Biden risks a return of Trump if he doesn’t push for an Israeli cease-fire in Gaza | Opinion
After Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the Iowa caucuses, newsstands and TV media are speculating whether the former president can return to the White House. With Trump as the clear front-runner for weeks, the commentary has fast forwarded past nominee predictions and into forebodings of his victory.
Some polling showed Trump leading by 5 percentage points in November, and pundits are lamenting that Joe Biden’s voters are unconvinced on his accomplishments of a booming economy and infrastructure projects. The Biden campaign has dismissed the numbers, and strategists boast that the president is “underestimated,” with the ability to turn out voters closer to Election Day.
As a 27-year old Pakistani-American Muslim, I do not want to see Trump — a racist, warmongering, climate change-denying misogynist — return to power. In 2020, I implored my communities, my elders and my peers — even those who were skeptical of Biden’s war hawkishness — to defeat Trump at the ballot box. But in 2024, as a consequence of the president’s refusal to push Israel into a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, I cannot in good conscience push my loved ones to cast a Biden ballot in November.
This sentiment isn’t an anomaly, but a reflection of Biden’s shrinking support among key constituencies. A majority of Americans support a cease-fire, especially among young people, 70% of whom support it. Even more recent polling shows that three-quarters of young people do not support the president’s actions on Israel-Palestine. Trump is polling ahead among young voters overall. According to Gallup, Biden’s approval rating is currently sitting at 39%, the lowest ever for a modern-day president at this point in his first term.
In key swing states, Biden’s multiracial coalition is actively turning against him. Among Arab Americans, Biden’s approval rating has gone from a majority to 17%. Muslim and Arab organizers in Michigan and Wisconsin, where the number of Arab voters alone far outweighs Biden’s slim 2020 margins, have launched an #AbandonBiden campaign to demand the president’s support for a cease-fire — or he might suffer defeat come November. Anecdotally, this same sentiment exists within my Muslim South Asian community.
While few of us want to see the return of Trump, the stakes are too high for our Palestinian siblings to accept President Biden’s current stance. Through social media, millions around the world are watching daily targeted bombings on civilians, hospitals and refugee camps, and the forcible displacement of more than 90% of Gaza’s population — actions many consider war crimes under international law. Human rights monitors such as Oxfam and Amnesty International USA have implored the president to not send deadly munitions to Israel, which has been dropping U.S.-supplied 2,000-pound bombs in densely populated areas.
Israel’s military has killed more than 30,000 people in three months. Twice now, Biden has bypassed Congress to provide weapons from U.S. manufacturers, of which the most recent sale amounted to about $150 million, even as cities see record-breaking anti-war protests.
Biden cannot distinguish himself from Trump with campaign speeches alone. He must demonstrate through his actions that he is an appreciably stronger moral choice than Trump. If historic protests, dire polling, and a growing number of Democratic members of Congress calling for a cease-fire cannot move the president, then threatening the return of Trump may be the only thing that will.
President Biden’s behavior appears to be rooted in a naive belief that, despite the current crisis, disgust with Trump will hold his support together. But as 2020 showed, winning the battle for the “soul of our democracy,” as he so often characterizes, is not possible without a multiracial, cross-class, multigenerational big tent. For both Palestinians and for the future of our country, Biden must change course.