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      Biden now has his best opening to end Israel’s war on Gaza – and won’t use it | Mohamad Bazzi

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      When the histories of his administration are written, it will be clear that Joe Biden held on to his callous disregard for Palestinians until the end of his presidency. How else to explain why Biden would refuse a final chance to stop Israel’s brutal war on Gaza and save Palestinian lives, when he has nothing to lose?On Tuesday, the Biden administration quietly ignored its own deadline for Israel to increase the minuscule amount of humanitarian aid it allows to enter Gaza. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, imposed the 30-day deadline in a letter sent to Israeli officials on 13 October, which warned that they must take “concrete measures” to ensure that Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza have access to food, medicine and other necessities. The administration said it could suspend US military support to Israel if conditions did not improve. Despite the US ultimatum, the amount of aid reaching the besieged territory in October had dropped to its lowest level in 11 months.As the deadline passed, the Biden administration did what it has done for more than a year: it caved and continued sending weapons to the government of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the devastation and famine Israel has inflicted on Gaza. And Washington sheepishly told the world that it would not impose any consequences on Israel, even though the US is legally bound to stop arming an ally that blocks humanitarian aid in a conflict zone.It’s the latest in a long series of decisions by Biden over the past 13 months that show his disdain for Palestinian lives. But his lack of action this week is especially egregious because Biden is politically unrestrained: the presidential election is over, and Donald Trump won. Biden can do whatever he wants without incurring a political cost. He doesn’t even have to worry about a transition to his fellow Democrat and vice-president, Kamala Harris. If there was ever a time for Biden to use his considerable power to save Palestinians, this was it. Yet he squandered this final opportunity to make the right and moral choice – and help end the Gaza war before leaving office.Biden’s decision to keep supplying weapons to Israel reinforces his legacy as the primary enabler of the slaughter in Gaza, and Netanyahu’s campaign to expand the war into Lebanon. While Biden and his allies have done a lot of hand-wringing about Trump’s disregard for the rule of law, the Biden administration failed to uphold US law and its own policies – and it has undermined US credibility around the world even before Trump takes office once again.Biden has been fully complicit in Israel’s destruction of Gaza, in which more than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed, although the true figure is probably much higher. One estimate published by researchers in the Lancet, a medical journal, found that the death toll could eventually reach 186,000. That accounts for “indirect casualties” of war, such as widespread hunger, a cholera epidemic, unsanitary conditions and the destruction of Gaza’s health system.Following a relentless Israeli military assault that started after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, nearly all of Gaza’s 2.1 million people have been displaced at least once, and are now living in makeshift tents or in the ruins of bombed-out buildings. Last week, a UN-affiliated group of experts warned that famine is imminent, or may already be unfolding, in northern Gaza – and that the enclave’s entire population faces acute food insecurity, which is one step below a full-blown famine.Days after Biden decided to continue arming Israel into the twilight of his presidency, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a devastating 154-page report that contradicted most US and Israeli assurances that Israel is not violating international law. The report, issued on Thursday, concluded: “Israeli authorities have caused the massive, deliberate forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since October 2023 and are responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity.” HRW urged western governments to impose sanctions and suspend their arms shipments to Israel.The US has provided Israel with nearly $18bn in weapons and other military assistance since October 2023, according to a report released last month by Brown University. Washington spent another $4.8bn on its own military activities in the Middle East due to the conflict. Overall, the Biden administration spent at least $22.7bn in US taxpayer funds to enable Netanyahu and his government to prolong the Gaza war.But the US administration did not have to become so deeply complicit in Israel’s war crimes. Biden and his aides had the leverage, policy tools and legal mechanisms to restrain Israel, end the conflict, and save thousands of Palestinian lives. For months, Biden, along with his secretary of state, squandered any influence they could have exerted over Netanyahu by refusing to enforce US law and their own administration’s policies on weapons transfers.In February, as Biden faced pressure from a handful of Democrats in Congress critical of his unwavering support for Israel, he issued a new national security memo which required the state department to certify that recipients of US weapons would allow the delivery of humanitarian aid during active conflicts and abide by international law. Biden’s memo did not set new policies for arms transfers to foreign countries, but instead used provisions of existing US laws, especially under the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWashington can suspend shipments if it suspects that a foreign military will use US weapons to carry out violations of international law, or to countries that block the delivery of humanitarian aid – as Israel has done throughout its war in Gaza. By May, the state department sent a 46-page report to Congress full of bureaucratic double-speak to justify Biden’s decision to flout US and international laws to protect Netanyahu.Long before the administration’s report, the UN and human rights groups had amply documented that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war – a violation of international law – and deliberately blocking food and other supplies from entering Gaza.Yet the report avoided concluding that the Israeli military had obstructed humanitarian aid, or violated international law while using US weapons. Such findings would have forced Biden to suspend most weapons shipments to Israel under the policies outlined in his own national security memo. But instead of upholding US law and using the suspension of military support to force Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire, Biden sat by and enabled Israel to kill thousands of Palestinians since May.Back then, Biden was still running for re-election and could have feared political repercussions for breaking with Netanyahu. But this week, the US president was as free from politics as he’s ever been in his entire career. He simply decided that Palestinians don’t matter – and sealed his legacy as the enabler of Israel’s war crimes.

      Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian center for Near Eastern studies, and a journalism professor at New York University More

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      Elizabeth Warren denounces Biden administration over Gaza humanitarian situation

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      Elizabeth Warren, a leading progressive voice in the US Senate, has denounced the Biden administration’s failure to punish Israel over the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza and endorsed a joint resolution of disapproval in Congress.The amount of aid reaching the territory has dropped to the lowest level in 11 months, official Israeli figures show. The White House last month gave Israel an ultimatum of 30 days to improve conditions or risk losing military support. As the deadline expired on Tuesday, international aid groups said Israel had fallen far short.But the US state department announced it would not take any punitive action, insisting that Israel was making limited progress and was not blocking aid and therefore not violating US law. Warren condemned the Biden administration’s decision to continue supplying arms to its ally.“On October 13, the Biden administration told Prime Minister Netanyahu that his government had 30 days to increase humanitarian aid into Gaza or face the consequences under US law, which would include cutting off military assistance,” the Massachusetts senator said in a statement shared with the Guardian.“Thirty days later, the Biden administration acknowledged that Israel’s actions had not significantly expanded food, water and basic necessities for desperate Palestinian civilians. Despite Netanyahu’s failure to meet the United States’ demands, the Biden administration has taken no action to restrict the flow of offensive weapons.”For the first time on the issue, Warren threw her weight behind a joint resolution of disapproval, a legislative tool that enables Congress to overturn actions taken by the executive branch. Such a resolution must pass both the House of Representatives and the Senate.She added: “The failure by the Biden administration to follow US law and to suspend arms shipments is a grave mistake that undermines American credibility worldwide. If this administration will not act, Congress must step up to enforce US law and hold the Netanyahu government accountable through a joint resolution of disapproval.”Eight international aid groups have said that Israel failed to meet the US demands to improve access for assistance, while food security experts have said it is likely that famine is imminent in parts of Gaza.Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, told reporters on Wednesday that Israel had taken some steps to improve aid but they needed to be sustained to take effect. He called on Israel to rescind evacuation orders to allow those displaced by its operations to return home and to resume commercial trucking deliveries into Gaza.Biden has backed Israel since Hamas-led gunmen attacked the country in October 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages. Since then, more than 43,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in Gaza, with 2 million displaced people and much of the strip reduced to rubble.The president, whose term ends in January and who will be replaced by his predecessor Donald Trump, is facing growing dissent from Democrats over his handling of the war. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told Zeteo this week: “President Biden’s inaction, given the suffering in Gaza, is shameful. I mean, there’s no other word for it.”Bernie Sanders, an independent senator for Vermont, announced that next week he will bring joint resolutions of disapproval that would block the sale of certain weapons to Israel. “There is no longer any doubt that Netanyahu’s extremist government is in clear violation of US and international law as it wages a barbaric war against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” he said.And on Thursday, 15 members of the Senate and 69 members of the House announced efforts to press the Biden administration to hold members of the Netanyahu government – specifically, the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir – and others accountable for the rise in settler violence, settlement expansion and destabilising activity in the West Bank. More

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      Is Donald Trump a foreign policy dove? If only | Mehdi Hasan

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      “If Kamala wins, only death and destruction await because she is the candidate of endless wars,” declaimed Donald Trump at a rally in Michigan, on the Friday before the election. “I am the candidate of peace.” In a typically ridiculous rhetorical flourish, Trump added: “I am peace.”Nevertheless, despite the ridiculousness, the president-elect in recent weeks succeeded in connecting with plenty of of anti-war voters tired of the United States’ “forever wars”. He went to Dearborn, the “capital” of Arab America, attacked Kamala Harris for campaigning with the pro-war Cheneys, and came away with an endorsement from a local imam who called him the “peace” candidate.In fact, I have lost count of the number of leftists who have told me in recent months: “Trump didn’t start any new wars.” Sorry, what? Trump spent his four years in the White House escalating every single conflict that he inherited from Barack Obama. Many have forgotten that Trump bombed the Assad government in Syria twice; dropped the “mother of all bombs” on Afghanistan; illegally assassinated Iranian general Qasem Soleimani on Iraqi soil; armed Saudi Arabia’s genocide in Yemen; and made John Bolton his national security adviser. Few are even aware that Trump launched more drone strikes in his first two years in office than Obama, dubbed “the drone president”, did across eight years in office.But this time, we were told, it would be different. This time Trump meant it. No more war! No more neocons! Some took heart from Trump’s very public rejection of arch-hawks Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley. Others signal-boosted efforts by RFK Jr, Don Jr and Tucker Carlson to block neoconservative figures from joining the new Trump-Vance administration. “I’m on it,” bragged Trump’s eldest failson.It was all for naught. “I am peace”? Really? Consider who Trump now plans to nominate as his secretary of state: Marco Rubio. The Florida senator was once an outspoken critic of the president-elect, calling him a “con man”, “the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency”, and questioning the size of his manhood. Fast forward almost a decade and Rubio has happily bent the knee to Trump in order to become fourth in line for the presidency and to take charge of US diplomacy.The slight problem is that Rubio isn’t a fan of diplomacy; he’s a fan of war. An ardent hawk, Rubio defended the invasion of Iraq during his first Senate run in 2010. He has since backed regime change everywhere from Cuba to Venezuela to Iran to Syria. In 2019 he voted to oppose withdrawing US forces from both Syria and Afghanistan. Over the past year, he has been one of the strongest supporters in Congress of Benjamin Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza, dismissing widespread Palestinian civilian casualties as the fault only of Hamas, and saying that Israel cannot coexist “with these savages … They have to be eradicated.”“I am peace”? At Rubio’s side, running the Trump transition team at the state department, is Brian Hook, a long-standing Iran hawk and co-founder of the John Hay Initiative, an anti-isolationist Republican group. He was the architect of the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran during Trump’s first term. And, as I revealed for the Intercept in 2018, Hook was in charge of the the state department’s policy planning staff when one of its internal memos called for an “Islamic reformation”.“I am peace”? Trump wants Elise Stefanik to be the new US ambassador to the United Nations. The New York congresswoman is perhaps best known for being a Trump sycophant par excellence but she is also a long-standing Republican hawk whose first job out of college was working in the Bush White House. She later went on to be employed by two of the most hawkish thinktanks in Washington DC, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI). The FDD is obsessed (obsessed!) with regime change in Iran, while the FPI, which was co-founded by neocons Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan and closed down in 2017, loudly pushed for an expansion of the war in Afghanistan.Stefanik is also a blind supporter of Israel’s war on Gaza, backs an uninterrupted supply of US weapons to the Netanyahu government, and has slammed Joe Biden for being too tough on the Jewish state. In May, she gave an address to the Knesset in which she called for a “total victory” against Hamas.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I am peace”? Trump is appointing Florida congressman Mike Waltz as his national security adviser. Waltz, a former Green Beret, is perhaps the leading China hawk in Congress. Like Stefanik, Waltz is also an alumnus of the Bush administration and an enthusiast for the “war on terror”. As late as 2017, he was still calling for a “multi-generational war” against terrorism and suggesting the US should be ready for “a lot more fighting” in Afghanistan. That sound dovish to you? In fact, here’s the best (worst?) part: he served as counterterrorism adviser to the most hawkish vice-president in US history, the prince of darkness himself: Richard B Cheney. Got that? Trump spent the last few weeks of his presidential campaign attacking Dick and Liz Cheney, suggesting the latter should be forced to face “nine barrels” on the battlefield, and then just days after winning the election tapped the elder Cheney’s former counterterrorism adviser to be his own national security adviser. File it under: You. Cannot. Make. This. Stuff. Up.“I am peace”? Trump is sending former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee to Israel as his ambassador. Huckabee is a Christian evangelical so extreme that he believes there is “no such thing as a West Bank” and “no such thing as an occupation”. He compared Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal to the Nazi Holocaust and was such a proud supporter of the Iraq war that he even criticized George W Bush for setting a timetable for withdrawal!“I am peace”? Trump’s pick for defense secretary is Fox host Peter Hegseth, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dubbed “Trump’s war whisperer”, Hegseth called for the US to disregard the “rigged” rules of war in order to attack Iranian religious and cultural sites in 2020, and also helped persuade Trump to pardon three soldiers accused or convicted of war crimes in 2019. How do you get more hawkish than a supporter of a literal war criminal?In Washington DC, as the saying goes, personnel is policy. Trump is surrounding himself with hawks so you can be assured that his will be a very hawkish administration. Again.But this is the Trump playbook: run as a dove, govern as a hawk. It’s what he did in 2016 and again this year. Attack neocons; get elected; hire neocons.So “Donald the dove”, as Maureen Dowd of the New York Times once put it? If only. Whether it is on domestic policy or foreign policy, Trump remains a conman. Don’t take my word for it. Take his new secretary of state’s.

      Mehdi Hasan is the CEO and editor-in-chief of the new media company Zeteo More

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      Trump builds hawkish team with Rubio and Waltz tipped for top jobs

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      Donald Trump has chosen a pair of establishment Republicans from Florida for senior roles in his administration as he builds a national security team that looks more hawkish than the isolationist America First brand of foreign policy that he has championed in public.Trump was expected to select the senator Marco Rubio as his secretary of state, the US’s top diplomat, and has asked the congressman Mike Waltz, a retired Green Beret known as a China hawk, to become his national security adviser, a powerful role that would help shape his policies on the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as around the world.Rubio is a noted foreign policy hawk with hardline policies on China, Iran, and on Venezuela, where he has led US efforts to unseat the president, Nicolás Maduro. He was one of the earliest China hawks in Washington, where Beijing is now viewed with extreme scepticism by both parties, and has served as a co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China.On Ukraine he is likely to tailor his views to Trump’s and those around him, including Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr, who have voiced sharp criticism of continued funding for Ukraine’s defence against the Russian invasion. Rubio was one of 15 Republican lawmakers to vote against a $61bn supplemental aid bill in the Senate earlier this year that led to a months-long delay of crucial funding for the Ukrainian military.Rubio said earlier this month on national television: “I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong in standing up to Russia. But at the end of the day what we are funding here is a stalemate war, and it needs to be brought to a conclusion, or that country is going to be set back 100 years.”Rubio, whom Trump nicknamed “Little Marco” during his first presidential run, has gone from a regular target of Trump’s insults to a loyal surrogate to the Republican president-elect.Trump had regularly denigrated him in the past as a member of the Republican establishment, calling him a “puppet” and saying he was a “nervous basket case”. But he has been in lockstep with Trump during the campaign and has worked with Democrats and fellow Republicans in the Senate foreign relations committee and intelligence committee, making it likely he will have an easy confirmation process in that body.That stands in sharp relief to a reported rival for the role of secretary of state, Ric Grenell, Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence and ambassador to Germany, who has proven himself as a loyalist but was known in Washington and Europe as combative and would have faced a tough confirmation process.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWaltz, Trump’s choice for national security adviser, has argued that Trump should move quickly to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine in order to transfer US focus and military assets back to the Indo-Pacific region and counter China.Those policies dovetail with Trump’s isolationist tendencies in terms of seeking a speedy resolution to the war in Ukraine, even if it is achieved by forcing Ukraine to make concessions to Russia.“Supporting Ukraine for ‘as long as it takes’ in a war of attrition against a larger power is a recipe for failure,” Waltz and a co-author, Matthew Kroenig, wrote in an op-ed for the Economist this year. “The next administration should aim, as Donald Trump has argued, to ‘end the war and stop the killing’.” They said the US should use economic leverage on energy sales to “bring Mr Putin to the table”.“If he refuses to talk, Washington can, as Mr Trump argued, provide more weapons to Ukraine with fewer restrictions on their use,” they continued. “Faced with this pressure, Mr Putin will probably take the opportunity to wind the conflict down.”With regards to Israel’s war in Gaza, the pair appeared ready to give Benjamin Netanyahu carte blanche to “let Israel finish the job”, as Trump has said. They also suggested launching a “diplomatic and economic pressure campaign to stop [Iran] and to constrain their support for terror proxies”.“Washington should maintain a military presence in the region, but with the war in Gaza and Lebanon concluded, it can transfer critical capabilities back to the Indo-Pacific,” they wrote. More

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      Not changing course on Gaza was a colossal mistake by Kamala Harris | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      Could Kamala Harris have won the election if she had promised to change course in Gaza? It’s impossible to know, of course, but there’s reason to think so. Instead, Harris hewed far too closely to Biden’s position, alienating large numbers of voters along the way. The result? We can expect the catastrophe for the Palestinian people to continue, while we learn to live with a much more dangerous Donald Trump, a man whose far-right agenda threatens many of us in and out of the United States.What seems to have doomed Harris most was not so much traditional Democrats casting votes for the Republican Trump, though there was some of that. In fact, party loyalty, at around 95% for both parties, was basically the same as in 2020. Rather, Harris’s shortcomings point to the rank-and-file of the Democratic party not coming out to vote and to more first-time voters casting Republican ballots. We don’t have the final voter tally yet, but so far Harris has amassed just over 68m votes, compared with Trump’s 72m. Biden, by contrast, earned over 81m votes in 2020. By the time the final numbers are in, it’s likely that Trump will have won more than the 74m votes he had in 2020, and Harris will have been the first Democrat to lose the popular vote in 20 years.Some of those lost votes surely must be attributable to Harris’s weak position on Palestine. A significant majority of young people sympathize with Palestinian rights, according to the Pew Research Center, and young people are also highly critical of Biden’s policies on Palestine. Meanwhile, reporting from around the nation indicates that voter turnout among young people in this election was low. The Chicago board of elections noted that 53% of registered voters between the ages of 18 and 24 cast a ballot, well below the city’s average turnout of 58%. And compared with the 2020 election, Trump doubled his support from first-time voters there.In Dearborn, Michigan, where 55% of the population is of Middle Eastern descent, Trump scored a victory over Harris, an upset considering Biden won Dearborn with almost 70% of the vote in 2020. And while Black voters continued to overwhelmingly support Harris, their numbers also dropped, reflecting a lack of excitement for the vice-president. Christopher Shell, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Foreign Policy magazine that “it’s hard to ignore the impact of US war-making under the Biden-Harris administration and the administration’s inconsistent stance on issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict, which likely deflated enthusiasm for Harris among the influential Black voting bloc”.If you’re wondering what such inconsistencies regarding Gaza could be, you can watch a report by CNN that aired on 1 November, which showed how the Harris campaign aired two completely different ads about their position. One ad, aimed at Arab American voters in Michigan, shows Harris speaking from a podium. “What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating,” she says. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.” Meanwhile, in another ad, this time aimed at Jewish voters in Pennsylvania, she says: “Let me be clear. I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7.”It gets worse. In the Pennsylvania ad, the campaign also spliced together two parts of a Harris speech, which enabled them to cut out the part where Harris talks about ending the suffering in Gaza so that “the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination”. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski sums this all up understatedly. “Here you have two entirely different constituencies,” he says, “and they are getting two entirely different messages.”I realize I sound like I’m Monday-morning quarterbacking, but many thousands of people – myself included – had been warning the Democrats for months that they had to take a stand against the wholesale slaughter of innocent people if they wanted to earn our trust, let alone earn our vote. Instead, not only did the Harris campaign refuse to let a Palestinian American on stage during their national convention in August and not only did they remove an Arab Muslim Democrat from a rally in late October, but they also decided in their wisdom to trot out two different messages to two different communities, thinking no one would notice. It seems they believed that Democrats would not vote for Trump in any large number, but how did they not realize that if you are repeatedly ignored, insulted and slighted by your party, then you just might not come out to vote.Obviously, Gaza was not the only issue in this campaign, and voters had multiple reasons for their choices, including the economy and concerns over asylum policies, among others. But conventional wisdom already seems to be lining up to say that Gaza played no discernible role in Harris’s defeat, pointing out that the margins in Trump’s victories in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia appear to be greater than any measurable voter discontent over a largely US-funded genocide, the term, incidentally, that prominent experts increasingly use to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza.But much of that post-election analysis is based on exit polling, and exit polling, as far as I know, does not aim to capture why people did not come out to vote in the first place. Why Democratic voters didn’t show up is the crucial question that must be posed. And the answer, I suspect, is abundantly clear. Not changing course on Gaza was a colossal mistake on the part of the Harris campaign, a fatal error certainly for Palestinians and quite likely, as we now see, for Americans, too.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Musk-linked Pac accused of targeting Jewish and Arab Americans in swing states

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      A political action committee (Pac) linked to Elon Musk is accused of targeting Jewish and Arab American voters in swing states with dramatically different messages about Kamala Harris’s position on Gaza, a strategy by Trump allies aimed at peeling off Democratic support for the vice-president.Texts, mailers, social media ads and billboards targeting heavily Arab American areas in metro Detroit paint Harris as a staunch ally of Israel who will continue supplying arms to the country. Meanwhile, residents in metro Detroit or areas of Pennsylvania with higher Jewish populations have been receiving messaging that underscores her alleged support for the Palestinian cause.Those aimed at Arab American populations claim Harris will “ALWAYS stand with Israel” and “stand up against Hamas and radical terrorists in Gaza”. Another notes that she has a Jewish husband, and describes the pair as “America’s pro-Israel power couple”.

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      Meanwhile, texts and mailers sent to heavily Jewish areas claim “two faced Kamala stands with Palestine”, picturing her in front of a Palestinian flag. A Pennsylvania ad asked: “Why did Kamala Harris support denying Israel the weapons needed to defeat the Hamas terrorists who massacred thousands? And why did Harris show sympathy for college protesters who are rabidly antisemitic?”The different ads, produced by the Future Coalition Pac, can be viewed in Google’s ad transparency center.“They are stirring up and trying to create trouble,” Mark Brewer, a Michigan elections attorney and former head of the state’s Democratic party, told the Guardian. Messages depicting Harris as pro-Israel or having a Jewish husband in Michigan “are not designed to help her – they’re designed to hurt her”.Metro Detroit has the largest Arab American population in the US per capita, until this election a solidly Democratic voting bloc that helped boost the party in the divided swing state. But the Trump campaign has made inroads with the groups as frustration mounts over the Biden administration’s support for Israel in its bombardments of Gaza and Lebanon.Another Musk Pac is separately facing legal action and backlash for mistreating canvassers, including failing to pay them.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMany mailers and billboards are from Future Coalition, which was established in July. In its Federal Election Commission (FEC) paperwork, the Pac claims its ads are in support of Harris, despite the fact that those in Michigan clearly aim to sabotage her. The only funding it recorded was a $3m contribution from the Musk-funded Building America’s Future non-profit.One billboard from the group in a heavily Arab American Michigan area is more open about its aims: it states that the Democratic US Senate candidate Elissa Slotkin, who is Jewish and in a tight race with her GOP counterpart, is “more focused on arming Israel than helping your family”.But some people in Arab American areas around Detroit report receiving up to five text messages a day from unidentified senders touting Harris’s alleged support for Israel. The FEC does not require organizations sending political texts to identify themselves, Brewer said, which he called “a real problem and a big loophole”. The FEC in 2002 ruled that identification in text messages was not required in part because the messages of character limits on the messages.The same Pac is producing purportedly pro-Harris ads targeting Pennsylvania on issues unrelated to Gaza, one of which reads: “Imagine a world where the American Dream has no borders,” and features a photo of migrants at the US border. More

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      Harris vows at Michigan rally to ‘do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza’

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      Kamala Harris pledged to “do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza” in her final rally in Michigan on Sunday, as she attempted to appeal to the state’s large Arab American and Muslim American population two days out from the election.Michigan is home to about 240,000 registered Muslim voters, a majority of whom voted for Biden in 2020, helping him to a narrow victory over Donald Trump. But Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in the state have expressed dissatisfaction over the vice-president’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza, and polling suggests that these voters are gravitating towards Jill Stein, the Green party candidate.With Harris and the former president essentially tied in Michigan, a drop in voting numbers for either could be critical, and Harris made a clear appeal at the beginning of her speech.“We are joined today by leaders of the Arab American community, which has deep and proud roots here in Michigan, and I want to say this year has been difficult, given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon,” Harris said.“It is devastating, and as president, I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure and ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom, security and self-determination.”Speaking at the Michigan State University campus, Harris repeated her campaign promise to “turn the page on a decade of politics driven by fear and division”. Harris did not mention Trump by name in East Lansing, as she gave an address that struck a hopeful tone for the future.“America is ready for a fresh start, ready for a new way forward, where we see our fellow American not as an enemy, but as a neighbor,” she said.“We are ready for a president who knows that the true measure of a leader is not based on who you beat down, it is based on who you lift up.”

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      Harris was making her fourth stop of the day in Michigan, having earlier spoken at a church in Detroit and stopped by a barber shop in Pontiac. The state is key to her chances of success, but the result is likely to be close. Trump won Michigan by about 10,000 votes in 2016 as he demolished Democrats’ “blue wall”, and Biden also carried the state by a narrow margin in 2020. Trump is holding his final rally of the campaign in Michigan on Monday night, but Harris was defiant.“We need to finish strong. So for the next two days we still have a lot of work to do but here’s the thing: we like hard work. Hard work is good work. Hard work is joyful work,” she said.“And make no mistake, we will win.”It was a raucous atmosphere at the rally, Harris’s final stop in Michigan before Tuesday’s vote. She repeatedly had to pause for loud chants of “Kamala, Kamala” from a diverse crowd who seemed enthusiastic about voting for her“I feel more energized and more excited in this election than I have in a while,” said Latonya Demps, 40, a small business owner and a Michigan State alumna.“I’m very excited to vote for Harris. As a woman she speaks for my rights and the rights of women that we have fought for for a very, very long time: the right to choose, the right to have equity and access, also freedom for all of us in terms of climate change, in terms of our economy, the type of neighbors we want to have, the families that we want to raise, I think she represents the values that are really important to me.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis week Democrats have fought to counter the gains made by Stein among Arab American and Muslim American voters in Michigan, with the Democratic National Committee launching a series of ads on Instagram and YouTube aiming to discourage people from voting for Stein and Cornel West, who is running as an independent and is also a critic of Israel.The ads highlight recent comments by Trump that he likes Stein “very much”, because: “She takes 100% from [Democrats].” The pro-Democrat organization MoveOn has also been running a “seven-figure” ad campaign this week, which it said was designed to appeal to people who are yet to decide on a candidate and “third-party curious voters”.Polling on the issue has yielded inconsistent results. Last week a national survey of Arab Americans, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit, found 43% supporting Trump compared with 41% for Harris, and 4% backing Stein, while a survey of Muslim Americans, by the Council on American-Islamic Relations of American Muslims, found that 42.3% plan to vote for Stein, 41% for Harris and 9.8% for Trump.Despite that uncertainty, Harris supporters left buoyant on Sunday night.“She’s going to be the first Black woman president that we’ve had. She’s actually going to fight for our rights. She’s fighting for women’s reproductive rights, she’s also fighting for the middle class, for entrepreneurs, and business owners like myself,” said Zay Worthey, 19.Worthey said he was “100%” confident that Harris will win the White House on Tuesday.“Because she has something that Donald Trump doesn’t: community,” Worthey said.“She’s really working and fighting for the people of America, and Donald Trump is just only working for the people of the rich.” More