Some pro-Palestinian activists have urged their supporters to support third-party candidates. (File)
Washington:
Kamala Harris’s U.S. presidential campaign team has hired an Egyptian-American lawyer and former Department of Homeland Security official to help reach out to Arab-American voters who wield influence in some states and could help decide the Nov. 5 election, the team said Wednesday.
Brenda Abdelall’s job would be to win the support of a population frustrated with U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Vice President Harris, a Democrat, has already hired Afghan-American lawyer Nasrina Bargzie to reach out to Muslim Americans.
Harris is running neck and neck with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. The votes of Muslim and Arab Americans could help decide the outcome in swing states like Michigan, where there have been street protests over the war between Israel and Gaza.
US President Joe Biden won a large share of Arab and Muslim voters in 2020, but his support for Israel despite the high death toll in Gaza has frustrated many members of the community, who launched an “undecided” campaign against him in the Democratic nomination election.
Michigan, where Harris will visit next week, is home to one of the largest Muslim and Arab American populations in the United States. More than 100,000 voters cast “undecided” ballots in the state’s primary for Biden, who withdrew as a candidate on July 21.
Some activists say they blame Harris for the Biden administration’s Israel policy and the crisis in the Gaza Strip.
After the Democratic National Convention last week, pro-Palestinian activists said Harris had failed to demonstrate a break with the status quo.
While pro-Palestinian voters are not expected to vote for Trump and have not signaled support for the Republican, some activists have launched a campaign called “Abandon Harris,” urging their supporters to support third-party candidates.
Abdelall, Harris’ choice for the Arab-American, was most recently senior adviser to the Secretary of Homeland Security. She joined the agency in January 2021, shortly after Trump left office, to become chief of staff of the department’s Office of Civil Rights.
Abdelall, who grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, previously ran a food blog and website focused on Middle Eastern cuisine and taught Middle Eastern cooking classes at a cooking school in Northern Virginia.
The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict began on October 7, when the Palestinian Islamic group Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli sources.
According to the local health ministry, Israel’s subsequent assault on the Hamas-ruled enclave has now killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and displaced almost the entire population of 2.3 million, leading to a famine and accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice, which Israel denies.
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