The Dilemma of the Pro-Palestinian Voter

How to vote when the political system is aligned against you

The Michigan presidential primary is tomorrow, and I’ve seen a number of articles (here’s a good one, by Michelle Goldberg) speculating on whether it will reveal dangerous weakness for President Biden among Arab-Americans, Muslim-Americans, and other voters who are angry about his strong support of Israel in its war in Gaza in response to the atrocities of October 7th. It’s entirely possible that it will reveal such weakness, whether in the form of a large vote for “Uncommitted” or or other formal dissent. And it’s also possible that, if not appeased, these voters will stay home in November and play a crucial role in electing Donald Trump to the presidency.

The question is: would that be rational behavior on their part?

Mainstream Democrats reflexively reach for the answer that no, it is not rational. Trump basically gave Netanyahu anything he wanted and asked nothing in exchange, and the Republican Party more generally is dominated by elements (like Christian Zionists) that are extremely hostile to Palestinian ambitions. Yes, Israel’s war in Gaza has been incredibly destructive, with horrific loss of life, and it’s abundantly clear that Israel’s current government is absolutely opposed to any kind of political horizon for the Palestinians once the war is over, so I understand why Biden’s strong support of Israel is abhorrent to sympathizers to the Palestinian cause. But that doesn’t mean that hobbling Biden will do anything to advance that cause, and unless you’re a believer in “the worse the better” type of thinking (in which case you should never have been supporting Biden in the first place), a Trump administration could do much to set it back.

I find this reflexive rejection unconvincing, however. There have been lots of causes through history that had the formal shape of advocacy for the Palestinian cause. There has to be more to say about the matter than just “suck it up and pick the lesser of two evils.”

The first problem with this reflexive rejection is, oddly, the assumption that Arab-American and Muslim-American voters are a natural part of a left-wing coalition in the first place. In fact, I suspect a large percentage of these voters are cross-pressured. Just as with Black and Hispanic voters, Arab-American and Muslim-American voters tend to be more socially conservative than White liberals. There’s also a very high rate of entrepreneurship in those communities, and a lot of concern about crime. All of those factors give Republicans a natural opening. Anti-Muslim views espoused by many Republican politicians, along with staunch Republican support not only for Israel but for the Israeli right, make it much harder for Republicans to exploit those openings, but if the GOP and the Democrats are viewed as equally terrible on the Palestinian issue then that might make it easier for some of these voters to support Republicans for reasons unrelated to foreign policy.

For more liberal or progressive people in these communities, of course, that calculus doesn’t obtain, and the response of “suck it up and pick the lesser of two evils” has some real validity. If you care about protecting abortion rights, subsidizing health care and achieving a Palestinian state, then helping Trump get elected because of Biden’s support for Israel is indeed perverse. But what about for individuals or groups who genuinely vote on a single issue? How should they approach the subject?

I actually think that, for these voters, it is rational to have a litmus test and to simply refuse to support anyone who doesn’t pass the litmus test, no matter the consequences. There will be times, of course, where nobody can pass the test—and when that happens, you have to sit on your hands and refuse to vote. But you also have to hold yourself out there as willing to support anyone who passes the litmus test—no matter what their views on any other subject.

There are voting blocs who behave this way, and they wield narrow but potent influence. The Satmar Hasidim in New York, for example, are virtually single-issue voters on questions related to the integrity of their education system and its immunity from public scrutiny and regulation. I’m sure everyone in that community has his or her own views on a variety of subjects like crime and taxation and fixing potholes. But they are nonetheless extraordinarily disciplined about only supporting politicians who promise to allow them to continue to educate their children just the way they choose, even if it means it means seriously handicapping their ability to participate in the economy and make the community increasingly dependent on public welfare.

I’ve written before about the challenge this poses to liberals, philosophically and practically, but that’s a problem for liberals to wrestle with, not the Satmar. Is this, though, a viable example for supporters of the Palestinian cause to follow?

Maybe. The thing is, what the Satmar want primarily is a carve out for themselves from the rules that more generally obtain. What supporters of the Palestinian cause want is a change in American foreign policy—and that change is potentially profound. Consider that the Obama administration was both notably cold to the Netanyahu government in Israel and pushed hard for an opening to Tehran, and that not only did this do nothing to alter the trajectory of Israel’s policies, it prompted a reaction in the Arab world that pushed the Gulf States closer to Israel, a development that most would see as distinctly inimical to the Palestinian cause. A carve-out in foreign policy is more complicated than a domestic carve-out, and what the Palestinian activists want comes closer to a sea-change than a carve-out anyway. That’s just a very tall order.

Nonetheless, there are precedents for this kind of activism, the most relevant probably being advocacy for the Armenian cause, which always risks angering an important American ally (Turkey) and, today, risks putting activists on the side of a country backed by a major American adversary (Putin’s Russia, Armenia’s primary patron). The Armenians just suffered a major instance of ethnic cleansing, and I would imagine that advocates for the Armenian cause would expect some kind of recognition of that fact, and some kind of action in response, from any politician who wanted to earn their support.

That’s the model, it seems to me, if you are a single-issue activist. It’s easy to make fun of a guy like Khalid Turaani, formerly a founder of Arab-American Republicans Against Bush and now the head of the Abandon Biden campaign, but what he’s doing is entirely rational. He’s trying to convince more members of his community to be genuinely single-issue voters, willing to support either party provided they pass his litmus tests.

Will it work? I doubt it. But it’s more likely to work than the approach that progressive organizations seem to prefer, which is to add yet another issue to a long list that politicians need to support to win progressive backing. That approach, by making mainstream Democrats seem both more extreme than the median voter and less in control of their own party, mostly props up an increasingly extreme and dysfunctional GOP. That’s an acceptable price to pay for a single-issue voting bloc, but it’s a completely irrational strategy for a broad left-wing movement.