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Lydia Polgreen

By Lydia Polgreen

Opinion Columnist

Last month, I was in Dubai for a reporting trip and met a Palestinian American woman named Alaa’ Odeh at a dinner party. She is from North Carolina but lives in Dubai, where she works as a strategy and public policy consultant. She had spoken passionately about her efforts to raise money to support people struggling to survive in Gaza, where she has mentored young Palestinians over the past decade. As I was leaving the dinner, we exchanged details and promised to keep in touch. As often happens when Americans meet abroad these days, we talked about the U.S. election, unfolding as the war in Gaza spreads to Lebanon.

In our conversation I did something I’ve never done before: urge someone to vote for a particular candidate. Odeh said she felt genuinely torn. Could she support Kamala Harris given the Biden administration’s unstinting support of Israel, whatever the cost to civilians in Gaza? Surely, I suggested, with so many issues at stake she would set aside those concerns and cast her crucial swing state ballot for Harris, given the stark choice between her and Donald Trump. It seemed, I suppose, obvious to me. My mind was already made up: I would be voting for Harris.

But as soon as I uttered the words I felt a hot bolt of shame. As a journalist I have a longstanding aversion to publicly supporting candidates, even if privately I have my preferences. But this was something else: a sense that I had no business telling this person, whose family experienced dispossession and exile, who was watching people from her family’s homeland die every day, how to vote, no matter the stakes from my perspective. Odeh was gracious. If she was shocked or offended, she did not let on. She sent me a warm email a few days later saying how much she enjoyed hearing about my work.

Over the past few weeks, I keep going back to that moment as the horrors in Gaza and Lebanon have escalated. A year into the war, Israel is undertaking a pitiless siege of northern Gaza, halting the already anemic flow of humanitarian aid while relentlessly attacking hospitals, crumbling apartment buildings and schools used as shelters by the displaced, asserting that Hamas fighters are hiding among medical workers and other civilians.

This siege has produced indelible images, like the body of a teenager named Shaaban al-Dalou engulfed in flames as the encampment where he and his family sheltered in tents next to a hospital in Deir al-Balah. On Wednesday, a medic named Abdulaziz al-Bardini in the same city wailed and sobbed as he discovered that the battered body he was transporting was his own mother, Samira. She was killed in an Israeli strike on a car in the Maghazi refugee camp, The Associated Press reported.

Dozens of people, including at least 25 children, died when Israeli forces struck an apartment building in which some 150 people had taken shelter in Beit Lahia on Tuesday, the Palestinian Civil Defense said. A State Department spokesman called it “a horrifying incident with a horrifying result.” The top United Nations humanitarian official issued a stark warning last week: “The entire population of North Gaza is at risk of dying.”

Against the backdrop of this widening catastrophe, surely the most consequential presidential election of my lifetime, between two candidates offering starkly different visions of America, is grinding to a photo finish. Every conversation I have is filled with anxiety and fear that Trump will win and plunge the United States, and the world, into chaos with his dystopian vision of a dog-eat-dog world of zero-sum competition.

I obviously fear this too. The other day I was trying to explain to my wife, who is a therapist for people experiencing grief and loss, this agonizing feeling I have been having, to locate its source and meaning. It was less the anxiety over a possible second Trump term than a debilitating combination of despair and paralysis in the face of the catastrophe in the Middle East, and the fear that no matter who wins, the unbearable suffering will continue.

“You’re despairalyzed,” she declared, apparently coining a neologism that instantly named the feeling. Usually I despise portmanteaus, but I have clung to this diagnosis like a life raft, sharing it with anyone I’ve met.

I was a little surprised to find myself feeling this way. I was an early and enthusiastic supporter of replacing Joe Biden with Kamala Harris, and I had high and perhaps unrealistic hopes that she might chart a different course on the issues that matter the most to me.

I have never been a single-issue voter, at least not when the issues are defined in an atomistic way. Abortion, health care, inequality, the rights of queer people to live in dignity, the climate crisis, the unfairness of the criminal justice system — these are all important to me. But what lies beneath each of them is a deeper question that I suppose does make me a single-issue voter: Who is protected under the iron dome of American belonging, and who is forced to stand outside it?

Elections are always about what matters to voters. But they also reveal who matters. Looking back as we barrel toward Election........

© The New York Times