Israeli strikes on Gaza, Lebanon mourned by Arab Americans

Israeli strikes on Gaza, Lebanon mourned by Arab Americans

By Andrea Shalal

Mohammad Enayah, an automotive engineer living in the Detroit suburbs, said he has lost nearly 100 relatives and friends in Gaza over the last year. He wonders if his home country the U.S. could have provided the weapons that killed them.

Enayah, 60, said America embraced him when he arrived as a 17-year-old student in 1981 and he has built up a good life for himself and his family. But tears spring to his eyes when he views photos of cousins, aunts and uncles who have died in Israel's assault on the Palestinian enclave since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.

"That's where I'm torn between how the United States embraced me and how it killed my family, literally," he said. "This is a group of helpless, defenseless civilians being slaughtered in front of everybody's eyes ... and nobody can do anything."

The U.S. military has not been directly involved in attacks on Gaza, and Washington has pushed unsuccessfully for a ceasefire there. But the U.S. is Israel's largest weapons supplier and has supplied billions of dollars in military aid in the last year as part of a longstanding agreement.

Enayah joined about 100 people who lit candles in a Dearborn park on Monday to mark the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli figures. Israeli strikes have killed nearly 42,000 people in Gaza since, according to Palestinian health authorities, and most of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been displaced.

The Israeli military has also killed around 2,000 Lebanese civilians over the past year, according to Lebanese health authorities, since the Hezbollah militant group began firing at Israel in solidarity with Hamas.

Michigan is home to several hundred thousand Arab Americans and Muslims like Enayah with family in Gaza and others with family in Lebanon. It is one of a handful of battleground states that will decide the November election.

"I am so patriotic that I want to change this country," he said and plans to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in November rather than Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris or Republican Donald Trump.

"I would die for the love of America, the love of what it is ... I'm not going to give up on this country," he said.

In Michigan, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election by 11,000 votes, but lost to Biden in 2020 by 155,000 votes. Political scientists say the 2024 election is too close to call.

Hussein Dabajeh, 37, who grew up in Dearborn, first visited his ancestral home of Lebanon in 2017 and has returned many times since.

"Two weeks ago today, I lost six family members in two different attacks on the same day," Dabajeh said. "A lot of us, if we have not lost someone directly, we've lost someone from our village or we've lost someone that's related to us."

Micho Assi, a 40-year-old Lebanese American, flew into Beirut a year ago and recalled the city's skyline gleaming in the sunrise. Now, she said, her village in southern Lebanon has been destroyed and she has no idea what she and her children will find when they return.

"My little daughter asked me what happened to the bakery shop that we used to go get pies from. 'Is it destroyed?'" she said. "My other daughter asked me, 'Is the beach that we visit in south Lebanon ...still okay?'"