What Rashida Tlaib Represents

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Last May, following protests in East Jerusalem over planned evictions of Palestinians, Hamas started firing rockets toward Tel Aviv, and Israeli airstrikes pounded residential buildings in the Gaza Strip. Shortly after, a group of nine Democratic lawmakers, all longstanding Israel supporters, took to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to reaffirm the country’s right to defend itself. “We have a duty as Americans to stand by the side of Israel in the face of attacks from terrorists,” Elaine Luria, a representative from Virginia, said, “who again, have the same goal in mind: to kill Jews.”

Later that evening, about a dozen other Democrats spoke as well — to question the justice of funneling almost $4 billion a year to a country that was in the midst of bombing civilians. “Do Palestinians have a right to survive?” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat, said. “Do we believe that? And, if so, we have a responsibility to that as well.”

The speeches were a rare occasion when Palestinian rights have been addressed at such length on the House floor. They were introduced by Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin. But the driving message of the session came from Rashida Tlaib, the 45-year-old second-term congresswoman from Detroit, who, according to several people familiar with the discussions, played a significant role in making the speeches happen. “How many Palestinians have to die for their lives to matter?” Tlaib said in her own remarks, fighting back tears.

Tlaib is the only Palestinian American now serving in the House of Representatives, and the first with family currently living in the West Bank, whose three million inhabitants’ lives are intimately shaped by American support for Israel. As the May fighting intensified, colleagues approached Tlaib to ask if her family was safe. “It’s a voice that hasn’t been heard before,” Betty McCollum, a Democratic representative from Minnesota, told me.

Tlaib has been criticized, sometimes viciously, by Republicans and pro-Israel Democrats for calling Israel an “apartheid regime,” and for her support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which aims to end military occupation by exerting economic pressure on Israel. She has been called anti-Semitic for her criticism of Israeli policies, and has become a favored quarry of Fox News. Tony Paris, a close friend and former colleague of Tlaib’s, told me that in conversations with some of his relatives, conservative Democrats, he has “tiptoed around the Rashida thing.”

But Tlaib’s arrival on the national stage has also coincided with an opening, albeit a small one, within the Democratic Party to challenge the United States’ Israel policy. The Palestinian cause has become a significant part of the politics of the American left at the same time that the left has gained a legible footing on the national stage. Tlaib, a democratic socialist who is if anything more outspoken on domestic issues than she is on the Palestinian cause, has found herself at the center of this turn. She appeared in a traditional Palestinian dress made by her mother during her swearing in, sometimes wears a kaffiyeh (symbolically tied to the Palestinian resistance) on the House floor and speaks often about her grandmother in the West Bank. Rebecca Abou-Chedid, a lawyer and longtime Arab American activist, told me that the simple fact of Tlaib’s presence on the Hill means that “we are now actual people to them.”

Yet Tlaib is wary of adopting the role of the only Palestinian voice in the room. “I feel like no one wants to see me as anyone but Palestinian,” she told me. “I’m a mother, I’m a woman, I have gone through a lot being the daughter of two immigrants in the United States. I’m also the big sister of 13 younger siblings. I’m also a neighbor in a predominantly Black city.”

Tlaib’s pitch is that the roads to a fairer Israel policy and to fix the problems that plague her district — poverty, water access, pollution — are not so different. She didn’t run for Congress with a strategic plan to shift the Israeli-Palestinian debate, or even a coherent vision to do so. Sometimes she even seemed to equivocate. “We need to be not choosing a side,” she told The Washington Post during her 2018 campaign. But over her three years in Washington, Tlaib’s argument has sharpened: If the United States cares about democratic values, then upholding Palestinian rights is inherently American.

I first met Tlaib last summer at a cafe in the Midtown neighborhood of Detroit, a gentrifying area of dive bars and boutiques. Two days of thunderstorms had left 850,000 people without power, and several restaurants were still closed. Tlaib was in a white summer dress and sneakers (“My mother hates when I wear them”); a congressional pin hung around her neck. I had ambitiously ordered a cinnamon roll, and as we sat down, Tlaib, who had gotten a coffee, eyed it and brought me a fork and napkins. “I’m such a mom,” she said. Shortly after they arrived in Washington, Ilhan Omar, a Democratic representative from Minnesota, gave bracelets to fellow members of “the Squad”: the young, left-leaning congress members of color that at the time included Tlaib, Omar, Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, all of whom were elected in 2018. Omar had Tlaib’s inscribed “Mama Bear.”

Tlaib grew up caring for her seven brothers and six sisters, balancing diapers with homework. Her father, Harbi Elabed, was born in East Jerusalem, and her mother, Fatima, grew up in Beit Ur al-Fouqa, a village in the West Bank. They arrived in Detroit shortly before Tlaib was born, in 1976, as the city was reeling from years of deindustrialization and redlining and the deadly unrest of 1967. Capital had fled in search of cheap labor, as had white residents, leaving the city majority Black.

Michigan’s 13th District, which Tlaib represents, cuts through most of working-class Detroit before veering abruptly west into slices of three other cities: Dearborn Heights, Romulus and Wayne. It is the second-poorest district in the country. Tlaib, who grew up relying on food assistance, came to Congress at a time when more than half its members were millionaires. She recalls voicing her frustrations about finding an affordable place in Washington to a freshman colleague, who nonchalantly mentioned that he’d bought an apartment nearby. “That’s like $800,000, isn’t it?” she said in amazement.

Tlaib’s father, who died in 2017, was an assembly-line worker at the Ford Motor Company and a United Auto Workers member. They had a difficult relationship, but she credits him with introducing her to politics. When she turned 18, instead of wishing her a happy birthday, he told her to register to vote. “I think it’s because maybe he knew it’s a privilege, because he didn’t have that opportunity anywhere else,” she told me.

After law school, she worked at a nonprofit serving the Arab American community, then moved to the Statehouse as a staff member. In 2008, she won an eight-way primary race to become a state representative — a surprise to her father, who was skeptical Americans would elect an Arab after 9/11. (Soon after the attacks, like many Muslims, Tlaib’s parents were interrogated for hours by F.B.I. agents about their travel and whom they knew among potential suspects on the agency’s radar, according to Tlaib.) In office, she developed a reputation for taking matters into her own hands. When plumes of black dust appeared over the Detroit River, in 2013, she and a few environmental activists drove to the river’s edge, marched past a “No Trespassing” sign and crossed old train tracks to the source: an industrial site where petroleum coke was piled in 40-foot-high black dunes. Tlaib scooped the substance into Ziploc bags and sent it off to a lab. A storage company was stockpiling the petcoke — prolonged exposure to which at high concentrations can cause lung disease — without a city permit. For weeks, Tlaib held up a bag of the residue in interviews, and the company was later ordered to remove the piles.

In 2017, John Conyers, Detroit’s longtime congressman, resigned following a sexual-harassment scandal, opening up a House seat in the city for the first time in 52 years. Many residents believed the seat should go to another Black person, and the mayor and the Wayne County executive endorsed Tlaib’s primary rival, Brenda Jones, the City Council president at the time, who is Black. But Tlaib won the primary against Jones the following August, and with it, the near guarantee of winning the general election.

When she and the Somalia-born Omar were elected that November, they became the first Muslim women in the House. “I guess I was naïve,” Tlaib told me, “in not understanding how bipartisan Islamophobia is in Congress.” It was the subtle things, she said: colleagues shocked to know that most American Muslims are Black, or stereotypes of Muslim women being submissive. One colleague approached Omar and touched her hijab. Besides ignorance, Tlaib said, “I think there’s a tremendous amount of fear.”

Her election also made her the third Palestinian American in the House after Justin Amash, a Republican representative from Michigan, and John E. Sununu, a Republican representative from New Hampshire. Amash at times bucked his party, which he left before exiting Congress in 2021, on Israel. In 2014, he voted against funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system, which has been significantly financed by the United States since it was established in 2011. Amash, a libertarian, explained his opposition on the grounds of government spending. Tlaib’s views, by contrast, are deeply and openly personal. She grew up hearing stories of family members being forced out of their homes. At age 12, she visited the West Bank and saw for herself the walls and checkpoints.

Still, foreign policy had hardly come up in her years as state representative. Shortly after her bid for Congress, Steve Tobocman, a former state representative for whom she worked early in her career, sat down with her. The two had discussed the conflict in the past, but now Tobocman, who was working on her campaign, wanted to further understand her views.

Tlaib, he recalls, offered few specifics for a policy agenda, but told him about playing with children of Israeli settlers when she visited her grandmother, and recognizing the humanity of people on both sides. Ultimately, she told him, her position on the conflict would be driven by values of equality, peace and justice. She reminded Tobocman of Barbara Lee, the California Democratic congresswoman who cast the sole vote against the authorization of force in Afghanistan in 2001, quoting in her floor speech a clergy member’s warning to “not become the evil we deplore.”

“I said, ‘You aspire to be like Barbara Lee,’” Tobocman told me. “And she said, ‘Absolutely.’”

In the fall of 1973, shortly before Tlaib’s parents arrived in Michigan, almost 3,000 Arab American U.A.W. members marched to the U.A.W. Dearborn office and demanded that the local union liquidate about $300,000 in bonds it had purchased from the State of Israel with money collected from union dues. At another protest, workers waved signs that read: “Jewish People Yes, Zionism No.” The U.A.W. later liquidated some Israeli bonds.

Only recently had the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fully entered American politics. In 1967, after a six-day war with its Arab neighbors, Israel captured the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights; swaths of Palestinian land were now under Israeli control, and so were one million additional Palestinians. To American leaders, Israel proved itself a capable ally against Soviet-backed regimes in Egypt and Syria. By 1976, Israel had become the biggest recipient of U.S. military aid.

Around the same time, James Zogby, who is now president of the Arab American Institute, helped found the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, part of a nascent Palestinian rights movement that had a few allies in the Capitol. But its efforts were dwarfed by those of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), founded over a decade earlier, which helped form pro-Israel political action committees that fund-raised for both parties. Israel also successfully framed the Middle East conflict for American audiences as a battle between the West and Soviet-sponsored terrorism. In 1988, Zogby, who advised Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign that year, was a delegate at the Democratic National Convention. He tried to persuade the party’s leadership to include language about the “legitimate rights of Palestinian people” in the party platform, but failed. “Palestinian became the prefix for the word ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorism,’” Zogby told me. “You couldn’t say one without the other.”

Since then, the question of U.S. aid to Israel, in the words of Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, has remained “sacrosanct.” Barack Obama committed the United States to an additional $33 billion in military aid, even as Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, brazenly waded into American politics on the side of the Republican Party and presided over Israeli politics’ lurch to the right. Israel legitimized settlement expansion despite international condemnation and, in 2018, passed a controversial “nation-state” law that in part affirms that only Jewish people have the “right to national self-determination.”

But beneath the unbroken surface of U.S. policy, the consensus has begun to slip. According to Gallup polling, Americans’ views of the conflict have changed significantly since 2013, with sympathy for the Israelis falling slightly and sympathy for the Palestinians more than doubling. The shift has overwhelmingly been on account of Democrats; while Republican opinion has changed little, Democrats have gone from sympathizing more with Israel by a margin of 30 points in 2002 to being more or less evenly split today.

The beginning of this shift roughly coincides with the resumption of the active conflict in 2014, when Israel launched a major military operation in the Gaza Strip after the kidnapping and murder of several Israeli teenagers by the Hamas militant organization. Social media was flooded with testimonials and videos of Israeli airstrikes, which killed nearly 1,500 Palestinian civilians (six Israeli civilians were killed by Hamas rockets).

The American Jewish community, which is broadly Democratic, has meanwhile begun to fracture in its support for Israel. According to a recent poll from the Jewish Electorate Institute, 43 percent of Jewish voters under 40 say that Israeli treatment of Palestinians is comparable to racism in the United States, versus 27 percent of those over 64. And pro-Palestinian activists have more successfully integrated their cause with the last decades’ currents of American activism, most notably marching alongside Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, while halfway around the world, Palestinians tweeted tactical advice (“Don’t keep much distance from the Police, if you’re close to them they can’t tear gas”).

Although most Democratic lawmakers continue to side with Israel when the conflict finds its way into Congress, a handful have begun to reflect the shifting sympathies of the party’s base. In 2017, McCollum introduced the first piece of legislation to directly support Palestinian rights, a bill that would have restricted U.S. aid from being used to detain Palestinian children in military prisons. The bill never came up for a vote, but it garnered 30 co-sponsors. “It’s a bit of new space that might be cracking open,” says Brad Parker, a senior policy adviser for Defense for Children International — Palestine. He added, “We’re trying to force it open.”

In interviews, Tlaib speaks about the occupied Palestinian territories in the context of Detroit, pointing to issues of water access in both, comparing their patterns of segregation and poverty. “I don’t separate them,” Tlaib told me. Both places have “what I call ‘othering’ politics,” she said, “or feeling like government or systems are making us feel ‘less than.”’

In 2013, Detroit entered the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. It came under emergency management, which granted a governor-appointed trustee, a bankruptcy lawyer from the Jones Day law firm, authority to overhaul spending on city services. At the time, the city’s unemployment rate hovered around 15 percent, and more than a third of the population was living under the poverty line. Widespread power outages followed; people opened their faucets to find them dry. Today, a quarter of the city’s population is unemployed. In office, Tlaib has been more focused on the affairs of her district than of the Middle East, including persuading the House to pass a national moratorium on utility shut-offs when the pandemic started, as well as pushing legislation to replace lead water pipes. But from her first days in office, it was Tlaib’s positions on Israel that attracted both attention and criticism.

In January 2019, on the day that Tlaib and Omar were sworn in, Senate Republicans added language to a bipartisan bill reauthorizing aid to Israel that affirmed state and local governments’ right to sever ties with companies that boycotted or divested from the country. This was a nod to the more than two dozen state legislatures that already had laws responding to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The Democratic Socialists of America, of which Tlaib is a member, endorsed B.D.S. in 2017, and both Tlaib and Omar had voiced support for the movement. In response to the Republicans’ bill, a version of which was previously introduced in 2017, Tlaib tweeted that the sponsors “forgot what country they represent,” which critics charged was perpetuating an anti-Semitic trope accusing Jews of dual loyalty.

Tlaib’s timing couldn’t have been worse: The Democrats had recently taken control of the House, and Republicans had already zeroed in on the Squad’s left-wing politics. “I don’t see much hope for changing where Tlaib and Omar are, but there is a battle in the Democratic Party,” Norm Coleman, the former Republican senator from Minnesota who now presides over the Republican Jewish Coalition, said at the time. House Democrats “will have to make choices about whether they’ll quiet those voices or whether they’ll remain quiet.”

Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, admonished Democratic leadership for not “taking action” against the anti-Israel stance of Tlaib and Omar, to which Omar tweeted in reply, “It’s all about the Benjamins” — $100 bills. The ensuing maelstrom defined Tlaib’s career for the next several months. Tlaib came to the defense of Omar (who apologized the next day) even as Democratic leaders issued a statement to condemn Omar for anti-Semitic remarks. The party was already sharply divided on B.D.S.; Speaker Nancy Pelosi described it as a “dangerous” ideology “masquerading as policy.” By that summer, the House overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan resolution to oppose boycott efforts targeting Israel; Pressley broke with her Squadmates and voted in favor. The anti-Semitism charge, Lara Friedman told me, was a “sharp knife” that Republicans could throw “and watch Democrats attack each other.”

According to Tlaib’s friends and staff, she hadn’t expected the level of vitriol flung at her and her colleagues. Yet, at times, even her critics seemed unsure of how to respond to Tlaib’s unique position as a Palestinian American member of Congress. Shortly after her election in 2018, Tlaib announced plans to lead a congressional delegation to the Palestinian territories, a tour that would focus on poverty and water access. The trip would coincide with the annual AIPAC-sponsored congressional visit to Israel led by Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader. After public encouragement from Donald Trump, Netanyahu announced on Twitter that Tlaib and Omar, who planned to join the trip, were barred from entering because of their support for B.D.S. The move drew criticism from Hoyer, and even AIPAC and several Republicans. Tlaib asked permission to at least visit her grandmother in the West Bank, who was 90 years old at the time, promising to not promote boycotts while there. Israel acceded to the terms, but in a sudden about-face, Tlaib decided not to go. In a statement, Tlaib said that visiting under “oppressive conditions meant to humiliate me would break my grandmother’s heart.”

One aide to a Squad member, who asked for anonymity to speak freely, told me that wanting to show solidarity with Tlaib gave their boss more courage to speak on the issue. McCollum told me she receives less pushback from colleagues now than she did for her earlier efforts to recognize basic rights of Palestinians. “If I can speak out about what’s happening at home,” she said, “why can’t I point out when another democracy is not behaving in a way that I think lives up to human rights norms?”

Even President Biden, who during the May 2021 conflict reiterated Israel’s right to defend itself, made a point of speaking to Tlaib about the situation when he met her on an airport tarmac during a trip to Michigan. According to Tlaib, Biden brought up the conflict first, asking how her family was doing in the West Bank. Over the course of the eight-minute conversation that followed, the president listened as Tlaib spoke about the dire situation in the West Bank. “Everything you’re doing is enabling it more,” she later said she told him.

Tlaib arrived in Washington with one genuinely vanguard position on the conflict. During the 1990s the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization, along with the United States, agreed that the best solution to the conflict was the establishment of two states: a sovereign Palestine and a sovereign Israel coexisting side by side. Though the borders have never been agreed upon, the two-state outcome remains a “core U.S. policy objective,” according to the State Department. But since then, settlements have grown steadily, while military occupation of the Palestinian territories continues. Today, nearly 700,000 Jewish settlers occupy land in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which has not only cut off some residents’ access to water and electricity but also left Palestinians with less — and more fragmented — territory for a Palestinian state in any hypothetical future negotiation. This has led Middle East experts like Zaha Hassan from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Steven Cook from the Council on Foreign Relations and commentators like Peter Beinart to publicly give up on a two-state solution as a fair or realistic outcome and turn toward what was once considered a radical prospect in the debate: a single democratic state with equal rights for Arabs and Jews.

Tlaib didn’t seem to have a firm view on the best road to peace before her election. During her 2018 campaign, the liberal pro-Israel group J Street endorsed her candidacy based on a meeting and a policy paper that her team submitted, which argued that a two-state outcome, while increasingly difficult to achieve, was the best aim. Soon after, in an interview with the left-wing magazine In These Times, she reversed herself, questioning the two-state solution. After seeking clarification from Tlaib about her position, J Street pulled its endorsement. By the time Tlaib reached Washington, she was the only member of Congress to publicly back a single, fully democratic state.

This position has put Tlaib out of step with most of her Democratic colleagues. Hoyer, with whom she has grown close and who calls her “my Palestinian daughter,” told me she has not swayed him on his views on Israel. Even her progressive colleagues like Omar support a two-state solution.

To other congressional Democrats, talk of a secular one-state outcome, which by definition rejects the idea of Jewish nationalism, is tantamount to calling for the eradication of a Jewish state. “The whole idea of a one state solution denies either party the right to self-determination,” Ted Deutch, a Democratic congressman from Florida who chairs the House Subcommittee on the Middle East, North Africa and Global Counterterrorism and is a staunch Israel supporter, told me. If you advocate getting rid of a Jewish state, he said, “that’s when you end up on the path to anti-Semitism.”

Deutch clashed directly with Tlaib on the House floor in September, when Hoyer forced a vote on a bill that would provide Israel with an additional $1 billion for its Iron Dome program. Tlaib has long seen U.S. aid as a crucial source of leverage in the fight for Palestinian rights. She argued against the resolution, declaring Israel to be an “apartheid regime.” (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, have all taken the position that Israel has committed the crime of “apartheid,” but Human Rights Watch has stopped short of calling it an “apartheid regime.”) Chuck Fleischmann, the Tennessee Republican representative who was floor manager during the debate, urged Democrats to condemn Tlaib’s words. Deutch spoke up, saying the House would always stand by Israel and suggesting that Tlaib’s position was anti-Semitic.

Afterward, Tlaib told me, her colleagues “whispered, ‘Are you OK?’ The whispering needs to stop,” she said, “and they need to speak up and say, ‘That was wrong.’” Hoyer told me he didn’t consider Tlaib’s remarks anti-Semitic, but thought they were “harsher than they needed to be.”

Some Palestinian rights advocates, including McCollum, didn’t join Tlaib’s nay. Only nine lawmakers voted against the measure. Ocasio-Cortez, who the previous May introduced legislation to block a $735 million weapons sale to Israel, was about to join them, but ultimately changed her vote to present, crying as she did so. She didn’t give a clear reason for the switch but later said there were pressures of “vitriol, disingenuous framing, deeply racist accusations” and “lack of substantive discussion.” Tlaib spoke with her privately after, but wouldn’t reveal details. She had conversations with several others too. “People were really sincere about the guard rails they felt were present,” Tlaib told me. “They kept saying ‘guard rails.’”

The pro-Palestinian cohort in Congress remains only informally organized. The House has nearly 400 caucuses, including one for rum and another for candy, but none focused on Palestinian rights. Staff members of about a dozen current House and Senate members meet informally to discuss the latest efforts to advance Palestinian rights and their long-term objectives, according to several participants in the discussions. But no one has yet filed the paperwork to start a formal caucus. “They’re kind of looking at me, and I’m like, ‘I’m not doing it by myself!’” Tlaib told me. “You all cared before I came here.”

In the years since Tlaib’s election, several Democratic battles involving the left have included fights over Palestinian rights — a difference that maps onto wider fights over the future of the Democratic Party. Cori Bush, the Missouri Black Lives Matter activist elected in 2020 to Congress, and Pressley now often link the Palestinian cause to issues of police brutality and segregation at home. Jamaal Bowman, who beat the longtime (and pro-Israel) incumbent Eliot Engel for a New York congressional seat in 2020, recently came under criticism from some in the D.S.A., which endorsed him, for his vote to support Iron Dome funding and for visiting Israel on a J Street-sponsored trip. In North Carolina, Nida Allam, the Durham County commissioner who is running for Congress on a platform of environmental justice, has called for conditioning military aid to Israel on Palestinian rights; she was recently endorsed by Tlaib.

In 2020, meanwhile, Zogby, who had been attending the D.N.C. for nearly four decades, finally succeeded in inserting changes to the party’s platform. Party leaders wouldn’t accept the word “occupation,” but for the first time, allowed the phrase “we oppose settlement expansion.”

Sensing a shift, however small, a new pro-Israel organization called the Democratic Majority for Israel was formed in 2019 to campaign for Democratic candidates who would uphold current U.S. Israel policy. “We thought it was important,” Mark Mellman, its founding president, told me, “before things get out of hand, if you will, to be a force in the Democratic Party and maintain support for Israel.”

D.M.F.I.’s political action committee has targeted primary races that often involve candidates backed by Justice Democrats, an influential left-wing PAC that recruited Ocasio-Cortez and Bowman. Last summer, D.M.F.I. PAC injected more than $2 million into the Democratic primary of a congressional special election in Ohio, and aired ads against Nina Turner, who supports placing conditions on military aid. (Turner lost.) Notably, the ads focused less on Turner’s position on Israel and more on her disagreements with party leadership. “In the super PAC business, one is about winning elections,” Mellman told me.

According to D.M.F.I., 28 out of its 29 candidates won their primaries in the last cycle. Among them was Ritchie Torres, a congressman representing the South Bronx, the poorest district in the country. Some Israel advocates see Torres as the model for bringing disaffected Democrats back into the fold: a self-described progressive who maintains support for Israel. For the first time since its founding, AIPAC is starting two political action committees. Writing in The Jerusalem Post, Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC lobbyist, said the group will “probably accelerate its ad campaign against” Omar and Tlaib, as well as “a few others on its enemies list.”

The politics of Tlaib’s own position on the Palestinian question, however, may be improving for other reasons. Detroit’s population has fallen again, and congressional lines were recently redrawn into another jigsaw piece of a district, costing Michigan a seat. In January, Tlaib announced she would run for the new District 12, which includes only two-thirds of her old constituents, but now also includes Dearborn, a city with a large concentrated Arab American population. Tlaib’s challenger, Shanelle Jackson, has already tried to wield her identity against her, telling Jewish Insider: “She obviously is carrying the water of Palestine in all that she does.”

In 2019, days after telling the Squad to “go back” to their countries, Donald Trump called Tlaib a “crazed lunatic.” Denzel McCampbell, Tlaib’s communication director, told me that whenever there is an uptick in hateful calls and threats at the office, he knows that Fox News must have mentioned her. A Republican political tracker — an operative who regularly films the activities of a politician — follows her around regularly, a practice usually reserved for campaign season.

In her Washington office, Tlaib keeps a sample of the petroleum coke she collected in Detroit in a glass cabinet. A framed photo of Tlaib’s grandmother, whom she hasn’t seen in more than 10 years, looks over her desk. “You know how some people take naps?” she told me. “I quit in my head for 20 minutes, and pretend I’m not the Congressmember for the 13,” she said, referring to her district. “Not because of them, but because of this place.”

Rozina Ali is a contributing writer at the magazine. She is working on a book about the history of Islamophobia in the United States. Jarod Lew is an artist and a photographer based in Detroit. His works explore community, identity and displacement and have been exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Design Museum of London and the Philharmonie de Paris.