Why Were Democrats Afraid to Hear a Palestinian?

Near midnight last week, Democratic delegates with the Uncommitted movement sat in protest outside Chicago’s United Center. Elected by hundreds of thousands of primary voters who oppose President Joe Biden’s response to the war in Gaza, the delegates were sent to the DNC “uncommitted”—not pledged to support any candidate at the convention. Earlier in the week, the group did what they were elected to do by calling for a permanent ceasefire and immediate arms embargo. They also continued a simpler request they’d started making before the convention: a spot for a speaker on the main stage to talk about Palestine.

On Wednesday evening, the DNC and Harris campaign finally told them that no Palestinian American would be allowed to speak from the main stage of the convention. Here was their last ditch effort. They hoped a sit-in—and the Civil Rights history it evoked—would push party leaders to change their minds.

As the delegates waited, I watched a middle-aged man walk past. He shouted at the protesters: “Free the hostages!”

“We agree,” a chorus of Uncommitted supporters replied.

He shouted again: “Free the hostages!”

“We agree,” a woman wearing a hijab repeated. The man, seemingly confused, wandered away. 

That image, over the past week after the DNC, has stuck in my mind. Despite being a group of staunch Democrats working to affect change from within the party, the Harris campaign—and many Democrats—mostly treated Uncommitted and their allies as outsiders ruining a party at the DNC. And, often, it seemed without even understanding what they were saying or where agreement could be had. The result was a four-day convention that managed to find space for seemingly everyone on the main stage except those willing to speak personally about what is happening in Palestine.

Donald Trump’s former communications director Stephanie Grisham, who stayed through family separations but called it quits after January 6? Yes. An American doctor who saved the lives of children in Gaza? No. A former Republican Lieutenant Gov. of Georgia who Democrats said in March was on the “frontlines of banning abortion, restricting the right to vote, and cutting taxes for the rich and powerful?” Yes. Rep. Ruwa Romman, a Georgia Democrat currently fighting against that agenda in the state legislature? No.

By denying someone of Palestinian descent the chance to speak, the Harris campaign missed an easy opportunity to create distance between itself and President Biden’s failing and highly unpopular response to the war. A June poll by CBS News and YouGov found that 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents believe that the United States should not send weapons and supplies to Israel, despite the Biden administration’s support for continuing to do so. Only 23 percent of Democrats, compared with 76 percent of Republicans, told Gallup in June that they support Israel’s military actions in Gaza. 

Nevertheless, Biden has pursued a policy of effectively unconditional support for Israel that is more in line with the preferences of Republican voters than independents and members of his own party. A Palestinian American speaker would have given Uncommitted delegates something to bring back to the voters who elected them to show that Harris understands this reality. 

“If we go to [uncommitted voters] right now and say, Hey, trust us there’s been a change at the top and we feel like maybe Vice President Harris feels a little bit differently in her heart,” Uncommitted co-founder Abbas Alawieh explained at the group’s first press conference of the convention, “that’s not going to win back voters. We need a plan. We need to know how the killing is going to be stopped.” 

The Uncommitted delegates made clear throughout the week that they want to defeat Trump. But they want Harris to take positions that will help them to convince their voters to support her. It is a remarkably pragmatic message for a movement that believes Harris has served as vice president in an administration enabling a genocide. Uncommitted delegates were not the communists I saw carrying a hammer and sickle–adorned banner at a protest outside the convention’s security perimeter. They were Democrats sent to Chicago by Democratic voters to pursue the inside track.

It was always going to be hard to sustain US media attention on Gaza as the presidential election came to dominate the minds of journalists and their bosses. Uncommitted, in a stroke of depressingly clear-eyed organizing tact, launched a movement that asked Democrats to vote uncommitted instead of backing Biden. And in doing so, Waleed Shahid, a Democratic strategist who previously served as the spokesperson for the Squad-adjacent Justice Democrats, along with Alawieh and fellow co-founder Layla Elabed, turned the effort to end the war into the kind of campaign story journalists could cover. 

Alawieh, a large and gentle man who previously worked as Rep. Cori Bush’s (D-Mo.) chief of staff, served as an emotional spokesperson throughout the DNC. As a teenager, he survived Israeli bombs that fell on south Lebanon. “I remember what those bombs feel like when they drop,” Alawieh explained. “I remember how your bones shake within your body.” 

The overarching message of his speeches was that the more than 16,000 children who have died in Gaza are just as human as the boy he once was. The need to make that point again and again was its own form of dehumanization. But Alawieh hoped that repeating the message would get Democrats to accept his help and change their course on Gaza.

As he staged the sit-in, Alawieh struggled to accept that there would be no speaker at the DNC: “We did everything right, you know?” Again and again, Alawieh told reporters he was waiting for party leaders to call and tell him they’d changed their mind. 

Often, during the DNC, I was struck by the restraint of the Uncommitted movement. So much, it seemed, was set up for Democrats to accept. And all of this was despite what they had seen—and their families had experienced. 

What often got lost in commentary about the Uncommitted movement during the DNC were the atrocities that forced this moment. Israelis and Palestinians are now almost one year into the war that began with the brutal October 7 Hamas-led attack that took the lives of nearly 1,200 people in Israel. Since then, Israel has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza and injured nearly 100,000—most of whom have been civilians, according to the local health ministry. (Relative to Gaza’s population, this is the equivalent to the United States suffering 20 million casualties in less than a year.) 

Thousands of bodies are believed to be buried under the rubble and potentially tens of thousands of others may die due to malnutrition, disease, and the destruction of medical infrastructure caused by the Israeli siege. This suffering is happening in a small strip of land that was considered by many experts to be an “open-air prison” long before October 7 as a result of a devastating Israeli blockade. Beyond the damage to human life, Gaza has been reduced to rubble by one of the most intense aerial bombing campaigns in human history. Top Israeli officials have spoken openly about wanting to destroy Gaza. Thanks in part to a steady stream of American armaments, they have now succeeded to an extent that is still not fully understood. 

When I spoke in March with Omer Bartov, an Israeli military veteran who is now the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, he believed Israel’s actions in Gaza were on the verge of genocide. Since then, Bartov has concluded that the line has been crossed. (He is far from alone in that conclusion among genocide scholars and human rights experts.) 

At the DNC, most of this went largely unheard. The focus was understandably on the joy and unity inspired by Harris replacing Biden atop the ticket. For the first time in more than a decade, Democrats seemed to have the swagger of the Obama era. They didn’t want to jinx it but they knew a Trump-ending victory was tantalizingly close. They mocked the former president as a morally—and perhaps anatomically—small man.

But, for others, it was impossible to fully take part in that celebration with Gaza in mind. A Tuesday Uncommitted press conference made that clear. Featuring American doctors who have volunteered in Gaza, their testimony was at times punctuated by the sobbing of those listening. Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish American orthopedic surgeon in North Carolina, said in a statement read by fellow surgeon Feroze Sidhwa: 

Never before have I seen a small child shot in the head and then in the chest, and I could never have imagined that I would see two such cases in less than two weeks. Never before have I seen a dozen small children screaming in pain and terror—crowded into a trauma bay smaller than my living room, their burning flesh filling the space so aggressively that my eyes started to burn…

And, worst of all, I could never have imagined that my government would be supplying the weapons and funding that keeps this horrifying slaughter going. Not for one week. Not for one month. But for nearly an entire year now. To this day, I wear my late father’s mezuzah around my neck. Since returning from Gaza, I have also draped a keffiyeh over my shoulders. And there is no contradiction.  

These horrors are not abstractions for many Uncommitted voters and their allies. At the Monday panel on Palestinian human rights attended by hundreds of people, Hala Hijazi introduced herself as a moderate Democrat and civil servant from San Francisco. Hijazi said that more than 100 of her family members had been killed in Gaza—including two the previous week.

“I’m here because they can no longer speak,” she said. “I’m here because it’s the least that I can do as an American, as a person of faith, and as a Democrat.”

Like other convention speeches, the Uncommitted movement knew that the speaker and remarks would have been edited and vetted beforehand. Initially, Uncommitted organizers put forward Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor who spoke at Uncommitted press conferences.

After Dr. Haj-Hassan was rejected for unspecified reasons, organizers sent over the names of people who have lost relatives in Gaza, as well as Palestinian American elected officials. Uncommitted organizers had heard that it was a good sign that their speaking request was still in limbo.

One of their top choices was Romman, the Georgia state representative. Romman’s message would have complemented the one delivered by Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, who gave a moving speech about how their son Hersh Goldberg-Polin was taken hostage on October 7. Romman saw letting an elected Democrat like herself give a carefully worded speech as the “bare minimum” party leaders could do. But they never contacted her to see what she wanted to say. 

As a result, the Harris campaign likely did not see the speech Romman hoped to give until Mother Jones published it during the convention. Once it was out, even more moderate writers like Jonathan Chait wondered what all the fuss was about. Why go through so much trouble and sow so much disunity to prevent an elected Democrat from giving a speech that included lines like:

Let’s commit to each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur. Let’s fight for the policies long overdue—from restoring access to abortions to ensuring a living wage, to demanding an end to reckless war and a ceasefire in Gaza.

It was the refusal to let a Palestinian American say even that that led to the sit-in on Wednesday night. Instead, on the final night of the convention, Rep. Romman ended up reading the speech she’d hoped to give to the many members of the media assembled before her outside the United Center. Later that night, the delegates locked arms and made their way back into the United Center. As they made their way in, it was increasingly possible to imagine a Democratic Party that one day saw them not as disruptors but champions of the values the party purports to hold. But by the time that moment arrives, there may be far fewer Palestines left to save.

As Romman has made clear, there is a long tradition of this kind of activism at the DNC. In 1988, the Reverend Jesse Jackson famously invoked how liberals have lauded history they might have said was too controversial at the time of its happening. After mentioning apartheid in South Africa, Jackson spoke of the need for the party to not shy away from controversy if it meant keeping a conscience. “Fannie Lou Hamer didn’t have the most votes in Atlantic City, but her principles have outlasted the life of every delegate who voted to lock her out,” Jackson argued. “If we are principled first, our politics will fall in place.” Romman invoked their legacy, adding that “I hope we listen now instead of in the future.”

Back inside the arena, delegates—committed and uncommitted—heard Harris accept the nomination. 

“What has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating,” the vice president said during the section of her speech that addressed the war. “So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”

This was, if anything, a step backward from March, when Biden said in his State of the Union:

This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed.  Most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands are innocent women and children. Girls and boys also orphaned. Nearly 2 million more Palestinians under bombardment or displaced.  Homes destroyed, neighborhoods in rubble, cities in ruin. Families without food, water, medicine. It’s heartbreaking.

Either way, focusing on rhetoric is a distraction from the policy decisions that matter. As Uncommitted delegates said too many times to count at the convention: “Palestinians can’t eat words.”

In announcing the sit-in, Alawieh referenced how the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin had talked in their DNC speech about the idea in the Jewish tradition “every person is an entire universe.” He connected it to a Muslim idea that harming one person harms all of humanity. “As I was seated inside as a delegate, and hearing about the 109 hostages still in Gaza,” he explained. “I sat with them. Every one of those 109 people are universes.”

“And I was also thinking of the 16,000 children,” Alawieh continued. “I could have been one of those children.”

Why did no Palestinian go on that stage? Perhaps because it is easier for those enabling Israel’s war in Gaza not to hear these pleas of shared humanity. It would require them to maybe reckon with how easy it is to forget about who is at the end of the bombs we send to Israel. “We are talking about children,” Alawieh said outside the arena. “President Biden, Vice President Harris, what are we talking about here? We’re talking about children.”