The Democratic Convention Failed the Palestine Movement
The Uncommitted movement made modest demands on the Democratic Party toward ending the agony in Gaza, and the party rejected them. But their demands cannot be ignored by Democratic power brokers forever.
Hadas Thier
This story was originally published by Jacobin.
The vibes were good at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) this week. Unity was on the agenda, and a sense of confidence prevailed in speeches from the lame-duck president to the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) Shawn Fain to the left flank of the party represented by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Given a seven-and-a-half-minute slot during prime time, Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was greeted by thousands of delegates with chants of “AOC! AOC!” A politics of joy was sweeping the Democratic Party in the wake of Joe Biden stepping down as its nominee.
But by the convention’s final morning, down the hall away from the main stage, hearts were breaking at a press conference held by Uncommitted delegates. The thirty delegates — representing approximately 740,000 uncommitted Democratic primary voters from Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and around a half dozen other states — had been pushing all week for a change in course of the administration’s financial, military and political support of Israel’s war on Gaza. Many saw themselves as fighting to save the soul of the Democratic Party, which espouses to be the party of democracy and human rights but has enabled a genocidal war.
At the heart of the Uncommitted National Movement’s organizing is the call for “not another bomb” through an arms embargo that would stop weapons shipments to Israel. Although the Biden/Harris administration claims to be working to secure a cease-fire, all that is meaningless jargon, they explained, so long as the United States remains Israel’s biggest weapons supplier. As Uncommitted’s cofounder Layla Elabed put it: “How can we have a cease-fire when we provide the fire?”
At Thursday morning’s press conference, speakers and supporters shared anger and tears. Some had been up all night at a sit-in that they had begun the evening before. Wednesday evening, they received word that after weeks of negotiations, the DNC rejected their request to have a Palestinian American speaker address the convention, even for two minutes. Elabed recounted her lifelong commitment to the Democratic Party, instilled in her by her father, an immigrant from Palestine and a UAW member. Her father taught her and her siblings (among them Representative Rashida Tlaib) that the Democratic Party provided them and others like them with a voice at the table.
“This convention,” Elabed said with her voice shaking, “undid all of that.”
The unity on display at the DNC came jarringly at the expense of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians currently being bombed and starved in Gaza. Despite the overwhelming support among Democratic voters for a cease-fire, and a finding by a recent YouGov poll that calling for an arms embargo would be popular among Democratic and independent voters in swing states, the party’s leadership failed, at this key turning point, to commit to a policy change. They failed to even allow a Palestinian American Democrat to address the convention.
Uncommitted delegates had submitted a list of possible names, among them elected officials with long track records within the Democratic Party, including state representative Ruwa Romman, who has spent a decade turning out votes and building support for the Democratic Party in the swing state of Georgia. Uncommitted assured the DNC that whoever they chose to speak could have their speech vetted ahead of time. One draft of such a speech was beautiful and would have been a gift to the Kamala Harris campaign.
Having a speaker who could speak to the suffering in Gaza was a very minimal ask — far from their demand for an arms embargo. But it would have provided a symbolic gesture of goodwill that Uncommitted delegates believed would signal a willingness to discuss the party’s policy.
Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, whose twenty-three-year-old son is being held hostage by Hamas, were given the stage — a move that Uncommitted delegates were very much in support of. But so too was Geoff Duncan, a Georgia Republican and former lieutenant governor. At the sit-in on Wednesday night, Georgia representative Romman explained in exasperation, “Our tent can fit anti-choice Republicans, but it can’t fit an elected official like me.”
Scant reference was made to Gaza from the convention’s stage, limited to a handful of words from the party’s progressive/left flank: Bernie Sanders, Raphael Warnock and AOC; from parents of hostages held by Hamas; and finally by the president and vice president themselves.
Senator Warnock made reference to Palestinian humanity, Senator Sanders finally called for a permanent cease-fire, and the parents of hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin gave a heartbreaking and clear-headed call for a cease-fire, a return of hostages, and an end to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.
In a surprisingly out-of-sync moment, AOC used her prime-time minutes to repeat the false narrative that Vice President Harris is “working tirelessly to secure a cease-fire in Gaza.” At the moment when Uncommitted delegates were actively organizing at the convention to build support for their demands, and seemed teetering on the edge of getting stage time for a Palestinian American speaker, they could have used a champion like AOC to supply oxygen to the movement.
The congresswoman has been a fierce defender of Palestinian rights and an ally to the Uncommitted movement in pushing for a speaker at the convention. Calling into the Uncommitted sit-in via FaceTime on Wednesday night, AOC assured those sitting in that their work was being “paired with a very strong inside push” within the party.
Yet even if a positive affirmation was beyond what Ocasio-Cortez could feasibly do from the front of the convention stage, given the stakes of her speech at that moment, she could have at least made a nod toward the humanity of Palestinians, pointed to the horrifying anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim policies and aims of Donald Trump or even said nothing at all about the war on Gaza. But by declaring to raucous applause that essentially Harris already “got this,” she — perhaps unwittingly — undercut arguments for policy change.
As Rep. Ilhan Omar would later say at one of the Uncommitted press conferences: “Working tirelessly for a cease-fire is really not a thing and [members of the administration] should be ashamed of themselves for saying such things. Because we supply these weapons. So if you really wanted a cease-fire, you just stop sending the weapons.”
Of course, Uncommitted delegates and their supporters were under no illusion about the difficulty of the tasks ahead. As Romman told Zeteo’s Mehdi Hassan: “None of us expected to change 80 years worth of policy in the course of a single election cycle.” The party has a long, shameful history of backing Israeli apartheid and assaults on the Palestinian people. In the last 10 months, their ironclad commitment to Israel has translated into an interminable flow of money, arms and political cover from the Biden administration, used to bomb, starve and displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
But many in the Palestine movement were cautiously optimistic, noting the different tone conveyed by Harris vis-à-vis Gaza — no doubt a reflection of the sea change in public opinion putting pressure on the Democratic Party leadership.
And despite the heartbreak and frustration, their wager that the party’s base has shifted on Israel and Palestine was proven correct. Uncommitted delegates were able to recruit hundreds of Harris delegates to sign on to become cease-fire delegates. And while they were treated as outsiders by the DNC leadership and many of the delegates, they nevertheless noted others who were wearing keffiyehs, pins and flags, and responding positively to their presence.
Even the disturbingly insufficient references to cease-fire from the main stage received the most thunderous applause. Harris herself gave what began as a template “both sides” defense of Israel and Palestinian civilians during her speech but ended with a call for the Palestinian people to realize “their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”
The movement also made some significant breakthroughs in terms of visibility: organizing the first panel on Palestinian human rights at the DNC in the party’s history; drawing mainstream media into multiple press conferences; and shining a national spotlight on the party’s refusal to allow a Palestinian American to speak. Organizing for “not another bomb” will continue on past the DNC and put pressure on the Democratic Party from within and without to change its barbaric policy in Israel and Palestine.
Still, the movement has a very steep hill to climb. The fact that Uncommitted made a relatively minor ask of the Democratic Party leadership — to get a few minutes of airtime at the DNC to discuss one of the most brutal wars of the twenty-first century thus far — and was rejected anyway reflects a disturbing commitment to continued dehumanization of the Palestine people.
But coming out of the convention, there’s also a sense that the bloody status quo in Gaza will not be able to hold for much longer for Democrats. However committed to funding and supplying endless war against Palestinian civilians that Democratic leaders may be, Democratic voters and Democratic convention delegates are not. The former may hold most of the power, but the latter hold the truth. The Uncommitted organizers have shown that the truth will not remain unheard and defeated forever.
Hadas Thier is an activist and socialist in New York, the author of A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics, and a regular contributor to Jacobin Magazine. She tweets at @HadasThier.
