For Palestinian Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, evacuation and loss have become a central component of her family heritage, like Zaina Jadara and her family.
Her family was during the 1948 Naqbah when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven out of their homes and land by Zionist paramilitaries and Israeli forces in the war surrounding Israel, and the current Jordan River He was a teacher at Al Bille on the West Bank. Creation.
“They escaped the attack with two cars for Jordan. One car made it, the other was bombed and they were burned alive,” she says.
“None of them survived.”
So when Donald Trump, standing alongside Benjamin Netanyahu, suggested last week that Palestinians in the destroyed Gaza Strip left their homes and that it became the “riviera” for “people of the world.” , commented that he doubled it. Jadara was alive and alive.
“The US president calls for ethnic cleansing and continued genocide for Palestinians,” she says.
“That’s outrageous.”
For many Palestinian residents of Dearborn, such as Jadallah, the response to the US president’s proposal was not a rebellious, angry, but a surprise.
“He has a history of being loyal to the Zionist movement of genocide and loyal to the Palestinian colonization (),” she says.
“It wasn’t surprising, but it was outrageous.”
The cover photo of the February 1st edition of Dearborn-Published Arab American News depicts thousands of Palestinians walking along the sea front to a destroyed home in northern Gaza. The caption reads, “A massive march of the turret.”
“The history of Gaza is one of both pain and pride,” reads a major newspaper article on the topic.
It continues: “It goes back to ancient civilizations and includes great resistance to invasion, such as the three-month siege by Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army in 332 BC.”
Trump’s announcement has threatened vulnerable talks to overthrow decades of international consensus and extend a sensitive ceasefire in Gaza. We met with delight by many of the Israeli Prime Minister’s coalition and other far-right elements of Israel.
More than half of Dearborn’s 110,000 residents are Arab heritage and are based in one of the largest Arab communities outside the Middle East. Many Palestinian residents lost their families during the onslaught in Israel’s Gaza Strip, killing more than 46,000 people.
“No one is really shocked, says Palestinian American comedian and activist Amar Zar, whose families were kicked out of Nazareth, Jaffa and Acca (Acre) during Nabba.
“I’m really upset with the notion that we’re talking about what we said on Tuesday as if it was new or novel or unique. It’s not,” he says.
“Ethnically cleansing Palestinians is an Israeli policy, and that policy is fully supported and funded by the United States.”
He also feels that this is only when Trump makes comments like the Liberals and Democrats “finally reject the concept of ethnic cleansing for Palestinians.”
“When Trump says that, I think there’s a different ring to it.”
Trump has more Republican candidates than Republican Kamala Harris and Greene candidate Jill Stein, than Republican candidates won the city for the first time in 24 years in the presidential election in Dearborn in November. I won the vote.
Harris refused to campaign in Dearborn, but Trump had lunch at a large commons cafe owned by Arab-American businessmen a few days before the election.
“A lot of people secretly voted for him (in Dearborn),” Zar says. “They are those who are silent now,” Zarl voted for Stein.
However, some have doubled their support and are not inclined to take Trump’s words at face value. Vishara Baba, a Palestinian American born and raised in Jerusalem, has campaigned extensively in Michigan and other swing states through groups previously known as Arab Americans for Trump. (The group changed its name to Arab Americans for peace last week.) He says Trump’s comments are merely a “water test.”
“I think the president abandoned the idea as a trial balloon. There was never a refuge for Palestinians from their hometown. That would be counterproductive,” he says.
Members of his family were forced to flee Jerusalem during Naqba in 1948, and he himself was banned from living in the city of his birth, but Baba was forced to say that Middle Eastern peace was the main character of Trump. I continue to believe that it is a goal.
“I know that the President wants a legacy of peace and wants to be known as a peace superintendent. The only way he would do that is the two that he said he would support him. It’s the state’s solution.”
He faced backlash in support of Trump, including “the message of X, which can be interpreted as a death threat,” but Trump’s advisers said Trump would force Palestinians in Gaza to be removed from them. They said they were told they were not going to suggest a house and land.
“I believe the president will come to the conclusion that what he said publicly cannot be done,” he says. He says the rebranding of the brand to Arab-Americans for the peace of his group has announced that Trump’s comments had been in work for months.
For Jadara, Trump’s alleged plan for Israel to hand over the Gaza Strip to the United States is a clear contradiction with what he campaigned for the president.
“That really shows his intention to serve foreign governments before the American people, right?” she says.
“If he wants America’s first agenda, he says, how can we use our hard-earned taxes to improve our healthcare system and schools. I’ll talk about it.”
She shows that Gaza’s resilient Palestinians continue to displace, and she says that Trump’s plan to take people out of Gaza is very unlikely to succeed. He says he believes that.
“They endured genocide, hunger and were exiled multiple times from north to south,” she says.
“There are still 2 million people living in Gaza and they have said they don’t want to leave because they are the legitimate owners of the land.”
