Joe Biden had barely started speaking at a high-profile re-election campaign rally focusing on abortion rights in Virginia last week when the carefully choreographed made-for-TV spectacle exploded into a cacophony of angry yelling.
“Genocide Joe!”, a protester holding up a Palestinian flag cried from the back of the hall. “How many kids have you killed in Gaza? How many women have you killed in Gaza?”
Biden looked bemused, blinking silently into the cameras. In all, he was to be interrupted at least 13 more times. “This is going to go on for a while,” he said at one point. “They’ve got this planned.”
As Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign gets under way, it is becoming increasingly clear that they have indeed got it planned. A decentralized network of pro-Palestinian groups and individuals, including Muslim Americans, Jewish Americans and anti-war organizations, are hounding Biden over his firm support for Israel despite the heavy cost in civilian lives of its war against Hamas.
“Our community is going to be active, with actions big or small, until this genocide ends and there’s a permanent ceasefire,” Mohamad Habehh told the Guardian. He was the individual who stood up and shouted: “Genocide Joe!” in Virginia.
Habehh said that Biden should expect much more of the same as election year unfolds. “Every event the president does, no matter where it is, not matter what state or city, there will be Americans who stand against his stance on Gaza.”
Habehh, who described himself as a Palestinian American organizer, was not making an idle threat. This month all of Biden’s big set-piece speeches marking the launch of his re-election campaign have been disrupted by pro-Palestinian protests.
At the abortion rights rally in Virginia there were at least 30 protesters inside the hall and a further 50 outside. A couple of weeks earlier at the historic Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, Biden’s appeal to Black voters ground to a halt after several protesters began chanting “ceasefire now!” from the pews.
A day after the Virginia rally, protesters interrupted a similarly carefully choreographed event in Washington DC aimed at wooing union members where Biden was accepting the endorsement of the United Auto Workers. Video taken by the New York Times reporter Katie Rogers showed individuals being physically dragged out of the venue.
The sense that such agitation is fast becoming the new normal was confirmed by Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the feminist peace group Code Pink and one of the protesters outside the Virginia rally.
“We expect there to be protests at every major event that Biden does, and even minor ones,” she said. “People are so angry they’re looking to vent their frustration and disgust at the man we now call Genocide Joe and anybody working for this complicit administration.”
It’s not just the major prime-time rallies that are now attracting the anti-Gaza war crowd’s wrath. Everywhere Biden goes he is being dogged, whether it is outside the church he attends near his home in Delaware or along the route of his presidential motorcade.
Other senior politicians are also in the firing line. Benjamin said she now joins protest events inside Congress almost daily.
Code Pink and other groups have accosted senators as they are going in and out of congressional hearings. They have also held sit-ins at the congressional offices of Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, and Mitch McConnell, his Republican opposite number.
Regular demonstrations are also being staged at entrances to the White House, at the US state department and other federal government offices deemed to be contributing to the Biden administration’s backing for the Israeli assault on Gaza, which came in response to Hamas’s attack on 7 October that killed 1,200 people inside Israel.
More than 26,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military operation, according to the Gaza health ministry.
In the short term, the disruptions threaten to cloud the re-election narrative that Biden and team are seeking to present. Where they had hoped the rallies would generate media coverage emphasizing the president’s record on fighting for women’s choice, racial equality or trade union rights, they instead were greeted with protest headlines.
Already there are signs that potentially key demographic groups who turned out strongly for Biden in 2020 might be paling this time because of their disapproval of his policy on the Israel-Hamas war. An AP analysis in 2020 found that 64% of American Muslims voted for Biden, against 35% for Donald Trump.
Biden will be looking to replicate such numbers in November, especially in key battleground states with sizable Muslim electorates. Those include Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
But opinion polls conducted since Israel’s assault on Gaza began show support for Biden among Arab Americans plummeting. The trend is especially worrying for the White House in Michigan, the state with the largest Arab American population.
Biden won Michigan by 154,000 votes in 2020. There are more than 200,000 Muslim American voters living there.
Influential Michigan figures have been excoriating in their criticism of the Biden administration. “I can tell you with confidence that Biden won’t get Arab and Muslim American votes in November,” Osama Siblani, publisher of the largest Arab American newspaper in the US, the Dearborn-based Arab American News, told the Guardian.
He added: “Our community is extremely angry at the president for his unlimited and unconditional support of Israeli crimes against Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. We won’t forget what Biden did, and we’ll deliver the message where it really counts – no votes for Biden.”
There are similar alarming signs that support for the Democratic president may be waning among young voters dismayed by the catastrophic destruction inside Gaza. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that almost half of 18- to 29-year-olds believe that Israel is committing genocide.
Biden has so far allowed the wave of protests to wash over him. At campaign events he has acknowledged the passion of his detractors – “they feel deeply”, he said in Virginia as he was being heckled – but has refused to engage in debate with them.
When pressed on the danger that he is losing Arab American support, he has countered by referencing Trump’s travel ban on visitors from several majority-Muslim countries. “We understand who cares about the Arab population,” he said recently.
Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, accused some of the protesters of being in the pay of the Kremlin. “Some, I think, are connected to Russia,” she told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, adding without evidence that they were doing the work of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
“For them to call for a ceasefire is Mr Putin’s message.”
Eva Borgwardt, the national spokesperson of the Jewish American group IfNotNow which opposes unconditional US support for Israel, dismissed such slurs against protesters. She pointed to her own record as a Democratic field organizer in Arizona in the 2020 presidential election.
“As an American Jew who worked for Biden in 2020, I’m furious and frustrated that he is risking throwing this election to Trump over his refusal to call for a ceasefire.”
In an October action, IfNotNow peacefully blockaded every entrance to the White House. The group has also targeted top Democrats in Congress including Schumer, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and the progressive Democratic senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.
Biden supporters have urged caution, telling protesters that there are bigger stakes at play in this presidential election than the president’s stance on the Middle East. They say the protesters might come to think differently were a politician with fundamentally anti-democratic tendencies, and his own contentious record on Israel-Palestine, in the White House.
Shev Jones, a state senator in Florida who is co-chair of the Biden re-election campaign there, told CNN that protesters had to get serious about the importance of this election. Addressing those who say they may not turn out for Biden to defeat Trump, he said: “It’s easy to say that when you currently have the ability to make a choice. I want them to say that when they’re not able to make a choice at all.”
Asked how she responded to the accusation that by attacking Biden the protesters are helping Trump, Borgwardt said: “Young Jews are terrified of a Trump presidency.” But she called it “absurd” to blame young voters “who are rightly furious with Biden for backing the Israeli government which has caused tens of thousands of deaths, rather than the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in the world”.
Habehh also dismissed claims that the protesters were giving Trump a boost. “That’s a very lazy argument,” he said.
“Trump could easily be worse – we’ve seen what he’s done to our community and we know what he’s capable of. But Biden’s the one who is unequivocally supporting the rightwing government of Benjamin Netanyahu that has killed more than 25,000 people, mostly women and children, using American taxpayer dollars.”
