Amid anger over Israel, Harris courts Arab and Muslim voters. Will it work?

Despite touting her unwavering support for Israel as the country wages war in Gaza and Lebanon, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is trying to garner support in Arab and Muslim communities in the United States before elections next month.

In recent weeks, the US vice president and her team have held meetings with Arab and Muslim “community leaders” while receiving endorsements from Muslim individuals and groups aligned with her Democratic Party.

But many advocates argue that as long as Harris maintains her pledge to continue to arm Israel and refuses to distance herself from President Joe Biden’s unconditional support for the US ally, nothing will help her standing with Arab and Muslim voters.

Moreover, critics have slammed the private meetings by Harris and her top national security adviser with handpicked attendees – whose identities are often not made public – as not representative of the communities her campaign says it is hoping to win over.

“Such groups and faceless individuals are mere tokens for the Democratic Party, paraded by Harris’s campaign to check off a box recommended by an algorithm — a strategy she maintained campaigning on trends and memes rather than impactful policy,” Laura Albast, a Palestinian American activist in the Washington, DC, area, told Al Jazeera.

Meetings

Harris’s push to reach out to Arab and Muslim voters comes as Israel’s military assaults on Gaza and Lebanon are escalating, heightening anger and anxiety in these communities just weeks before the November 5 elections.

For months, community members have urged the vice president to break from Biden and put conditions on US military aid to Israel to pressure the country to end its onslaught on the Gaza Strip.

But Harris has rebuffed those calls. In August, her campaign rejected pleas to allow a Palestinian American speaker at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

And this week, she joined Biden on a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which the US administration expressed “ironclad” support for Israel.

Harris met with Arab and Muslim advocates in Flint, north of Detroit, Michigan – a key battleground state with sizeable Arab communities – on Sunday. Days earlier, her top national security adviser held a similar meeting virtually.

Hussein Dabajeh, a Lebanese American political consultant in the Detroit area, decried the lack of transparency around such meetings.

He said the Harris campaign is “afraid” to have an open dialogue with representatives of the community, so it is reverting to behind-closed-doors discussions to appear like it is listening to Arab and Muslim Americans.

He stressed that the main audience for these meetings is not Arabs and Muslims but the broader electorate as the Democratic Party is trying to portray its candidate as inclusive and caring.