“Dearborn doesn’t sleep,” I recently told an out-of-state visitor to my hometown.
It was a reference to the celebratory time of Ramadan, when our city breaks bread together for iftar at sunset and suhoor, before sunrise, each day. For a month, Dearborn is bustling around the clock: Business districts buzz during the day, and residents and visitors flock to break the fast together every night, gathering over hot, heaping plates filled with some of the best food in the country, surrounded by neighbors of all backgrounds.
I have always spoken these words with warmth and pride for my community, but after 130 days of genocide in Gaza, the phrase has taken on new meaning.
Dearborn does not sleep. We have not slept. Our entire city is haunted by the images, videos and stories streaming out of Gaza. Life seems heavily veiled in a haze of shared grief, fear, helplessness and even guilt as we try to understand how our tax dollars could be used by those we elected to slaughter our relatives overseas.
We don’t have to imagine the violence and injustice being carried out against the Palestinian people. Many of us lived it, and still bear the scars of life under occupation and apartheid.
Since the Nakba of 1948, many Palestinians have been forcibly displaced by the state of Israel. My neighbors still have the documents they had to carry between Israeli military checkpoints, to prove they could walk the streets of their own ancestral villages. My aunts, uncles and elders recall life under Israeli occupation and wrestling with the decision to flee the only home they ever knew. I have seen grief gut a constituent whose family pulled both his grandmothers from the rubble of their shared apartment building after it was leveled by Israeli missiles. Even before the horrific events of Oct. 7, last year was the deadliest year in nearly two decades for Palestinians in the West Bank.
Now, friends pray for the safe return of family members still in the West Bank. A shop owner from Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem that has come under threat from radical Zionist settlers, wonders what will happen to Al Aqsa Mosque. His family has cared for it for generations.
At a Dearborn City Council meeting in November, a resident testified that his family has buried at least 80 relatives in Gaza since Israel began its bombing campaign in October. Eighty relatives. Eighty innocent lives.
What compounds the constant fear and mourning is a visceral sense of betrayal. In the past three federal elections, Arab American voters in Michigan have become a crucial and dependable voting bloc for the Democratic Party, and we were part of the wave that delivered for Joe Biden four years ago. But this fact seems long forgotten by our candidate as he calls for our votes once more while at the same time selling the very bombs that Benjamin Netanyahu’s military is dropping on our family and friends.
Until just a few months ago, I firmly believed that Joe Biden was one of the most consequential and transformative presidents that our nation had seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His administration managed to put in place groundbreaking domestic policies in the last three years that his predecessors couldn’t manage even in two terms. But no amount of landmark legislation can outweigh the more than 100,000 people killed, wounded or missing in Gaza. The scales of justice will not allow it.
President Biden is proving many of our worst fears about our government true: that regardless of how loud your voice may be, how many calls to government officials you may make, how many peaceful protests you organize and attend, nothing will change.
My greatest fear is that Mr. Biden will not be remembered as the president who saved American democracy in 2020, but rather as the president who sacrificed it for Benjamin Netanyahu in 2024.
Dearborn is not alone in calling for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. A poll conducted last fall found that 66 percent of Americans and a whopping 80 percent of Democrats want a cease-fire. However, the president and our elected representatives in Congress seem content to ignore the will of the American people.
This betrayal feels uniquely un-American. When conflict shoved them out of their homes, many of Dearborn’s parents fled to Michigan in pursuit of the American dream and the promise that their voices would be heard and valued. Today, we instill in our children the American aspiration of standing on the side of justice for all people, everywhere.
Two years ago, when Americans across the country rallied to offer support and aid to Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression, so did we. There are still blue and yellow flags fading against the facades of homes and businesses across my city. But when Dearborn residents flew the Palestinian flag this past fall, they were met with threats.
Too often, it feels as if our president and members of Congress have turned their backs on us. In many ways, the Democratic Party has turned its back on us, too.
This month, I agreed to meet with senior policy officials from the Biden administration on the condition that they be open to withdrawing their support for the right-wing Israeli government now bombarding Gaza. A delegation visited me in Dearborn on Feb. 8, fully aware of these terms.
I firmly believe that there is always time to do the right thing. But as I imparted to the officials I met with, words are not enough. The only way to ensure the safe return of all hostages and prisoners is through an immediate cease-fire. The only way to ensure that unrestricted humanitarian aid enters Gaza is through an immediate cease-fire. The only way to establish a just and legitimate Palestinian state is through an immediate cease-fire.
With every day that passes, every minute that the president fails to do the right thing, the belief that I, and so many others, have invested in him dwindles. With every American-made bomb that Israel’s right-wing government drops on Gaza, a stark numbness coats everything, restricting any space for belief to grow.
Four days after our meeting in Dearborn, the United States government watched as Israel, which had corralled innocent Palestinian civilians into Rafah, one of the last safe havens in Gaza, besieged the city overnight, killing dozens in what experts believe could amount to an egregious war crime.
I, like many of my fellow Americans, cannot in good conscience support the continuation of a genocide. This has weighed heavy on my heart, particularly as the presidential primary election in Michigan has drawn near.
It is for that reason that I will be checking the box for “Uncommitted” on my presidential primary ballot next Tuesday. In doing so, I am choosing hope.
The hope that Mr. Biden will listen. The hope that he and those in Democratic leadership will choose the salvation of our democracy over aiding and abetting Mr. Netanyahu’s war crimes. The hope that our families in Gaza will have food in their bellies, clean water to drink, access to health care and the internet and above all else, a just state in which they have the right to determine their own future.
The hope that, one day soon, Dearborn will be able to sleep again.
In my sleepless nights, I have often questioned what kind of America my daughters will grow up in: one that makes excuses for the killing of innocent men, women and children, or one that chooses to reclaim hope. What still lies between betrayal and hope is the power of accountability. It is my prayer — as a father, the son of immigrants, and as a public servant in the greatest city in the greatest nation in the world — that my fellow Michiganders will harness this power and lend their voice to this hope by holding the president accountable.
