In a key election year for the United Kingdom – the countries historically most responsible for the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine -, one thing is increasingly clear: the slaughter in Gaza is a factor that threatens the expectations of the democratic president , Joe Biden, and the British Labor candidate, Keir Starmer.
In the United States, the loss of vote intention suffered by Biden due to the rejection of his support for the Israeli bombing of Gaza was confirmed this week in the Democratic primaries. In Michigan, at the beginning of this month, more than 100,000 voters, 13% of the Democratic electorate, chose the “no compromise” option, a warning to Biden for his passivity in the face of the genocide in Gaza.
Now the punishment vote has been repeated in Minnesota, another state in the industrial Midwest. Nearly 20% of voters rejected Biden’s policy on Gaza in the Super Tuesday election. The same thing happens – albeit on a smaller scale – in other states that will be critical for Biden’s re-election.
In Michigan, the 250,000 inhabitants of Asian and Middle Eastern origin, 13% of the electorate, led the vote for punishment. In Minnesota, the pushback includes all demographics, especially students, Jewish activists and middle-class women, according to consulting firm Edison Research.
The Somali electorate in the state’s cities has also been key. Ilhan Omar, the Somali representative for Minnesota in Washington, and Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian representative for Michigan, have emerged as prominent leaders of the protest movement in the US against the genocide in Gaza.
Michigan and Minnesota are key states for Biden to win the election in November. The Democratic nominee won by a very narrow margin of 2.2% in Michigan in 2020, just 154,000 votes, after Trump’s 2016 victory by just 11,000 votes. “If Biden continues to be the banker of this slaughter, many thousands of Democrats will stay home without voting and Trump will win,” said filmmaker Michael Moore, a native of Flint, Michigan, and organizer of the Listen Michigan campaign. !”.
According to a poll by YouGov and the CEPR in Washington, 62% of Democrats and 52% of the American electorate oppose the delivery of arms to Israel.
Something similar happens in the UK, which together with the US has staged the largest protests in Western countries against the genocide in Gaza.
In the by-election in Rochdale, a depressed town with a textile past 20 kilometers from Manchester, with a large British Pakistani community, the radical left candidate George Galloway won a spectacular victory last month after a focused campaign in the genocide in Gaza.
Galloway took almost 40% of the total, twice as many as the Tory and Labor candidates combined, in what is usually a Labor fiefdom. The secret: to forge an alliance between voters of Asian origin – 30% of the population and more than 20% of the electorate – and other sectors of the electorate horrified by the slaughter in Palestine.
“Many white voters have seen with their own eyes what a genocide is and they feel anger,” Peter Higgins, Galloway’s campaign organizer, said in an interview with La Vanguardia.
Gaza is already a global and, at the same time, local political issue. “The politicians of the major parties are not doing what they should be doing about Gaza,” summed up Imam, a voter of Pakistani origin in Rochdale who has lived in Terrassa for four years.
The result confirms the fears of some Labor strategists: that Starmer’s unconditional support for Israel is already starting to create a danger in the run-up to the general election, probably in November. Starmer has refused to defend a ceasefire – he only proposes a humanitarian pause – or to describe the killing as genocide.
The Labor Party – with an advantage over the conservatives of almost 20 points in the polls – is still the favourite. But moral outrage over what is happening in Gaza is starting to “shift the tectonic plates” of the election, Galloway said after his victory in Rochdale. According to the latest YouGov poll, 66% of Britons support an immediate ceasefire.
The Rochdale phenomenon is reproduced on the other side of the Atlantic, from Michigan to Georgia, with 60,000 Muslim voters. The African-American vote is also being mobilized. If he manages to join the electoral rolls, the independent candidate Cornel West, a veteran African-American intellectual and ally of the Palestinian cause, could subtract enough votes from Biden in critical states such as Michigan, Ohio or Georgia.
“Only time will tell if Biden has doomed his bid for re-election by blind support for Israel,” says Mitchell Plitnick, a Jewish activist in defense of Palestinian rights, in the new book Deluge (OR Books, 2024).
Others highlight Biden’s dilemma in other states such as Florida where millions of voters – many of them Jewish retirees – are staunchly pro-Israel. “If Biden gets tougher on Bibi (Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister), he risks losing even more votes,” said Leon Lazaroff, a professor at Brooklyn College.
Galloway’s new party aims to contest a dozen seats in the UK with important Asian communities and mobilized young people, such as Ilford and Bethnal Green in London.
Other pro-Palestine candidates will also present themselves, including ex-leader Jeremy Corbyn – expelled from Labor by Starmer – who will probably contest his Islington seat as a candidate of the Peace and Justice campaign. Andrew Feinstein, the veteran South African Jewish anti-apartheid activist, will contest Starmer’s seat in the London borough of Holborn.
