CHICAGO — Day one of the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) saw two very different accounts of the American immigrant experience, at two very different events. At the morning’s Small Business Council meeting, restaurant owner Rohini Dey shared her story of coming to the United States “hell-bent on saving the world,” getting her PhD and doing stints at McKinsey and the World Bank before becoming an entrepreneur.

“I am actually the poster child as the antithesis of Project 2025,” she said. “I think there is so much to be optimistic about. We are doing wonderfully.”

Later in the day, at a panel on Palestinian human rights — the first ever such event held at the DNC — Hala Hijazi, the Palestinian American founder and CEO of a San Francisco–based consulting firm, talked about her own journey. A “proud moderate,” Hijazi had gotten involved in Democratic politics working for former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown in the late 1990s, eventually becoming a major donor and fundraiser for the party, raising more than $2 million and joining the board of a variety of liberal nonprofits. But she wasn’t celebrating these achievements.

“I’m a failure. I’m a fraud,” she said through tears. More than one hundred of her family members had been killed since the start of Israel’s razing of Gaza, including two just last week, she claimed. All the time she had been living her American dream, she said, her family back in Gaza was suffering under Israeli occupation — an occupation and now war that, many in the audience doubtless realized, has been inadvertently underwritten by US taxpayers like themselves.

It was an emotional, harrowing moment in an emotional, harrowing event. The panel of pro-Palestinian activists, moderated by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, had not been part of the day’s original programming but a late addition. It was a concession won by the “uncommitted” movement — which had won more than seven hundred thousand votes in state primaries across the country earlier this year, including battleground states like Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin — and one organizers and activists hoped would let them speak directly to Democratic insiders about the horror being inflicted by President Joe Biden’s Gaza policy.

Even for those who have followed Israel’s destruction of Gaza from the start, it was tough to listen to. Panelists and audience members were often in tears. Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, who had volunteered in the territory for Doctors Without Borders, talked about the case of a young boy, his entire family killed and half his face and neck blown off, who regretted surviving even after a skin graft that saved him from dangerous disfigurement.

“Everyone I love has gone to heaven, and I don’t want to be here anymore,” she recalled him saying.

Despite widespread speculation of 1968-style chaos, the uncommitted movement’s antiwar forces were taking a different tack as the DNC opened, hoping the latent sympathy for their cause within the Democratic establishment might bear fruit. Uncommitted activists I spoke to all said they had received a surprising amount of support from Kamala Harris delegates and other party stalwarts as they walked around the convention grounds clad in keffiyehs and handing out antiwar literature.

“People have been very grateful,” Hawaiian uncommitted delegate Eric Schrager told me, adding that Democratic Party members seem to understand that someone has to pressure the administration into forcing a cease-fire. Inga Gibson, a fellow uncommitted delegate from the state, said that people had approached them all day to thank them.

As a result, one panelist, uncommitted movement founder Layla Elabed, told me that organizers whipping Democratic support for an arms embargo had found it “some of the easiest organizing they’ve had to do.” Around two hundred Democratic delegates pledged to sign a petition calling for an arms embargo on Israel to be inserted into the party platform, according to organizers.

“They are reflective of the majority of Democrats calling for a cease-fire,” Elabed said.

“People are sympathetic to the cause, but they’re also running in elections,” said Sarah Arveson, a United Auto Workers (UAW) member and California delegate.

Even the protests were more subdued than expected. While a few demonstrators were arrested for breaching a security fence, the protests were largely peaceful and, at roughly several thousand people, far smaller than the tens of thousands organizers had hoped for. As convention attendees shuffled forward in the long, snaking line to enter the United Center that evening, protesters largely didn’t harangue them, but asked them to use their attendance to push for peace.

“Let’s stick to our democratic principles,” shouted one. “Remember MLK.”

“Please stand up for human rights,” another pleaded with convention-goers. “We need your voices on the inside.”

Activists were optimistic that Harris might still break from her own administration’s policy. “I have faith in her, but we need her to do more,” former Michigan representative Andy Levin said on the panel. The vice president could break from Biden in subtle ways while staying loyal to the president, he said, by publicly saying the United States would follow international law under her administration, or by calling for an emergency diplomatic session and reaching out to her counterparts among allied states to do so collectively.

Levin rejected the idea that she had to fear the kind of onslaught of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) money that he himself fell to in 2022, insisting that the dynamics of a presidential election are fundamentally different to the Democratic primary races the lobby has intervened in.

“How much money did she raise in twenty-four hours?” he said.

The decision to permit the panel was viewed as a victory, but not the victory that activists are looking for, which would be a policy shift ending US arms transfers to Israel and forcing a cease-fire agreement. The hope for activists is that, given the chance to speak directly to Harris delegates and other party diehards at the DNC, they can persuade the Harris campaign and the Biden administration to change course on Gaza.

Last night’s panel was a step in that direction. But it remains an open question to what extent it reflects Harris’s support for the antiwar cause or simply a ploy to keep those seen as troublemakers inside the tent.

Beneath the shows of civility and unity, rancor and division remain. The Democratic platform on Israel-Palestine reads little different from an AIPAC leaflet, complete with a vow of unbending support for “Israel in the fight against Hamas,” subtle criticism of the United Nations for “one-sided efforts to condemn Israel,” and a denunciation of Hamas sexual violence that made no mention of the Israeli prison rape scandal currently roiling the country.

“How many of you are Palestinian?” one attendee mockingly asked a Code Pink protester outside the convention. In the stadium, party loyalists aggressively snatched away a “Stop Arming Israel” banner and, at one point, hit one of the hijab-wearing activists holding it on her head. “I’m all for civil disobedience, but what were they trying to achieve?” I overheard one attendee say as we all filed out.

Palestinians were treated little better in the night’s speeches, being mostly absent. President Biden, the man most responsible after Benjamin Netanyahu for the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, said that the protesters in Chicago “have a point,” before quickly moving on. This minor comment nonetheless went further than even some of the schedule’s Palestinian allies. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has been fiercely critical of the war and voted against military aid to Israel earlier this year, nonetheless dubiously assured the crowd Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a cease-fire in Gaza.” Shawn Fain, president of the UAW — which had a delegation at the Palestinian rights panel and officially supports a Gaza cease-fire — didn’t mention it at all.

The excitement and positivity of the DNC, unimaginable a month ago, stands on fragile foundations. Harris’s lead nationally and in the battleground states, while consistent, is slim, only a few percentage points at most — far less than Biden was registering when he won his narrow victory over Donald Trump four years ago, and less than Hillary Clinton when she lost to him four years before that. Cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas are at an impasse as Netanyahu continues to sabotage peace efforts, and a regional war looms in the Middle East.

And though uncommitted activists are playing ball as they wait for a tangible shift, it is still the case that, however respectful uncommitted activists have been at the DNC, one hundred thousand voters in the heavily Arab- and Muslim-populated state of Michigan signaled they would withhold their vote come November if Israel is allowed to continue carrying out genocide.

“Uncommitted delegates want to vote for Harris,” says Schrager.

It remains to be seen if the party will make the changes necessary for them to actually do it.