Before their son died in captivity in Gaza, the mother and father of Hersh Goldberg-Polin spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. It was a testament to their huge empathy that, beyond pleading for the return of their son, they also pleaded for the end of the war in Gaza that has killed at least 48,000 Palestinians. They were the only speakers in the convention to move beyond the vaguest platitudes.

 

 

There were dozens of speakers at the Democratic National Convention besides Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin: Geoff Duncan, a former Lieutenant Governor of Georgia and Republican; Stevie Wonder; Steph Curry. Three days of round-the-clock primetime television coverage. There was no time for a Palestinian to speak for three minutes. This was not for want of a speaker: the Uncommitted movement, a group of Democratic party activists who had pushed for months to change the party’s support for sending arms to Israel, had sent a list containing dozens of potential speakers: doctors who had worked in Gaza and seen firsthand multiple children walk in with point-blank gunshot wounds in their head, along with every Democratic Palestinian American elected official. This was in addition to progressive politicians submitting their own lists to the DNC. Every potential speaker was rejected. The Uncommitted movement had reached the limits of its power.

 

 

The Uncommitted movement did everything a pressure group within one of the two parties that dominates American politics is supposed to do. Lead organizers Waleed Shahid, Abbas Alawieh, and Layla Elabed had worked on the Democratic primary ballot line to give primary voters another option so they could express discontent with the party before the general election. The party, outside of the most hardline pro-Israel elements, seemed open to engaging with them: when Uncommitted had its first big success, garnering 13% of the primary vote in Michigan, one of the chairs of the Biden campaign responded by saying that the campaign had received the message. When Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee, she initially signaled that she was open to dialogue with the left-wing of the party; after being approached in a photo lineup by two uncommitted organizers, she expressed openness to meeting with the group. The Uncommitted movement was enjoying huge success for a group that had been bootstrapped with thousands of dollars of funding and a few committed former congressional staffers as leaders; in Minnesota, they won nearly 19% of the vote, and in Rhode Island 14%. In total, Uncommitted, if counted with spoiled ballots and other Gaza protest votes, won something in the order of one million votes: a real, if small, minority.

 

 

Immediately the movement worked to translate the 37 delegates (out of the 3,949 pledged delegates present at the DNC) into a voice for ending the war and securing a hostage deal. The movement secured an early victory after the DNC announced that there would be a panel on Palestinian human rights at the DNC. Hundreds of delegates agreed to become “ceasefire” delegates, sponsoring pins supporting Palestinian human rights and wearing keffiyehs. The leader of the Washington Uncommitted delegation estimated that roughly 40% of the delegates supported the movement’s demands to end arms sales to the Israeli government. But the push for speakers failed, leading eventually to a sit-in outside the DNC led by Uncommitted delegates and supported by representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. Waleed Shahid, who had previously recruited AOC to run for Congress and was one of the leaders of the progressive movement on Capitol Hill, described the complete rejection by the DNC as one of the most humiliating moments of his life.

 

 

The Democratic Party’s unwillingness to give even the most basic recognition to Palestinian voices (the speech proposed was not radical; it endorsed Kamala Harris, called for a hostage deal, and didn’t even mention halting arms transfers) is not just morally unconscionable; it’s also deeply politically stupid. Michigan is evenly split in the polls, and Arab Americans, many of whom have family living in Lebanon and Palestine, are understandably disgusted by the genocidal assault being carried out in Gaza. Trump would certainly be much worse, and more importantly completely insulated to pressure from the left, but to a voter today in Michigan these concerns might seem like ones for the future. Uncommitted offered a way to bring these voters back into the Democratic coalition. The Harris campaign has squandered it. But Arab Americans are not a rock-solid part of the Democratic coalition; a majority voted for Republicans before 9/11, and polls show that since October 7^th Arab Americans are incredibly disillusioned with the Democratic Party (this is in marked contrast to Jewish American voters, who have been solidly Democratic voters since the New Deal and who polls show as not having shifted significantly since October 7^th).

 

 

What prevented the party from taking this basic step to addressing the concerns of a key part of its fragile coalition? Both the Republican and Democratic parties have become hollowed-out institutions fatally unable to communicate with critical parts of their constituencies; over the last 40 or so years each institution have devolved into glorified fundraising instruments. It is far harder to build a movement to contest an institution that hardly qualifies as a political party when lobbying groups like AIPAC, Democratic Majority for Israel, and other large pro-Israel lobbying groups spend upwards of 100 million dollars on challenges to the Democratic party’s orthodoxy on Israel. This trend of hollowing has also been coupled with a professionalisation of the party; policy is in large part being shaped not by competition between different wings of the party but by small numbers of technocratic advisors laser-focused on opinion polling and dismissive or downright insolent to a left which mobilizes people, not money, for changes in policy.

 

 

Beyond this, though, is the simple and extremely unfortunate contingency that the current head of the Democratic Party and president of the United States is someone who early in their career was one of the most hawkish Democrats on Israel. Right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin disassociated himself from remarks that Biden made where he pushed for even greater brutality than that being carried out by the Israel Defense Forces. Unfortunately, Biden does not seem to have changed much from this early support; as his Vice President, Harris is not able to make a U-turn on his policy.

 

 

Though the Uncommitted movement refused to endorse the Harris campaign after none of its demands were met or addressed, most of its leaders have individually expressed support for voting for Harris. The proposed speaker at the DNC, Georgia State Representative and Palestinian American Ruwa Romman, explicitly endorsed the campaign. The Democratic Party has not given them many reasons to do so, besides finger-wagging that Trump will be worse, or telling progressives to shut up and get in line. But Shahid and Alawieh understand that third-party challenges to either party are for now a dead-end, and that at least a future Harris administration could be pressured. It remains to be seen whether voters in Michigan and Wisconsin will follow suit. ∎

 

 

Words by Charlie Goldberg. Image Courtesy of Lorie Shaull via Flickr.