Arab Americans rise from 9/11 shadows to US political power

For 25 years, Arab Americans and Muslim Americans have lived in the shadow of the September 11 attacks, watchlisted at airports, treated as security threats, and monitored by federal agents who viewed their mosques with suspicion.

In the summer of 2026, two Egyptian American candidates won Democratic primaries, putting a long-surveilled community on the November ballot, backed by a new financial infrastructure built specifically to challenge the pro-Israel lobby's dominance in Democratic politics.

In New Jersey, Adam Hamawy won a crowded Democratic primary for the open 12th Congressional District on June 2, defeating 11 other candidates with roughly 28% of the vote to succeed retiring Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman.

Weeks later, on August 4, Abdul El-Sayed narrowly defeated Representative Haley Stevens, 48.7% to 47.3%, to win Michigan's Democratic Senate nomination for the seat Senator Gary Peters is vacating.

Both men were born in Egypt. Both ran on platforms sharply critical of US support for Israel's war in Gaza. Both face Republican opponents on November 3: Hamawy against Gregg Mele in a safely Democratic district, and El-Sayed against Mike Rogers in a race expected to help decide control of the Senate.

Both candidates were backed by American Priorities, a pro-Palestinian super PAC formed on February 12, 2026, led by Hannah Fertig, a Jewish political strategist who previously worked on Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign.

The group has pledged to spend more than $10 million during the midterms, drawing largely from a small pool of wealthy donors, many of them Muslim American technology and business figures, aiming to shield Israel-critical candidates from the kind of spending AIPAC has historically deployed against them.

By July, it had spent more in New Jersey's 12th District than in any other race, over $1.5 million backing Hamawy.

Hamawy, a retired US Army combat surgeon, served in Iraq, where he is credited with saving the life of then-Lieutenant Colonel Tammy Duckworth, now a US Senator, who endorsed his campaign.

In 2024, he volunteered to treat civilian patients in Gaza, an experience that shaped his central promise to end US military aid and weapons sales to Israel.

He raised $1.4 million by primary day and secured endorsements from the entire Congressional Progressive Caucus, including Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib.

"We were told that an outsider couldn't win. That we couldn't compete. Well, I think we competed," Hamawy told supporters on primary night.

His campaign was not without controversy. Opponents resurfaced his history as a defence witness in the 1995 terrorism trial of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Egyptian-born "blind sheikh" convicted in a plot connected to the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing.

Rival candidate Adrian Mapp, mayor of Plainfield, called Hamawy a "radical extremist" over the association.

Hamawy's campaign responded that he "condemns that man's violent rhetoric and actions, and all violence, hatred, and terrorism," calling the attacks "bad-faith, guilt-by-association" tactics against Muslim and Arab candidates. The episode did not stop his win. If elected, Hamawy would become New Jersey's first Muslim member of Congress.

'Maybe they see us now'

For voters like Mariam Fouad, 58, a retired schoolteacher and mosque volunteer in Lawrence Township, the win carried a weight no ad campaign could capture.

"For years, my son Mina would get pulled aside at Newark airport before every trip. The first time he flew after 9/11, he was 14. He came home and asked me, 'Mama, do they think I'm a terrorist?' I didn't have an answer," she tells The New Arab.

"This summer, when Hamawy won, Mina called me from work. He said, 'Mama, maybe they see us now.' I stood in my kitchen and cried. I have voted in every election since I became a citizen, but I never put a yard sign in front of my house. This year I put one up. That is what this win means to me. Not that everything is fixed. But my kids can look at a ballot and see someone who has our name, our face, our story."

That shift showed up door by door, too.

Yousef Hamed, 26, a pharmacy student at Rutgers, served as a canvass captain for Hamawy's campaign, knocking doors in Trenton most nights after class.

"What people don't see is the same conversation happening over and over," he tells The New Arab.

He recalled one door in particular, an older Egyptian man in his seventies who initially waved him off. "He told me, 'We don't do politics. We keep our heads down.' I almost left. Then I said, 'Hamawy is a combat surgeon. He went to Gaza.' He went quiet. He came back with a photo of his brother's family in Khan Younis and asked me, 'Is this man really going to say our names out loud?' I said, 'He already has.'"

The man gave Hamed his phone number on the spot. "By the last three weeks, I was sleeping in my car between shifts. We knocked on over 15,000 doors," Hamed said. "It wasn't one big speech. It was one locked door at a time, one family story at a time."

'A tool for building political power'

In Michigan, El-Sayed's race became the most expensive Democratic primary in the state's history, with outside groups spending more than $60 million on Stevens's behalf.

AIPAC and affiliated groups alone poured in more than $30 million, the largest single investment AIPAC has made in any US election contest to date.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer endorsed Stevens late in the race in what was widely seen as an attempt to stop El-Sayed's momentum. He won anyway, by roughly one percentage point.

El-Sayed, a physician, Rhodes Scholar, and former director of Detroit's Health Department and later Wayne County's Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services, called Israel's military campaign in Gaza a genocide and demanded an end to US military aid to Israel.

It was his second bid for statewide office, after losing the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary to Whitmer. If elected in November, he would become the first self-identified Muslim senator in American history.

Jim Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute, called the win "a watershed moment in US politics," telling Arab News: "He defeated dark money. He showed that Israel and their lobby could be publicly debated and defeated."

Maya Berry, the Institute's executive director, said Michigan voters "did not buy" an advertising campaign that ignored policy and instead attacked "an Arab American Muslim man named Abdul."

"I am thrilled for the rest of the country to learn that Michigan is not going to take it," she told* Al Jazeera*.

That sentiment echoed on the ground in Dearborn, home to one of the country's largest Arab American communities, where roughly 100,000 Michiganders had withheld their vote from President Biden in 2024's "uncommitted" protest over Gaza.

"Our basic needs continue to go unmet, and this definitely impacted the election results," Ahmad Abubakar, a Dearborn resident and journalist, tells *The New Arab. *

"Arab Americans in Michigan see primary ballots as a tool for building political power, not just a protest," adds Safiya Umar, a Michigan voter and resident.

Neither Hamawy nor El-Sayed has been elected to Congress yet.

Both face voters again in seven weeks, in races being watched closely as a test of whether a financial counterweight to the pro-Israel lobby can hold up in a general election, and whether a community defined for a generation by post-9/11 surveillance can now help decide who represents it in Washington.

Umar Ibrahim Agaie is an independent journalist and researcher covering environmental justice, tech-surveillance, and human rights

This story was published in collaboration with Egab