For Palestinians in Florida, DeSantis’ anti-Gaza stance is ‘heartbreaking’

Dalia Mousa-Fakhouri’s mother came to Florida at age 2, with a birth certificate that listed her place of birth as “Jerusalem, Palestine.” Her father was born in Texas to immigrant parents, and his family wound up in Florida as well.

To Mousa-Fakhouri, who lives in Jacksonville, Gov. Ron DeSantis has long represented a populist vision of the state not so different from the promise her grandparents sought, a place with “equal opportunity for people to work and live and make money.”

The past few days, though, have shaken her faith in her governor and preferred presidential candidate.

”He’s wonderful,” she said. “He’s done a lot for our state. But, unfortunately, his comments really made me second-guess everything.”

DeSantis’ comments came Saturday during a speech to supporters in Iowa, when he called Gazans antisemitic and said the United States should not welcome Gazan citizens seeking refuge from Israel’s war with Hamas.

“We cannot accept people from Gaza into this country as refugees,” he said. “I am not going to do that. If you look at how they behave, not all of them are Hamas, but they are all antisemitic. None of them believe in Israel’s right to exist. None of the Arab states are willing to take any of them. The Arab states should be taking them if you have refugees. You don’t fly people and import them into the United States of America.”

The blunt language and hard-line stance is consistent with DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign. But it drew criticism from those who decried his treating all Palestinians as a monolith.

“America has always been sympathetic to the fact that you can separate civilians from terrorists,” another presidential contender, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, told CNN’s “State of the Union.”

State Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from Orlando, called DeSantis’ rhetoric “a dehumanization tactic.”

“This rhetoric is so incredibly dangerous and only further fuels violence towards innocent Palestinians who are experiencing forced relocation and have been cut off from electricity and water,” Eskamani posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Palestinians across Florida echoed fears that DeSantis’ words could stoke anti-Palestinian hatred — especially coming the same weekend that an Illinois man allegedly stabbed a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy 26 times in what police there called a hate crime. The boy died.

”My kids are Palestinian babies,” said Mousa-Fakhouri, a stay-at-home mom of three. “They’re not terrorists, and they’re not animals.”

Leali Shalabi, 22, a University of South Florida graduate who spoke during a pro-Palestinian rally last week in downtown Tampa, said misinformation can easily breed hatred.

“The Palestinian community here in Tampa is diverse and strong,” she said. “There are teachers, engineers, businessmen, students, etc. We have built a strong community of kindness to contribute to our society. But the governor refers to us as terrorists and antisemitic. I think he’s going to incite a lot of hate in Floridians and Americans towards the Palestinians.”

DeSantis followed his comments Saturday with an appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” where he said people in Gaza were living in a “toxic culture.”

“They teach kids to hate Jews,” he said. “The textbooks do not have Israel even on the map. They prepare very young kids to commit terrorist attacks. So I think it’s a toxic culture, and I think if we were to import large numbers of those to the United States, I think it would increase antisemitism in this country, and I think it would create anti-Americanism in this country.”

There are around 1,000 Gazans who are Christian, said Matthew Tapie, director of the Center for Catholic-Jewish Studies at Saint Leo University in Pasco County. The region is home to Catholic priests and the patriarch of Jerusalem, Franciscan Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, who Tapie said is seen as an important leader in the Middle East.

Tapie urged DeSantis, who is Catholic, to consider the diversity within the Gazan populace.

“It just doesn’t make sense to paint so broadly with that brush,” he said. “There are many Gazans who are caught in the middle.”

Recent University of South Florida graduate Eman Hasan, 23, called DeSantis’ remarks “heartbreaking for so many reasons,” including the fact that “Palestinians can be Jews, Christians and Muslims.”

Every member of her family, she said, has been affected by the more than half-century Israeli occupation of Gaza. Hasan has eight uncles who were taken as war prisoners for defending their lands, including one who was arrested when he was 14, and another who was sentenced to 20 years for protecting his land during the second intifada in the early 2000s.

Hasan said her mother and her three younger siblings are now in the West Bank, near Jerusalem. They went to Palestine because her mother wanted to teach their siblings the language, culture and traditions.

”Those are very important to us,” Hasan said, “but my mother is not trying to leave because that’s our land.”

Kari Bahour, 50, said her parents left Palestine when they were children in the 1960s; she was born in Ohio and has lived in Tampa since 1985.

Bahour, who has been an entrepreneur in the Tampa Bay area for 23 years, voiced her frustration about what she called misinformation aimed at silencing the Palestinian narrative and erasing its history.

“How would any other human feel? Why should our voices be silenced and our history be erased?” Bahour said. “When institutions want to ban us from speaking out against what the 75 years of occupation has done to the indigenous Palestinian people, it literally paralyzes us and makes us feel that we are not part of our own community.”

At a gathering Sunday night organized by Christians United for Israel at Free Life Chapel in Lakeland, a group of about 400 Christians and Jews took a moment to pray for Palestinians caught in the conflict.

“I don’t want to prejudge people’s hearts,” Pastor Scott Thomas said in an interview. “We are hearing more and more Palestinians speaking out about Hamas. We’re starting to see — thank God — videos of various leaders in different Arab and Muslim countries speaking out against Hamas. And so, in that capacity, I don’t ever just want to lump everybody as, ‘They’re all enemies, they all hate this, and they all love this.’ It’s dangerous when we start polarizing and making generalizations.”

Thomas agreed with DeSantis that immigration and border security need to be taken seriously. But he said there should be a way to bring people in while keeping paramount the safety of U.S. citizens.

“Right now I think there’s way too many decisions being made out of emotion,” he said. “We’ve kissed moral clarity goodbye. Even in the midst of chaos, we have to keep thinking, keep our feet on the ground, and keep making quality decisions, not just emotional ones.”

Mousa-Fakhouri, the Jacksonville resident, said she believes DeSantis’ rhetoric is likely to cost him support among Republicans in her Arab American community. Should he become the party’s nominee, she said, she would face a difficult decision about how to vote.

As the war has unfolded, she’s been horrified by images of bombings in Gaza and frustrated by the full-throated support that the American political establishment has lent to Israel. She described Gaza as an open-air prison, a term also used by human rights organizations to describe the territory. She believes its people, if given the opportunity to come to the United States, could be an asset to Florida’s economy, and she’s dismayed that DeSantis has written them off.

”I feel that he is no longer for the people,” she said. “I feel that he doesn’t feel all people are created equal.”

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