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As much as this issue resonated with many voters, America’s politicians were not ready to rethink the country’s relationship with Israel. | <span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); white-space: normal;">Joshua Lott</span>/Washington Post/Getty Images
Since the war in Gaza began, the threat of a protest vote — in which voters would choose to abstain from the presidential election or vote for third-party candidates who had no shot of winning — hung over Democrats’ heads because of President Joe Biden’s unconditional support for Israel and its right-wing government. When Vice President Kamala Harris became the nominee, her lack of willingness to distance herself from Biden on this issue didn’t help alleviate that threat. Meanwhile, Donald Trump accused Democrats of not being sufficiently pro-Israel.
Throughout the election, pro-Palestinian voters tried to put pressure on President Biden to change course, organizing protests on college campuses across the country and forming various campaigns to punish him at the ballot box. One group, the Uncommitted National Movement, asked Democratic voters to cast their ballots for “uncommitted” instead of Biden during the primaries, and they amassed hundreds of thousands of votes — enough to secure delegates at the Democratic National Convention.
But no matter how much pro-Palestinian voters pushed candidates to give them a better vision for how to end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, none were willing to meaningfully address the concerns of pro-Palestinian voters. And for Americans who regarded Gaza as one of their top concerns, their choice boiled down to either punishing Democrats or stopping Trump. The result was an election in which neither outcome would have been a win for Palestinians.
While it’s impossible to point to any single issue to explain why Harris lost to Trump, it’s clear that Harris lost at least some voters because of the Biden administration’s stance on Gaza. And now Trump, who vowed to ban Palestinian refugees from entering the United States and said he would revoke visas from foreign students who are deemed antisemitic, is the president-elect.
Voters wanted an actual plan to stop the war. Candidates weren’t interested.
When it came to which candidate had a better vision for how to end the war in Gaza, neither Biden, Harris, nor Trump offered a compelling message.
President Biden offered Israel unqualified support, sending billions of dollars in military aid. His administration defended Israel even as it committed horrific war crimes, including hospital bombings. Instead of reckoning with the rapidly rising death toll in Gaza, he cast doubt on the numbers that the Gaza Ministry of Health had put out — numbers that humanitarian groups and even the US government had deemed reliable in the past.
At times, Harris, after she became the Democratic nominee, tried calling out Israel for the staggering death toll, saying that “far too many” civilians had been killed and emphasizing that how Israel conducted itself during this war mattered. She called for an end to the war, but after having served in the administration that financed Israel’s war with virtually no conditions, it wasn’t a particularly convincing message.
Harris also muddied her outreach — or lack thereof — to Arab Americans by coupling any sympathetic statement about Palestinians with a staunch defense of Israel. At her DNC speech, for example, she said the death toll in Gaza was “heartbreaking” and stated that Palestinians’ right to self-determination ought to be realized — reiterating long-held US talking points — but also prefaced that statement by again justifying the war itself. When she was asked whether she was worried about losing Arab American voters because of Israel’s conduct, she said, “There are so many tragic stories coming from Gaza,” but that “the first and most tragic story is October 7.”
For his part, Trump didn’t try to say that he would be any better than Biden on Gaza. Earlier this year, he said Israel should wrap up the war and “get back to peace and stop killing people.” But he said it not in the context of sympathy for Palestinians, but out of concern that Israel was making itself look bad. “And the other thing is I hate — they put out tapes all the time. Every night, they’re releasing tapes of a building falling down. They shouldn’t be releasing tapes like that,” he said. “That’s why they’re losing the PR war.”
Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also seemed more concerned about the lost opportunity for development in Gaza than the human suffering, saying that the strip’s waterfront properties could be very valuable. “There was no ocean as far as that was concerned. They never took advantage of it,” Trump said. “You know, as a developer, it could be the most beautiful place — the weather, the water, the whole thing, the climate.”
As to how Trump would deal with Netanyahu, he indicated that he would let the Israeli prime minister be even more unrestrained, saying that Netanyahu was “doing a good job” and that Biden was holding him back.
Throughout the election, Palestinians were a target
Ultimately, whether Trump would end up being worse than Biden or Harris on this issue didn’t necessarily resonate with pro-Palestinian voters. For them, what’s been happening over the last year already represented the worst. Israel, after all, has already been credibly accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. As one Georgia voter told me in the week before the election, “In no way do I imagine Trump is better for Palestine … [but] I can’t imagine it worse.”
That helps explain why so many Arab Americans came out against Harris last Tuesday. In Dearborn, Michigan, an Arab-majority city, Trump won 43 percent of the vote compared to Harris’s 36 percent. In 2020, Biden won the city with 69 percent of the vote, and though Harris lost there, Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American, won her reelection to Congress with 62 percent of the vote.
As much as this issue resonated with many voters, America’s politicians were not ready to rethink the country’s relationship with Israel, even as the war escalated to the point where now over 44,000 Palestinians have been killed. In July, when Netanyahu gave an address to Congress, he was met with a standing ovation.
From the start, Palestinians were a target in this election. During the Republican primaries, candidates got on the debate stage and competed over who would be the most pro-Israel president. At that point, it had been a month since Hamas’s October 7 attack, and Israel’s war on Gaza had already killed over 10,000 Palestinians, 40 percent of whom were children. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he would tell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “finish the job once and for all with these butchers,” referring to Hamas. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott said, “You cannot negotiate with evil.” Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley repeated a line she had already tested out on the campaign trail: “Finish them.” She would later write that on an artillery shell during a visit to Israel. As for Trump, he even hurled the word “Palestinian” as an insult.
At each turn, no matter how devastating the war became, Palestinians were humiliated. Pro-Palestinian protesters were denigrated. And voters who sympathized with Palestinians in Gaza were scolded.
That left voters with no tangible options to improve the situation in Gaza at the ballot box, prompting many to believe that the best way to be heard is by sending a message that reckless foreign policy will cost incumbents votes. Even as some voters tried to turn the election into a referendum on Biden’s Gaza policy, the reality was that no candidate was willing to promise anything beyond the status quo. So Palestinians and their supporters found plenty of reason to believe that whatever the election outcome would be, it could only range from bad to worse.
That feeling of hopelessness paved the way for a protest vote to take hold. While Biden’s Israel policy, in the end, might not have been the deciding factor for much of the electorate, in some pockets of the country, voters tried to show that they shouldn’t be ignored in the only way they could: by voting against the party that allowed Gaza to turn into a “graveyard for children.”
It’s hard to know what the next few months, or next four years, will look like for Palestine. But there aren’t many signs of hope — if there are any at all. As the election drew to a close, Israelis announced that they are nearing a “full evacuation” of northern Gaza and that “there is no intention” to allow Palestinians to return. That sounds like only the beginning of a new phase in the war.
