By MARIAM FAM Associated Press

Demoralized by the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, Palestinian American Samia Assed found in Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascension — and her running mate pick — “a little ray of hope.”

That hope, she said, shattered during last month’s Democratic National Convention, where a request for a Palestinian American speaker was denied and listening to Harris left her feeling like the Democratic presidential nominee will continue the U.S. policies that have outraged many in the anti-war camp.

“I couldn’t breathe because I felt unseen and erased,” said Assed, a community organizer in New Mexico.

Under different circumstances, Assed would have reveled in the groundbreaking rise of a woman of color as her party’s nominee. Instead, she agonizes over her ballot box options.

For months, many Palestinian Americans have been contending with the double whammy of the rising Palestinian death toll and suffering in Gaza and their own government’s support for Israel in the war. Alongside pro-Palestinian allies, they’ve grieved, organized, lobbied and protested as the killings and destruction unfolded on their screens or touched their own families. Now, they also wrestle with tough, deeply personal voting decisions, including in battleground states.

“It’s a very hard time for Palestinian youth and Palestinian Americans,” Assed said. “There’s a lot of pain.”

Without a meaningful change, voting for Harris would feel for her “like a jab in the heart,” she said. At the same time, Assed, a lifelong Democrat and feminist, would like to help block another Donald Trump presidency and remain engaged with the Democrats “to hold them liable,” she said.

“It’s really a difficult place to be in.”

She’s not alone.

In Georgia, the Gaza bloodshed has been haunting Ghada Elnajjar. She said the war claimed the lives of more than 100 members of her extended family in Gaza, where her parents were born.

She saw missed opportunities at the DNC to connect with voters like her. Besides the rejection of the request for a Palestinian speaker, Elnajjar found a disconnect between U.S. policies and Harris’ assertion that she and President Joe Biden were working to accomplish a cease-fire and hostage deal.

“Without stopping U.S. financial support and military support to Israel, this will not stop,” said Elnajjar who in 2020 campaigned for Biden. “I’m a U.S. citizen. I’m a taxpayer … and I feel betrayed and neglected.”

She’ll keep looking for policy changes, but, if necessary, remain “uncommitted,” potentially leaving the top of the ticket blank. Harris must earn her vote, she said.

Harris, in her DNC speech, said she and Biden were working to end the war such that “Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”

She said she “will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself,” while describing the suffering in Gaza as “heartbreaking.”

While her recent rhetoric on Palestinian suffering has been viewed as empathetic by some who had soured on Biden over the war, the lack of a concrete policy shift appears to have increasingly frustrated many of those who want the war to end. Activists demanding a permanent cease-fire have urged an embargo on U.S. weapons to Israel, whose military campaign in Gaza has killed over 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials.

The war was sparked by an Oct. 7 attack on Israel in which Hamas-led terrorists killed some 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages. Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

Layla Elabed, a Palestinian American and co-director of the Uncommitted National Movement, said the demand for a policy shift remains. Nationally, “uncommitted” has garnered hundreds of thousands of votes in Democratic primaries.

Elabed said Harris and her team have been invited to meet before Sept. 15 with “uncommitted” movement leaders from key swing states and with Palestinian families with relatives killed in Gaza. After that date, she said, “we will need to make the decision if we can actually mobilize our base” to vote for Harris.

Without a policy change, “we can’t do an endorsement,” and will, instead, continue talking about the “dangers” of a Trump presidency, leaving voters to vote their conscience, she added.

Some other anti-war activists are taking it further, advocating for withholding votes from Harris in the absence of a change.

“There’s pressure to punish the Democratic Party,” Elabed said. “Our position is continue taking up space within the Democratic Party,” and push for change from the inside.

Some of the tensions surfaced at an August rally in Michigan when anti-war protesters interrupted Harris. Initially, Harris said everybody’s voice matters. As the shouting continued, with demonstrators chanting that they “won’t vote for genocide,” she took a sharper tone.

“If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that,” she said.

Nada Al-Hanooti, national deputy organizing director with the Muslim American advocacy group Emgage Action, rejects as unfair the argument by some that traditionally Democratic voters who withhold votes from Harris are in effect helping Trump. She said the burden should be on Harris and her party.

“Right now, it’s a struggle being a Palestinian American,” she said. “I don’t want a Trump presidency, but, at the same time, the Democratic Party needs to win our vote.”

Though dismayed that no Palestinian speaker was allowed on the DNC stage, Al-Hanooti said she felt inspired by how “uncommitted” activists made Palestinians part of the conversation at the convention. Activists were given space there to hold a forum discussing the plight of Palestinians in Gaza.

“We in the community still need to continue to push Harris on conditioning aid, on a cease-fire,” she said. “The fight is not over.”

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She said she’s never known grief like that she has experienced over the past year. In the girls of Gaza, she sees her late grandmother who, at 10, was displaced from her home during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation and lived in a Syrian refugee camp, dreaming of returning home.

“It just completely tears me apart,” Al-Hanooti said.

She tries to channel her pain into putting pressure on elected officials and encouraging community members to vote, despite encountering what she said was increased apathy, with many feeling that their vote won’t matter. “Our job at Emgage is simply right now to get our Muslim community to vote because our power is in the collective.”

In 2020, Emgage — whose political action committee then endorsed Biden — and other groups worked to maximize Muslim American turnout, especially in battleground states. Muslims make up a small percentage of Americans overall, but activists hope that in states with notable Muslim populations, such as Michigan, energizing more of them makes a difference in close races — and demonstrates the community’s political power.

Some voters want to send a message.

“Our community has given our votes away cheaply,” argued Omar Abuattieh, a pharmacy major at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “Once we can start to understand our votes as a bargaining tool, we’ll have more power.”

For Abuattieh, whose mother was born in Gaza, that means planning to vote third party “to demonstrate the power in numbers of a newly activated community that deserves future consultation.”

A Pew Research Center survey in February found that U.S. Muslims are more sympathetic to the Palestinian people than many other Americans are and that only 6% of Muslim American adults believe the U.S. is striking the right balance between the Israelis and Palestinians. Nearly two-thirds of Muslim registered voters identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, according to the survey.

But U.S. Muslims, who are racially and ethnically diverse, are not monolithic in their political behavior; some have publicly supported Harris in this election cycle. In 2020, among Muslim voters, 64% supported Biden and 35% supported Trump, according to AP VoteCast.

The Harris campaign said it has appointed two people for Muslim and Arab outreach.

Harris “will continue to meet with leaders from Palestinian, Muslim, Israeli and Jewish communities, as she has throughout her vice presidency,” the campaign said in response to questions, without specifically commenting on the uncommitted movement’s request for a meeting before Sept. 15.

Harris is being scrutinized by those who say the Biden-Harris administration hasn’t done enough to pressure Israel to end the war and by Republicans looking to brand her as insufficient in her support for Israel.

Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, said Trump “will once again deliver peace through strength to rebuild and expand the peace coalition he built in his first term to create long-term safety and security for both the Israeli and Palestinian people.”

Many Arab and Muslim Americans were angered by Trump’s ban, while in office, that affected travelers from several Muslim-majority countries, which Biden rescinded.

In Michigan, Ali Ramlawi, who owns a restaurant in Ann Arbor, said Harris’ nomination initially gave him relief on various domestic issues, but the DNC left him disappointed on the Palestinian question.

Before the convention, he expected to vote Democratic, but now says he’s considering backing the Green Party for the top of the ticket or leaving that blank.

“Our vote shouldn’t be taken for granted,” he said. “I won’t vote for the lesser of two evils.”

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

At the age of 11, Courtney Henry began working at his father’s first McDonald’s franchise, which still stands on University Avenue near the Minnesota State Capitol. With a heavy heart, tired of hearing that young employees had to remove heavy drug users from the bathroom, Henry in recent years converted the sizable location into a drive-through venue with an interior walk-up counter but no customer restroom or indoor seating.

Most of the space is now used for training purposes.

The longstanding Midway McDonald’s, also located on University Avenue in St. Paul near Snelling Avenue and Allianz Field, has been no less problematic. During the pandemic, it switched from being a sit-down restaurant to a drive-through with a walk-up window, and no interior service at all. On Dec. 8, at the end of its lease, Henry plans to shutter the site for good. Demolition could quickly follow.

Some are cautiously optimistic for better days ahead. Dr. Bill McGuire said he plans to tear down the franchise location and replace it with a hotel fronting two future restaurant pavilions and the green in front of Allianz Field, the 19,000-seat professional soccer stadium he built in partnership with the city. No hotel or restaurant tenants have been announced, though a spokesman for the development said heavy construction is likely to get underway next year. A giant loon statue will be installed overlooking Snelling and University avenues by the end of the month.

Henry said McGuire invited him to reopen McDonald’s somewhere else in the burgeoning development, but he declined.

“I want out of the Midway,” said Henry on Thursday, during a boat tour of the St. Paul Port Authority’s Mississippi River terminals.

Henry, who oversees 19 McDonald’s franchises, was recently appointed to the board of the Port Authority, the city’s leading economic development partner. He points to heavy loitering and open drug sales outside the shuttered CVS pharmacy in the northwest corner of the Snelling/University intersection as signs of blight and neglect.

“I’ve never seen the Midway this bad,” Henry said. “We’ve been there for 30 years. It’s literally an open-air drug market. It’s a slap in the face. If there’s a soccer game going on, it’s one of the safest areas in the city. But as soon as the game (is over)… it’s back to an open-air drug market. Business owners are at wit’s end. Something’s got to change.”

Challenges and changes ahead

That sentiment has become increasingly widespread in the Midway.

On a Saturday afternoon in late July, a man was shot and robbed of his e-bike by a bus shelter at Snelling and Spruce Tree Drive. On Friday, burglars stole an estimated $30,000 in computers, cell phones and assorted equipment from Tuan Auto Repair at University and Pascal.

“In all our years here these past couple to few years are the worst I have seen it,” wrote owner Raks Pham on Facebook.

Financial adviser Nneka Constantino, who served on the Port Authority for 18 years and lives in Hamline-Midway, said her husband’s University Avenue furniture store — Elsa’s House of Sleep — has been negatively impacted by the loss of foot traffic in the area and the uptick in loitering.

“I am absolutely disgusted with what is happening with Snelling and University, specifically the CVS,” said Constantino on Thursday. “If a small business owner had a business that has been boarded up … (the city) would be all over it. It’s an open-air drug market. It’s terrible for the kids in the neighborhood. … There’s been absolutely no accountability.”

St. Paul City Council President Mitra Jalali, who represents the area, said this month that the city’s Department of Safety and Inspections is aware of challenges at the CVS location and visits frequently, sometimes daily. The property owner — a real estate management group owned by or closely affiliated with CVS — has plans to install fencing and a motion detector, she said.

Some have blamed the Midway’s challenges on the national uptick in homelessness and fentanyl addiction during the pandemic, mismanagement of the Green Line light rail, the loss of small businesses following the 2020 riots and the developer’s decision to clear out businesses from the Midway Shopping Center to make room for new real estate around Allianz Field.

The Kimball Court Apartments, a destination for the recently homeless, sits two blocks north of the Snelling/University intersection at Charles and Snelling. Under pressure from the community after sometimes daily police visits, Beacon Interfaith switched security partners multiple times in 2022 and added new property management. If funding comes together, it plans a $13 million expansion from 76 to 98 units, which organizers say will help fund more on-site staffing and new office, service and programming spaces.

A giant loon — and eight-story hotel?

In what some see as a hopeful sign, McGuire — team owner of the Minnesota United — has said he is lining up some $200 million in private equity funding for an eight-story, 160-unit hotel, two restaurant pavilions, an office building and parking along the south side of University Avenue, with construction likely to get underway next year. An outdoor, all-abilities playground opened this summer adjoining the soccer stadium, and a giant sculpted loon measuring 35 feet in height and almost 90 feet across will be installed this month at the southeast corner of University and Snelling.

Demolition of an old Little Caesar’s pizza shop and adjoining vacant businesses was completed along University Avenue over the past month, and the existing McDonald’s could be taken down soon after it closes Dec. 8.

“There’s no intent to leave that building up for months,” said Mike Hahm, a project adviser and former city parks director, who is working with McGuire on community outreach.

As for the sculpture, “the first half of the trucks with the Loon left Los Angeles over the weekend, and should arrive in the Midway early this week,” said Hahm on Monday.

Allianz Field, which hosted the two-day Breakaway Music Festival in its parking lot in June, will host another electronic dance music festival — the Forbidden Festival — on Sept. 21.

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MOSCOW, Idaho (AP) — A judge has agreed to move the trial of man charged in the stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students to a different city.

In an order dated Friday, Idaho Second District Judge John C. Judge said he was concerned about defendant Bryan Kohberger’s ability to receive a fair trial at the Latah County courthouse in Moscow, given extensive media coverage of the case as well as statements by public officials suggesting Kohberger’s guilt.

He also noted that the courthouse isn’t big enough to accommodate the case and that the county sheriff’s office doesn’t have enough deputies to handle security. He did not specify where the trial would be moved.

Kohberger’s defense team sought the change of vendue, saying strong emotions in the close-knit community and constant news coverage will make it impossible to find an impartial jury in the small university town where the killings occurred. Prosecutors argued that any problems with potential bias could be resolved by simply calling a larger pool of potential jurors and questioning them carefully.

Kohberger, a former criminal justice student at Washington State University, which is across the state line in Pullman, faces four counts of murder in the deaths of Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves.

The four University of Idaho students were killed sometime in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, 2022, in a rental house near the campus.

Police arrested Kohberger six weeks later at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania, where he was spending winter break.

The killings stunned students at both universities and left the small city of Moscow deeply shaken. The case also spurred a flurry of news coverage, much of which Kohberger’s defense team says was inflammatory and left the community strongly biased against their client.