🇲🇾‎إدوين 🇲🇾

This morning, I saw an Arab news page celebrating the victories of several American candidates (pay attention to the word American) whose families originally came from Arab countries, describing it as an “Arab landslide in the US Congress”! The page is Egyptian, by the way, and it seems to have overlooked the most remarkable thing about these elections. A young man like Abdul El-Sayed, the son of an Egyptian immigrant family, won a seat in the US Senate despite the President of the United States himself campaigning against him and using all his influence to defeat him, and despite the hundreds of millions poured into these elections by wealthy donors, including Elon Musk, who spent nearly half a billion dollars supporting Republicans. And despite all that, Abdul won! To me, that is what deserves celebrating. Not his Arab roots, his religion, or his Egyptian father's name, but the democracy that allowed him to compete and win despite all the political and financial power he was up against. A democracy where a person's skin color, ethnicity, or religion should not determine their right to hold power. The very democracy we lack in all of our Arab countries, especially Egypt, where an authoritarian military regime fears free speech more than it fears the poverty its own people are living in. Now imagine if Abdul's father had stayed in Egypt, and Abdul had been born and raised there. Perhaps today he would be working as a doctor in a hospital, earning $300 a month, barely enough to get him through the first ten days of the month. Or perhaps he would be a taxi driver, struggling just to support his family. And if one day he dared to speak about politics or criticize the president, he might find himself in the depths of an Egyptian prison, like so many others. The same applies to other candidates whose families came from Arab and African countries, where so many people live under authoritarian regimes that deprive them of their most basic rights. And then the media in those very countries celebrate the success of their people abroad, when they finally find the opportunities and freedoms they were denied in their own homelands! Isn't that a shameful irony? As a Palestinian, I know very well how brutal American foreign policy can be. I have lived through its consequences, and I have no intention of romanticizing the United States. But there is a bitter irony here: the son of an Egyptian immigrant can challenge the most powerful people in America and win, while in his father's homeland, he could end up in prison simply for criticizing the president. This is not a triumph of Arab identity. It is an indictment of the dictatorships that force people to leave their homelands to enjoy the freedoms they should have had there. #Midterms2026 #SurvivalTestimony #USElections