US Arabs eye ‘historic’ Senate win for Abdul El-Sayed despite AIPAC attacks
Suehaila Amen’s voice trembles when she speaks about the plight of south Lebanon, where Israel is systematically wiping out entire villages. She struggles to hold back tears.
Amen, a prominent local activist, says the large Arab American community in Michigan is suffering from shock, pain and exhaustion after nearly three years of war, mass killings and destruction in Palestine and Lebanon.
“To say the community is hurting is really an understatement. Even in answering this question, I’m brought to tears because I lived there,” she said of Bint Jbail, one of the border towns in Lebanon that has been levelled by Israeli forces.
“This is my land too — my ancestral homeland. People are feeling like they are disregarded, that their lives don’t matter.”
In the middle of this despair, Amen said she has found a beacon of hope in the rise of politicians across the United States who are calling for an end to government support for Israel.
In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, a doctor and public health advocate, is running for the Senate on a pledge that he would seek to invest in local communities instead of foreign wars.
He has also been vocal in denouncing Israel’s war on Gaza, which he recognises as a genocide.
But El-Sayed, who is of Egyptian descent, has faced an avalanche of spending from pro-Israel groups — including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — that have backed his Democratic primary opponent, Congresswoman Haley Stevens, with more than $50m.
“It would be absolutely spectacular to watch the fall of that so-called empire that AIPAC thinks that they hold,” Amen said.
If El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, she believes his victory would be “historic”.
“Abdul is the candidate that’s right for the state of Michigan and for this country,” she continued. “We want to show the world that not everybody is going to align with Israel’s interests, and that this is a country where candidates should be putting America first and should be putting their constituents first.”
‘Bint Jbail is not far away’
At a Friday night campaign rally for El-Sayed in Dearborn, a Detroit suburb known as the “capital of Arab America”, boos rang out each time AIPAC was mentioned.
During a speech, Abbas Alawieh, a candidate for Michigan’s state Senate, noted the significance of the venue hosting the event: the Bint Jebail Cultural Center.
“I grew up three minutes from here. Bint Jbail is the village that I’m from on my mom’s side. Bint Jbail is actively experiencing an ethnic cleansing by the Israeli military. They are going house by house and demolishing,” Alawieh said.
“They just demolished the school that my grandfather was a principal at for years and years, that my mom and my uncles went to. That is Bint Jbail. Bint Jbail is not far away. Bint Jbail is right here where you are sitting. The houses that are outside are of community members who have family on the other side.”
Alawieh, a former congressional staffer, stressed to the crowd that El-Sayed would answer to the people, not to lobbyist groups like AIPAC in the US Senate.
“We have the power to deliver our Medicare for All,” Alawieh said, referencing the plan for universal healthcare in the US.
Campaign volunteers stood up and clapped as his voice rose with emotion. “We have the power to deliver a future free of endless wars,” Alawieh continued. “It’s within our grasp. It starts right here in Michigan.”
