By Mohammed Mhawish, contributer to A Land With A People
While Americans voted in their next president on Tuesday, the message to us Palestinians remained as clear as ever: America’s promises of freedom and justice don’t include us. But the election does have an outsize stake in our safety and survival.
For my family and millions of Palestinians, this moment is all too familiar: the fear, the helplessness, the resigned certainty that nothing ever really changes. And still it hurts, because the stakes in this election couldn’t be more personal. For us, the election of Donald Trump isn’t just a blip on the political radar or a shift in foreign policy. It’s a challenge to sustain existence while the world seems intent on erasing us. It’s about surviving 77 years under occupation and over a year of ongoing genocide — the very genocide I barely survived last December, when my family and I, including my elderly parents and 3-year-old son, were buried under the rubble of what was once our home after it was struck by an Israeli-fired, U.S.-made missile.
The date: Dec. 7, 2023. Our bones were crushed beneath layers of concrete and twisted metal as we spent hours in the dark, buried together and praying to be pulled out in one piece. The trauma of that night, in both its physical and emotional toll, of my son’s small, fragile hand clinging to mine, comes back to me now as Trump prepares to take power once more.
After surviving the strike and escaping the war, my son stopped asking when we could go home. He’s learned that “home” is just something we remember, something that crumbled with our walls that night. At 3 years old — or, per the language of Gaza, two wars old — he already knows to duck when he hears a rumble overhead, instinctively reaching for my hand.
Our suffering in light of this election isn’t some ambiguous concept. Every missile that reduces our homes to rubble, every sanction that chokes our economy, traces back to Washington. Policies that might seem like distant concerns of foreign affairs to many Americans have left millions of Palestinians trapped in unending trauma, where survival itself has become our only form of resistance.
The Palestinian people have spent generations waiting for an American president who would care enough to hold Israel accountable — to see our humanity and put an end to this constant brutality.
I’ve seen how American political leaders toy with the idea of change, how they dress up their campaigns with grand ideas about peace and justice. Yet each president brushes off our reality. Barack Obama promised hope and “change we could believe in,” yet we got more bombs. Joe Biden offered a different approach, pledging unyielding support for Israel, leaving us to live through even more horror. Vice President Kamala Harris’ niceties included no concrete promises to protect Palestinians, but she did pledge to continue financial support for Israel. And Trump’s bluntness, as he promises to come back swinging, reminds us not to hold out hope for change.
For decades, bipartisan U.S. policies have reinforced Israel’s impunity, from unconditional military aid packages to diplomatic shielding at the United Nations, allowing the erosion of Palestinian rights to go unchallenged. Trump’s brazen support for Israel isn’t a deviation but a natural progression of a legacy in which U.S. presidents have continually prioritized geopolitical alliances over Palestinian lives.
But Trump’s comeback — and the Democratic Party’s own failure to champion any real justice for us — unveils a stark truth: America’s entrenched political system is built upon the erasure of our suffering. Every administration carries the same legacy of apathy, emboldening Israel’s destructive agenda and casting aside our pleas. It’s a bipartisan moral failure that reduces our lives to collateral damage, sacrificed to preserve strategic alliances. This isn’t about just one election or one president. It’s a policy anchored in decades of American complicity in our oppression.
America’s unwavering support for Israel reveals a deeper collapse of the ideals the country claims to stand for. Principles like freedom and justice now barely flicker, distorted into tools of control, hollowed out by years of hypocrisy. When those ideals ring hollow for people like us — oppressed and silenced — the democratic values America champions feel like just another weapon turned against us.
With Trump in the White House again, the weight of it all feels crushing, with even more to fear in the years ahead. His stance on Palestine is as entrenched and dismissive as ever. His first term, from 2017 to 2021, left a bitter legacy by empowering Israel’s illegal occupation and writing blank checks for its military arsenal.
By moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, he treated our lives as bargaining chips. Trump slashed U.S. support for Palestinian refugees, effectively pushing millions into greater poverty and reducing our access to even the barest necessities. (Biden in 2021 reinstated $200 million in aid to Palestinians that Trump had cut.) Actions like these serve as solid proof, as elections come and go, that U.S. support for Israel is more ironclad than any candidate’s promise of “peace.”
Trump killed the two-state solution that was already hanging by a thread. And Biden? He’s talked about peace and rights but in ways that mean little when he continues to green-light the horrors unfolding in Gaza. Under his watch, Israel’s bombardments have only intensified. He provided billions of taxpayer dollars’ worth of military aid to Israel. His empty promises of peace sounded cruel when our hospitals and schools were flattened. During his recent presidential campaign, Trump hasn’t just promised unwavering support for Israel, he stated outright that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hadn’t gone far enough — a chilling endorsement of more destruction.
Whether red or blue, Democrat or Republican, as Palestinians, we know we have to fasten our seatbelts and brace for yet another four years of survival — for a life of terror and deprivation, of invisibility, of being told, through silence, that our suffering doesn’t matter, by whoever takes office.
This is our world, created and forgotten by the U.S. The billions of dollars in military aid, the weapons, the diplomatic shielding, it all has translated to fear, to lifelong traumas, to endless nights bracing for another missile, to telling my son that the bombardments outside the house were fireworks as I try to comfort him during the night. I can’t help but wonder: Will he see his next birthday? Will we see peace in our homeland? Will the homes of hundreds of others in Gaza be standing when morning comes? Will we ever feel the safety that so many American presidents have long promised us?
There is no reason to believe Trump will stop the destruction in Gaza, nor the devastation for those in the West Bank trying to stand up against settler violence and the illegal seizure of their lands. The war in Gaza has raged for over a year now, and we aren’t expecting a man who openly disregards our lives to bring an end to it.
Trump’s comeback means more unquestioned support for Israel’s war machine. And Palestinians will be there to pick up the pieces, over and over again, as we have for generations.
You can find this article here
A Land With a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism, edited by Esther Farmer, Rosalind Petchesky & Sarah Sills.
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