With Trump in the White House, will America remain a defender of human rights?

I lost the wager largely because Biden and Harris restricted their Middle East talking points to the issue of humanitarian aid, which rarely made it into the war-torn region. President Biden, meanwhile, supplied Israel with armaments that killed and maimed Palestinian civilians, including thousands of women, children, and babies.
The US presidential election has been a hot topic among Palestinians and Arabs. “Who will be better for Palestine?” I was often asked. Unhappy with either candidate, I weakly suggested Harris, despite her role in the Biden administration’s green-lighting of Benjamin Netanyahu’s war crimes in Gaza. My colleagues disagreed; she is no better than he, they argued. We wagered a breakfast over who would win the election.
Here in Amman, our media regularly covered what was viewed as Harris’s callous treatment of Arab and Muslim voters. The failure to invite Arab and Muslim Americans to speak at the Democratic National Convention got a lot of airtime on the major Arab satellite stations viewed in Palestine and elsewhere in the Arab region. One of the few times TV stations deviated from round-the-clock coverage of the war on Gaza was when they featured stories about how Arab, Muslim, Black, and progressive Americans were being excluded from the discussion during Harris’s short run for the presidency.
But while the majority of my family, friends, and colleagues and many in the Arab world were disgusted with Washington’s failure to stop the slaughter of our people, I was looking at the bigger picture of America’s standing as the leader of the free world.
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When I bet on Harris, I was hoping that the American people would elect a person whose human rights standards and moral compass, in spite of failing Gazans, put her on the right side of history. I was sure that Americans would not elect an immoral person who has little respect for the rule of law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
I was, of course, wrong. Trump’s election has left those of us in the realm of human rights feeling that the world has lost a major rights defender. In a meeting with fellow human rights defenders the day after the election, we questioned whether any major human rights supporter exists. I shared with a senior European Union official my feeling that we have lost the United States and the United Nations in this regard. Consider the international community’s and the UN’s inability to hold Israel accountable for its human rights abuses in Gaza.
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Palestinians are aware that to end their decades of suffering and occupation, there must be a strong leader in the White House.
If the president-elect is true to his campaign promise, he will attempt to end the wars in the Ukraine and Gaza. But Trump, whose campaign benefited from a $100 million donation from Israeli American Miriam Adelson, widow of the casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, is unlikely to stand up to Adelson’s idol, Netanyahu.
Despite losing the bet on Harris, I retain a sliver of hope. The violence in Gaza can’t continue. An independent Palestinian state will surely emerge from the ashes. We wish to live in our own free and independent country side by side with Israel. Will Trump be a help or a hindrance to the century-old Palestinian dream of freedom and liberty?
Daoud Kuttab is a Palestinian journalist and former professor of journalism at Princeton University. He is a columnist with the Washington-based Al-Monitor and the Saudi English daily Arab News. Follow him on X @daoudkuttab and on Threads @daoud.kuttab.