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During Vice President Kamala Harris’s Thursday night speech wherein she accepted the nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention, she specifically mentioned Palestinians.
“What has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating,” she told the crowd at the United Center in Chicago. “So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”
It was a surprisingly human line in a speech that otherwise touted a muscular foreign policy and patriotism; one that could have easily been delivered by George W Bush at the 2004 Republican National Convention or the late John McCain in 2008.
Harris then went a step further by saying that she and President Biden are “working to end this 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.” That mirrored the words Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made on the first night of the convention.
But Abbas Alawieh, one of the leaders of the Uncommitted movement, told The Independent he wasn’t fully satisfied with what Harris said.
“I was glad that she mentioned Palestinian dignity, and it did not surprise me that there was thunderous applause, and it's part of what we've been saying: that Democrats widely support Palestinian human rights,” he told The Independent.
Alawieh, a former chief of staff to Representative Cori Bush of Missouri, has led the charge among delegates who represent primary participants who chose to vote “uncommitted” as a way to protest the Biden administration’s policy toward Israel since the October 7 attack by Hamas.
While the Democratic National Convention reflected the larger jubilation within the party after Biden stepped away, uncommitted delegates grappled with that happiness, given that it seemed to knock the wind out of their movement.
“I was honestly quite disappointed with what seemed to me like repackaged talking points that perpetuate the status quo,” Alawieh continued. “Because what the Vice President is saying and how she's saying it, when she was talking about Palestinians, she said, ‘Palestinians have died and they are starving,’ as if Palestinians are just dropping dead for no reason, or that somehow they're going hungry and nobody knows why. There's a perpetrator here.”
Advocates like Alawieh and others had hoped that they could get Democrats to support a ceasefire in Gaza and support an embargo on arms to Israel. They also hoped that they could get a Palestinian to speak onstage at the convention. Instead, Ruwa Romman, one of proposed speakers, read her speech outside the convention during a press conference.
“Clearly they have room for anti-choice Republicans, but sadly, it doesn't seem like they have room for Palestinians,” she told The Independent, noting how the convention featured Republicans like former congressman Adam Kinzinger and former Georgia lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan.
“To be clear, ‘uncommitted’ garnered about a million votes, and they had very specific policy asks, and what they said was, at bare minimum, we would like a symbolic gesture, and we never even got the symbolic gesture,” she added.
Asma Mohammed, one of the delegates from Minnesota, noted at a press conference on Thursday evening that she was pushing Democrats because she loves the party.
“Imagine me — a hijabi woman with a keffiyeh — walking into the RNC right now,” she told reporters. “ It would never happen. This is our party. That's why we are working on our own party. This is my political home. That's why we are working on the inside.”
This is not to say that their work was a wash. Throughout the convention, numerous delegates, including older Black and white delegates from as far flung as Texas, were spotted wearing keffiyehs in clear support of the pro-Palestinian movement.
Now, uncommitted delegates are giving Harris until September 15 to meet with them.
“If we wait until October to start having this conversation, that would be too late, because there's a lot of harm that needs to start being repaired. And it's going to take a lot of work on our part if we're going to help Vice President Harris,” Abbas Alawieh said, noting how early voting is just around the corner.
But there is little sign that the Democratic Party wants to kill the vibe shift as they hope for a Harris victory. If anything, these protesters will likely face the same fate as the Chicks, who were viciously maligned by many Republicans and effectively banned from country music radio because of their opposition to the Iraq War.
On Thursday, the Chicks performed the national anthem at the DNC, with many of those Republicans who likely hated them now on the same side, opposing Trump. It’s funny how history can work itself out sometimes.
