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With the death toll in Gaza rising and Israel's invasion of Lebanon intensifying, it was not a difficult decision for the Abandon Harris movement to endorse Green Party presidential candidate Dr Jill Stein.
“Again and again, there has been silence from the Biden administration,” Hassan Abdel Salam, the director and co-founder of Abandon Harris, told a recent press conference in Dearborn as he introduced Dr Stein. “We have with us a leader, a person of truth, a partner in truth and conscience.”
The move could have a significant impact on the US presidential election. It’s here in Dearborn, and in other Michigan cities – home to more than 300,000 Arab Americans – where the presidential election could be won or lost. President Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 155,000 votes in 2020 with a significant number of those coming from Arab and Muslim Americans.
In Dearborn, the 2020 Biden-Harris ticket beat Trump by 17,500 votes. In Hamtramck, a city of 28,000 people of whom around 60 per cent are Muslim or Arab Americans, Mr Biden won 86 per cent of the vote four years ago. That city's Muslim mayor has now endorsed Mr Trump.
Further north of Detroit, in Oakland county, where around 65,000 Arab Americans live, Mr Biden beat Mr Trump by more than 100,000 votes in 2020.
While most national polls show around one per cent of voters likely to back Dr Stein, in Michigan that number doubles. The difference may appear negligible but in a state where only a few thousand votes could decide the winner, it poses a serious problem for the Democratic Party candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“We have a whole campaign of flyering, door knocking and phone banking, and we’re targeting people (across the state),” Mr Salam said. “We feel if we get 70,000 voters to vote against the Vice President, we will definitely be victorious in Michigan.”
The endorsement is a significant boost for Dr Stein.
“You serve as the conscience of the nation, demanding an end to genocide in Gaza being perpetrated in our name with our tax dollars,” she told the audience. “Abandon Harris is a moral compass for a nation that is lost at sea. You have given new life to our ailing democracy.”
For Huda Al Qouqa, whose family were displaced from Silat Ad Dhahr in what is now the occupied West Bank during the Nakba in 1948, last week's press conference was the first time she felt the need to attend an Abandon Harris event.
She said her son-in-law’s family is all in Gaza. “His cousins, his uncles all died. It doesn’t matter who you are – doctors, reporters; it’s really devastating,” she said.
The Dearborn resident said that seeing the news headlines focus on hurricanes while dozens of people were being killed in Gaza and Lebanon prompted her to get out and take part in the Abandon Harris protests.
“We need to encourage the third party more,” she said. “In the end, this is our country.”
Mr Abdel Salam said part of his motivation for advocating against Ms Harris springs from seeing first-hand how Palestinians are treated by Israel. He was detained and interrogated by Israeli police following his involvement in a pro-Palestine protest in Jerusalem in 2022.
Asked whether the Abandon Harris campaign may end up handing the White House to Mr Trump, who has claimed to be one of Israel’s biggest supporters and under whose previous administration restricted travel for several Muslim-majority countries in 2017, Mr Abdel Salam said there is a big difference between preventing people from travelling on one hand, and killing them on the other.
“Mr Trump … is a despicable candidate, an insurrectionist, a racist who spews perpetual racism,” he said. “But a lot of folks in the community now are completely persuaded that this is the only option.”
