Pro-Palestinian Candidate Jumps Into Michigan’s Senate Race

Abdul El-Sayed, a former Michigan health official known for his pro-Palestinian sympathies, has jumped into the Democratic primary to replace the retiring Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., in the Senate.

El-Sayed, who served as the director of the Wayne County public health department from March 2023 until this month, previously ran unsuccessfully for Michigan governor in 2018. He lost by a wide margin to Gretchen Whitmer in the Democrat primary. This time, El-Sayed faces a Democrat field that includes state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and potentially Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich. 

On the Republican side, former Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., has declared his candidacy for the seat as well. Rogers narrowly lost the 2024 Michigan Senate race to Elissa Slotkin. 

El-Sayed has had a distinguished career in one of the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies: higher education. After graduating from the University of Michigan, he received a Rhodes scholarship to attend Oxford where he earned a Ph.D. in public health. He then completed his medical doctorate at Columbia University where he later worked as an assistant professor of epidemiology. El-Sayed was also the executive director of the Detroit Department of Health & Wellness Promotion from 2015 to 2017. l-

El-Sayed, who has a personal connection to the Middle East through his father who immigrated to the United States from Egypt, has strong views on the conflict between Israel and Palestinians. In an op-ed published in 2021 (long before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel), he criticized both Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces. 

“To be absolutely clear: I categorically condemn violence perpetrated on innocent people, no matter who perpetrates it, against whom it’s perpetrated, no matter where and no matter what the pretext. Period. Hamas is wrong. And its violent co-option of nonviolent protest is part of the problem,” El-Sayed said in the op-ed.

El-Sayed then went into his critique of the state of Israel.

“And because I categorically condemn violence perpetrated on innocent people, there is no world where the murder of 63 children is an act of ‘defense.’ So, no. There is no justification for the state-sponsored indiscriminate murder of Gazan children by the Israeli armed forces,” he wrote. 

El-Sayed also appeared to question the foreign aid the U.S. sends to Israel each year. “That year, 2004, the U.S. government sent $2.1 billion in military aid to Israel. Those billions funded the bombs that exploded over the heads of my friends—our government subsidizing the violence from which two of its own citizens could not escape,” the former academic wrote, referring to two childhood friends with whom he had traveled to the Mideast that summer.

In comments made to the Detroit Free Press in May 2021, El-Sayed also criticized bombings by the Israeli government.

El-Sayed was endorsed Thursday by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. El-Sayed has a long history with the Vermont senator, having endorsed him for president in 2019.

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