Dispatch: Pro-Palestine protesters could derail Biden in key swing state
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
As Joe Biden launched his “Pennsylvania push” campaign, he encountered a familiar set of unwanted visitors.
Outside his speech in Philadelphia on Thursday were two dozen activists holding signs with messages including “Stop the massacre of Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. The same protesters are present almost every day outside the White House. They sometimes demonstrate outside Congress and also at the Israeli embassy in Washington DC.
Less than seven months before polling day in this year’s election, there is a serious chance that Mr Biden’s policy on the war in Gaza could lose him the presidency.
The pro-Palestine movement has attracted many of the young liberals and Arab-Americans that Mr Biden relied on – as voters, campaigners and organisers – to deliver his victory in 2020.
Already, those who oppose his pro-Israeli stance on the war have made their displeasure known. In the Democratic primary in Michigan last month, more than 13 per cent of voters refused to vote for him, instead writing the word “uncommitted” on their ballot papers.
The protest vote will not stop him winning the Democratic nomination, which he has already secured. But the campaigners are hoping to show how many votes he could lose in November if he does not satisfy them by then.
On Tuesday, in Pennsylvania, protesters are hoping to make their biggest mark on the campaign yet. On Mr Biden’s visit to the state this week, he was also met by “uncommitted” campaigners in Pittsburgh and Scranton, his home town.
Seventy miles from Philadelphia lies the city of Bethlehem. It is about three times larger than the little town in the West Bank that bears the same name, and is known by locals for its history of steel production, rather than an association with Christ.
There, The Telegraph met Raya Abdelaal, 30. Ms Abdelaal is a veteran protester and local organiser of the “uncommitted” campaign, based in nearby Nazareth.
She and her colleagues are calling for Mr Biden to declare support for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and to stop selling weapons to Israel. If he refuses, they will abstain in November and hope to deny him a victory in the presidential race.
“A lot of us are Democrats that voted for Biden in the previous election,” she said.
“We thought his stance would be progressive and would align with our values, only to recently find out that he has been completely unsupportive about what’s happening in Palestine.”
“This is like a signal to be like, ‘Hey – pay attention’. We’re going to write in ‘uncommitted’.
“These are the votes that could get him a win in Pennsylvania, because we are a swing state. It’s costing him a great deal at this point.”
She said Israel was a “colonist project” designed to “aid the United States in having ties with the Middle East” and claims that the US support for the creation of a Jewish state was “an anti-Semitic move” because “they didn’t want the Jewish people to come here”.
She said Mr Biden was “brainwashed” into support for Israel, and that the US hoped to exploit oil reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Ms Abdelaal is familiar with the criticism of mainstream Democrats – that if she refuses to support Mr Biden, she runs the risk of handing the keys to the White House to Donald Trump.
“I personally don’t feel like it’s our responsibility to save [Mr Biden’s] presidency,” she said.
“He did that himself, with the actions that he put forth when he decided not to call for a ceasefire early on, and when he decided to fund Israel with arms.
“Those were his actions that led him to this loss and I wouldn’t blame the people for that.”
Ms Abdelaal said she is not a supporter of Hamas, but believes armed resistance is justified against Israeli soldiers in Gaza.
“What are the Palestinian people supposed to do?” she said. “What is the solution if tomorrow Canada came here and occupied the United States? Would we judge the United States for resisting?”
Mr Biden has consistently stated and demonstrated his support for Israel, including by providing US military support for the country’s defence against a missile and drone attack by Iran on April 13.
He has been a lifelong supporter of a Jewish state in the Middle East – a policy position he says he inherited from his father, who he said had a “preoccupation with the Holocaust”.
Although Mr Biden has criticised Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned Rafah offensive in the south of Gaza and implored him not to retaliate against Iran’s air strikes, he has repeatedly described the US’s support for Israel as “ironclad”.
However, the President’s own voters are split on the issue. Earlier this month, 22 per cent of Democrats said that they were more sympathetic toward Palestinians in the conflict, while 16 percent said they were more sympathetic toward Israelis. The largest group, of 44 per cent, said they sympathise with both groups.
Voters under the age of 30 and Arab-Americans, both of whom are core Democrat constituencies, are much more likely to be critical of Mr Biden’s stance on the war.
“Clearly, I think this is doing him some damage,” said Matt Duss, Executive Vice President at the Center for International Policy in Washington DC.
“There’s a sense in which the Palestinian issue is not just an issue with foreign policy – it’s an issue of social and racial justice.
“One can agree or disagree with that, but I do think that is a reality, especially for young progressive Democrats, not just Palestinians and Arab Americans.”
Mr Duss said that the Biden campaign could also suffer from a lack of support on the ground from students and young liberals who historically do much of the party’s shoe leather campaigning for free.
“This is a constituency that the party depends on for volunteer work, for phone banking, for door knocking, and for a whole bunch of other things that it needs to do to maximise turnout,” he said. “That’s where I think this could hurt the president and could hurt the party, and they don’t really appreciate that.”
After Tuesday’s Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, all eyes will be on the uncommitted vote to see if it could spell doom for the President in November. In 2020, he won the state by a margin of 80,000 votes – just 1.2 per cent of the total.
Meanwhile, the pro-Palestinian campaigners hope that the result will be a wake-up call for the White House.
“I don’t believe that these types of presidents and these types of elected officials are going to be able to sustain their campaigns moving forwards,” said Ms Abdelaal.
“We have to have an eruption, right? There has to be some sort of dramatic push. We will suffer a little bit for a greater value later on.”
