View from Israel: “In scene unimaginable 4 years ago, Michigan Arabs bask in Trump win they helped clinch”

Photo: The Kuwait Times

Optimism and hookahs were bubbling in concert on Tuesday, the 5^th November, night at the Arab Americans for Trump election watch party in Dearborn, Michigan, as the major TV networks called one state after another for the former and soon-to-be future US president, writes ‘The Tines of Israel’.

It was a scene that was virtually unimaginable just four years ago, when Joe Biden won nearly 90 percent of the vote in the southern part of Dearborn, where a similarly overwhelming percentage of residents are Arab and Muslim.

But riding the community’s utter fury over the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of Israel’s war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza, Donald Trump managed to win a plurality of the vote in Dearborn — 47 percent to 28% for Vice President Kamala Harris, who only beat Green Party candidate Jill Stein by six percentage points, according to an NBC News projection.

But results across the country demonstrated that Harris’s problems extended much further than the Arab and Muslim communities, with more consequential drops in support identified among Black and Latino voters.

Nonetheless, the several dozen men still at the Lava Java hookah bar after 2 a.m. could not help feeling vindicated, as network analysts began pointing out that Michigan could be the state that officially puts Trump over the 270 electoral vote threshold. (Wisconsin was the one that ultimately put him over the edge.)

“For a long time, the issue of Palestine is what kept us with the Democrats, but after Gaza that is no longer the case,” said Ali, an attendee at the watch party who declined to share his last name.

“Moving a plaque from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem does not equal killing 43,000 people,” said Arab Americans for Trump national chairman Bishara Bahbah, dismissively describing Trump’s embassy move in comparison to the Hamas-run health ministry’s death toll from the Gaza war during Biden’s tenure.

The Biden administration has made repeated efforts to broker a ceasefire and regularly calls out Israel over the high civilian casualty count in Gaza, but progressive critics say the Democratic president’s refusal to lean harder on Jerusalem has allowed the war to drag on for 13 months. Biden officials counter that they can’t coax the parties into a ceasefire if the parties don’t want one, placing particular blame on Hamas for the ongoing impasse.

Trump, for his part, has pledged to swiftly end the Mideast war but has not provided any details regarding how he plans to do so.

Bahbah claimed that the president-elect could well impose an arms embargo on Israel if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ignores his call to quickly end the war in Gaza.

“If he says to Netanyahu, ‘End the war by the time I enter office’ and Netanyahu fails to do so, there’s nothing stopping Trump from stopping the flow of arms to Israel,” Bahbah said.

Trump’s record as president — from moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, to cutting aid to the Palestinians, to steps legitimizing Israeli settlements in the West Bank — offers nothing to suggest that he would abandon the Jewish state in his second term.

But Bahbah insisted that “the Trump of 2016 and 2020 is a very different person than the Trump of 2024.”

“He’s been exposed to the Arab Muslim American communities. He has had at least 15 meetings with Arab and Muslim leaders,” the Trump supporter argued.

Indeed, a new member of Trump’s inner circle is Lebanese-born businessman Massad Boulos, whose son Michael married Tiffany Trump in 2022.

“Trump has committed himself publicly multiple times that he will end the wars and bring peace to the Middle East, and he is someone who keeps his word,” Bahbah said.

Despite the grim outlook regarding the current state of affairs back in the Middle East, attendees at the Dearborn watch party couldn’t help but celebrate Trump’s victory as it solidified well after midnight on Wednesday.

The Arab Trump supporters clapped along to Lebanese pop star Ramy Ayach’s “Mabrouk,” with one of the attendees busting the president-elect’s signature YMCA dance move.

Caught up in the moment, they didn’t immediately notice as the major news networks began to broadcast Trump’s victory speech from Florida.

The muted the music and refocused on the TV screens throughout the hookah lounge, as Trump basked in what still felt like an improbable victory, given the margin.

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