameters they impose upon us. Our aim, however distant or far-fetched it may seem, is to vanquish rather than accommodate oppression—the aim, in other words, is to win. The American liberal is a natural-born loser.
(To put it more bluntly: even if Arab Americans were responsible for Harris’s loss, we still would have nothing to apologize for.)
So a lot of liberals are mad at us. Let them stay that way. Nothing we say will assuage their anger, no matter how gentle or reassuring or contrite the message. Their tranquility is beyond our power. Anyway, it’s critical in this moment to brush aside their petulance and reaffirm the value of Palestinian life and the dignity of all oppressed people around the world.
It’s easy to lose sight of the basics in all the hullaballoo, as we defend ourselves, as we ward off shame, as we fight for acceptance, as we grieve, but the first (and only) point to remember is that the current administration, the one we were supposed to vote for as an act of humanity, is overseeing a genocide. There’s nothing controversial about that genocide, either. We have reams of video evidence. We have on-the-ground reporting. We have direct testimony. We have legal rulings. We have expert analysis.
And yet we also had repeated assurances from Kamala Harris that she intended to continue (and expand) this incomprehensible brutality.
You don’t vote for genocide. Ever. No matter what else is happening in the election. It’s a timeless principle. That liberals (and no small number of self-identified leftists) rejected the principle speaks poorly of their intellect and imagination. They’re both the product and progenitor of a rotten political culture and it’s a waste of time trying to nudge them away from the messianic certainty that a procession of lesser evils can gradually unearth a decent government. No country imprints this kind of exceptionalism onto people more effectively than the United States.
But…
What about reproductive rights? What about education? What about the well-being of transgender people? Black people? Immigrants? The working class? These things are all deeply important. Turning to the Democrats as a vehicle for positive change, or as a more pliable oppositional force, isn’t a realistic option. It is a strategy without evidence. Nor is the strategy convincing. Too many people have pegged Democratic campaigners, from centrists to progressives, as purveyors of empty rhetoric and the Party itself as a billion-dollar syndicate in which donor money ends up circulating among the same insider networks.
We have to keep connecting the well-being of life across the globe to that of the communities treated as expendable inside the United States. Abandoning Palestinians to genocide for lower prices at Safeway is a grotesque calculation, all the more so because it won’t actually decrease the cost of groceries. All capitalist parties, domestic and international, are enemies of the downtrodden. There is no such thing as a more compassionate ruling class.
U.S. society is so in love with the idea of elections as self-empowerment that its elite has most people believing that justice is finite, a commodity limited to select groups who earn it through obedience. The elite want us to think that justice is finite because they have none to offer. The finitude of justice corresponds to a scarcity of resources for which we must struggle while those elites live in abundance.
The upshot, manifested through electoralism, is a set of impossible choices. Why should we have to choose between abortion access and imperialism? Why does inflation need to be mitigated through the blood of Arabs? Why must a decent judicial system be contingent on genocide? Anybody accepting this logic has been duped into fighting the wrong enemy.
To the Arab Americans Who Abandoned Harris:
You did the right thing—morally and strategically. Tune out anybody who berates you for refusing to endorse a genocidaire.
Moral questions aside, you didn’t merely repudiate Harris; you also honored the wishes of her campaign, which repudiated you. Harris and company made it clear that your support was unwelcome. Why else would members of her team proclaim that they can win the election without Arab Americans? Why else would they send notorious Zionist stooge Richie Torres as a surrogate to Michigan, home to Dearborn, the cultural hub of Arab America? Why else would they ignore, ridicule, or shout down anyone raising concern about Gaza? Why else would they kick Arabs and Muslims out of campaign events?
The Democratic Party all but told you to fuck off, so there’s no reason to plead a case to belligerent liberals.
Another reason not to plead a case is that in the liberal imagination you belong to a demography of undifferentiated brutes who exist only to expedite their fantasies of political salvation. Basically, they think you’re too stupid to make your own decisions. You don’t understand the nuances of genocide as they do, even when it’s your own family being slaughtered. You’re too fanatical to appreciate the complexities of power. You’re too moralistic for democracy.
At best you’re an occasionally-useful nuisance who must forever be subject to their guardianship. You have two roles in American society: 1) make life easier for liberals and 2) stay out of the way otherwise.
Liberals are way too gleeful when pointing out all the awful things conservatives have in mind for you, as if they’re fine with the awfulness so long as it won’t be attributed to them.
Liberals can tolerate you only when you behave: vote (as per their demands), show up for diversity photoshoots, ease up on the religion, and don’t make too much noise about Palestine. They see you as children to be marshalled into civic duty every few years according to their own convenience. The moment you reject their delusions of lesser evilism, even when the supposedly lesser evil is incinerating your kin and leading the world to the brink of catastrophe, they no longer feel obliged to maintain decorum. It’s now obvious that liberals were itching for an excuse to unleash a lot of deep-seated animosity. All it took was your principled rejection of genocide.
You did what everyone should do in response to brazen disrespect: tell the offending party to take a hike. Rather than being an occasion for rage and sanctimony, this rejection of the Democratic Party should be a model of resoluteness for all communities who suffer its treachery. Don’t buy the notion that a refusal to be insulted and mistreated will lead to negative consequences for other disempowered people. The negativity arises from the political culture that thought-leaders are determined to maintain.
Common wisdom teaches us to side with the more powerful party to any given conflict, but it’s well past time that people see what’s everywhere in front of them—all the bloodshed, all the poverty, all the prejudice, all the precarity, all the homelessness—and put the blame exactly where it belongs, with members of the ruling class irrespective of party affiliation. Only when we collectively refuse to condemn one another for problems from above will our mordant political culture begin to resemble something functional. Electoralism impedes this possibility.
An Opening for Something Better?
For most Arab American voters, the calculation was simple (and unimpeachable): Democrats are overseeing the Zionist genocide; therefore, they refused to vote Democrat.
It’s lamentable that some Arab Americans supported Trump, especially the opportunists touting themselves as “community leaders” who shared a stage with him in Dearborn. (The supposedly progressive candidate, Harris, refused to be seen with members of the same community.) Those who defected to Green Party candidate Jill Stein had the right idea, but she was never more than a cipher for discontent. Arab Americans, like everyone concerned with Palestine’s liberation, need something more substantive than hostile participation in a dead-end system.
The massive Democratic failure opens some radical possibilities that can only be developed outside the mythic parameters of U.S. democracy. If we can’t pursue radical possibilities now, after this disaster of an election in which deeply vulnerable people were viciously renounced by purported allies and defenders, then there’s nothing left to do but wait out the decline of our planet. These electoral spectacles aren’t the sign of a healthy political culture; they’re an ugly business that benefit nobody outside of a corrupt and hermetic ecosystem aggressively devoted to its own proliferation.
Everyone else, the great majority of people throughout the United States, ends up with a whole lot of disaffection. Republicans have proved somewhat capable of exploiting this disaffection—they’re certainly more capable than Democrats—but they have limited appeal to the ever-growing number of Americans on the periphery, whose impulse is to avoid the spectacle altogether. (The viewpoints of this enormous demographic are scarcely represented among the pundit classes.)
Ignoring professional activists, public intellectuals, sitting politicians, and would-be presidents isn’t simply a survival mechanism; it is an active statement that we deserve something better and are willing to create it ourselves. Let the technocrats swap business cards and donor money. Their main concern is and always will be the status quo. Their occasional fit of conscience is marketing, nothing more.
We can never lose sight of what brought us to this moment: bipartisan support of the century’s most hideous atrocities, which would have ended months ago without the constant supply of American weapons. There’s no coming back from what we’ve witnessed. The system that allowed it to happen, that encouraged it, must become a target of opposition.
We’ve known for a long time that electoralism is coercive, anesthetizing, and mendacious. Now we know that it’s genocidal, as well.
It’s not enough for Arab Americans to have rejected Kamala Harris, or for others to limit the scope of that rejection. In the end Harris was incidental. We rejected genocide. In turn, we rejected the material ramifications of American exceptionalism. The election is over. Now we have to realize the gravity of that decision.
Steven Salaita is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo.
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