When Haneen Mahbuba saw the news of the deadly Israeli missile strikes on the Gaza Strip this week, she found herself so crestfallen that she struggled to breathe.
“Suddenly, it felt like I was suffocating,” Mahbuba said. While taking in what had happened from her Detroit-area home, she saw a photo of a child maimed by the violence – a girl who seemed to be nearly the same age as her daughter.
“I immediately prayed in prostration to God to end this madness,” she said. “So many in my community feel abandoned and let down. The human rights organisations have let them down. The politicians have let them down.
“Where do we turn?” she wondered.
Mahbuba’s reaction highlighted the anger, anxiety and betrayal felt by many Arab Americans in the Detroit suburbs in the wake of US president Donald Trump’s first months in office, and particularly after the latest round of Israeli missile strikes in Gaza on what Israel said were Hamas targets.
In nearly two dozen interviews across the region over the past three weeks, a common theme emerged: a sense among Arab Americans that their political concerns, especially about Gaza, have been largely shunted aside by both major political parties.
In this flat pocket of southeastern Michigan near the Canadian border, the Arab and Muslim presence dates back over a century. It is now among the most concentrated and influential of its kind in the United States.
Many Arab Americans here were angered by the Biden administration’s actions during the war in Gaza. That played out in November: majority Arab American voting districts in the area, which had long supported Democratic presidential candidates, shifted significantly toward Trump.
While it was a small part of the statewide wave favouring Trump, the overall Arab American shift was significant. Consider Dearborn, home to the Ford Motor Company, where about half of the roughly 110,000 residents are of Arab descent. Trump beat Kamala Harris by more than 2,500 votes, becoming the first Republican to win the city since George W Bush in 2000.
The Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, who pushed for an end to hostilities in Gaza, received about 18 per cent of the Dearborn vote, higher than anywhere else in Michigan.
This week’s Israeli bombings – which shattered a roughly two-month ceasefire and reportedly killed hundreds of Palestinians, many of them women and children – sent a chill not only to detractors of Trump but also to some of his fiercest Arab supporters in the Detroit area.
His foreign policy seems wildly unpopular, and those who endorsed Trump find themselves under an uncomfortable microscope.
“I’m receiving a lot of hate mail,” said one supporter, Faye Nemer, head of the local Middle Eastern and North African Chamber of Commerce. She still supports Trump’s domestic policies but is aghast at his handling of the Middle East – and smarting from the backlash she and other Trump supporters are receiving.
“Anyone who demonstrated any support for President Trump,” she said, “is completely ostracised.”
Trump and his fellow Republicans spent much of last year courting Michigan’s roughly 300,000 citizens of Middle Eastern and North African descent.
Months before the presidential election, Michael Flynn, a retired lieutenant general and former Trump adviser who had denigrated Islam, showed up to forge new connections with local leaders.
[ Irish-based surgeon loses four family members in Israeli air strike on GazaOpens in new window ]
He found many who were willing to give him a chance. And just days before the election, Trump was feted at the Great Commoner, a brick-clad corner cafe and restaurant in the heart of Dearborn.
The event caused a stir. Dearborn’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, and one of the area’s most prominent religious leaders, Imam Hassan Qazwini, steered clear of the occasion.
But Nemer stood at Trump’s side, as did other notable local Arab Americans, including the mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, Amer Ghalib. Trump reiterated a vow that he would bring an end to the bloodshed in Gaza and the Middle East.
Trump recently nominated Ghalib to be ambassador to Kuwait. The mayor of Dearborn Heights, Bill Bazzi, who also endorsed Trump, was named to be ambassador to Tunisia.
Dr Sam Fawaz, a staunch Trump supporter, was among the attendees at the Dearborn event. Even after the conflict resumed this week, he said he was taking the long view and sticking by the president.
“I fully understand why a lot of people would be disappointed, angry and feeling betrayed,” he said. But the president “knows his entire legacy will be shattered if the Middle East blows up even further and we get engaged in another war,” he added. “So I give him some slack and say, ‘Let’s wait and see what comes out of this.’”
Other Detroit Arabs are not as patient.
While many congregants at the Islamic Institute of America mosque in Dearborn Heights voiced no nostalgia for the Biden administration, Trump, they said, has added new layers of worry about tariffs and deportations, the targeting of pro-Palestinian protesters and recent American missile strikes on Yemen.
“We are totally fed up,” said Mo Baydoun, chair of the non-partisan Dearborn Heights City Council, as he met with friends at a hookah shop near his home. “And by that, I mean we are fed up with all sides.”
He and his friends listed some of the offenders: Democrats. Republicans. Trump supporters. The media. Critics of the Arab community, which they say has been unfairly blamed for Trump’s victory.
“It’s like nobody is really listening to us as our people are being killed,” Baydoun said.
A loud chorus of agreement from his friends followed. They had their reasons: Baydoun’s cousin and her family had been killed by a 2024 Israeli air strike in Lebanon.
They noted that Trump had shared a cartoonish, artificial intelligence-rendered video of Gaza reimagined as an opulent, Trump-branded tourist resort, in keeping with his proposal that America take over the seaside stretch of land. The plan would permanently displace many, if not all, of Gaza’s current residents, an unthinkable notion to most Palestinians, whose forced displacement from the land that became Israel is known to Arabs as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.”
Baydoun and his friends mocked the clip. “This is the president of the United States we’re talking about, putting out something like this,” one of them said. “The president of the United States.”
Then they briefly paused, their faces looking doleful and chagrined.
Late last week, despite it being the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when conversations turned to politics, the mood in Dearborn and other Arab enclaves felt even more dour.
Mahmoud Khalil, an immigrant of Palestinian descent who led student protests of Israel at Columbia University, was put in federal detention March 8th. His seizure led to a spreading worry that even green card holders could be deported – and it tamped down free discussion.
At Wayne State University in Detroit, student after student refused to speak about the current atmosphere. There was too much fear in the air, several of them explained. It felt safer to keep quiet.
One student willing to comment was Izhan Ibadat.
Ibadat (19), voted for Trump, partly because he believed the president would help stop the war in the Middle East and “that there would not be any more killings”.
But, disappointed by Trump’s foreign policy and his seemingly haphazard approach to domestic affairs, Ibadat said he would approach the ballot box differently today.
“After all these things going on,” he said, “honestly, I would probably vote undecided.”
- This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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