What Are Arab American Women Supposed to Do This November?

It was the ice cream that broke Reina Sultan. In February, when she saw a clip of President Joe Biden nonchalantly telling reporters he hoped to see a cease-fire in Gaza by the end of the weekend, a Van Leeuwen cone in his hand, her heart sank. Israel’s war on Gaza following the attacks by Hamas on October 7 had been raging for four months at that point, and the International Court of Justice had recently ordered the country to take action to prevent a genocide. “I wake up thinking about it,” the Brooklyn-based journalist says of the war. “I go to sleep thinking about it.” That image of Biden has replayed in Sultan’s head in the roughly 19 weekends since as a symbol of how seriously U.S. politicians take Israel’s bombing campaign, in which the death toll has passed 37,000, including 15,000 children. “I’ve been forced to witness babies that look like my cousins without their heads attached to their bodies,” Sultan says, “and there’s not a peep” from the president. “I expect nothing from him,” she adds.

I spoke with nearly a dozen Arab American women across the country over the past five months who tell me they’re fed up with the lack of progress they’ve seen from their elected officials on brokering a cease-fire.

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