Let a Palestinian Speak at the DNC
The Democratic Party has refused the request of “uncommitted” delegates to let a Palestinian American speak at the DNC. Remember this moment if Kamala Harris loses Michigan this fall.
Members of the Minnesota delegation turn their backs and cover their mouths while President Joe Biden speaks during the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. (Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Oprah spoke at this year’s Democratic National Convention. So did Amy Klobuchar, whose memory as an also-ran in the 2020 primaries is fading to the point where only the most dedicated political obsessives could tell you much of anything about who she is. Lil Jon had a slightly surreal turn under the DNC’s spotlight. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland will be on tonight. And of course they’ve found time for several Republicans. Any reasonably prominent member of the GOP can get a speaking slot, no matter their positions on abortion rights or labor unions or anything else, if they’re prepared to say the magic words: “Donald Trump is dangerous.”
But the Democrats have told antiwar “uncommitted” delegates that allowing even one single Palestinian on that stage to humanize the victims of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza is a bridge too far. The delegates offered them a list of possible speakers the DNC could choose from, and even said that, if they didn’t like any of those names, they could suggest one of their own. They offered to let the DNC vet the full speech in advance. The answer was still no. Dispirited and disgusted, Muslim Women for Harris disbanded in response.
We can’t know what’s going to happen this November. Maybe Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will win big. But if it’s a tight race, and they lose Michigan, and Democrats play their usual game of blaming everyone and everything except themselves, remember this moment.
Uncommitted and Cease-Fire Delegates
Right now, the official DNC platform starts with a land acknowledgment and ends with an “ironclad” commitment to continue to send Israel weapons. That level of absurdity is a lot easier to maintain if the horrors going on in Gaza are kept far out of sight and out of mind — and certainly nowhere near the convention stage.
It’s all too easy to talk about this in the abstract and forget what’s at stake, but the operation the Biden-Harris administration is helping Israel perpetrate in Gaza, and which Palestinians aren’t even being allowed to put a human face on at the DNC, has been mind-numbingly horrifying.
Millions of innocent people have been evicted from their homes by the Israeli military. School after school, hospital after hospital, church after church, mosque after mosque, refugee camp after refugee camp has been turned into rubble. The United Nations estimated that at this point it would take eighty years to rebuild Gaza. And they said that at the beginning of May.
There’s been almost four months of continued destruction since then. According to UNRWA, more children have died in Gaza — a tiny strip of land with a prewar population of 2.3 million people — than in all the war zones in the world for the previous four years. And they said that at the beginning of March.
My home state of Michigan has the largest Arab American population in the United States. Some of the voters who were being asked to turn out for Joe Biden in the Democratic primary back in February had relatives who have been slaughtered in Gaza. Unsurprisingly, then, it was the first state where a massive 13 percent vote for “uncommitted” signaled the depths of Democratic voters’ anger at Biden for sending Israel the bombs being dropped on those schools and refugee camps.
Soon afterward, the vote in neighboring Wisconsin showed that this anger wasn’t just a function of local demographics in Michigan. The Wisconsin organizers were aiming for 23,000 votes — which would have been just over the 20,682 votes Biden won the state by in 2020, sending a clear message that the administration was playing with fire if it continued to ignore the will of its voters. They got more than 48,000.
This week at the DNC, there are dozens of uncommitted delegates, representing parts of the country as diverse as Hawaii and Tim Walz’s home state of Minnesota. And there are also hundreds of “cease-fire” delegates — people elected as Harris-Walz delegates who have signaled their agreement with the uncommitted delegates’ core demand. On Tuesday night, Bernie Sanders got massive cheers when he went off-script at the end of his speech to demand an “immediate cease-fire.”
No one in the uncommitted camp wants Donald Trump to become president this fall. He’s such a foaming-at-the-mouth hawk on Gaza that, at his debate a couple months ago with Joe Biden, he bizarrely said that Biden himself had become a Palestinian.
But when I spoke to Natalia Latif, the communications director for the Uncommitted National Movement, earlier this year, she told me that the campaign is “descriptive” rather than “prescriptive.” They aren’t telling anyone how to vote in November, but they are giving voters a chance to make their feelings clear to the Biden-Harris administration in time to change course.
The most telling moment of the entire convention happened outside the building. BreakThrough News captured footage of protesters yelling out the names of children who had died in Gaza while delegates streaming out of the hall literally put their hands over their ears so they didn’t have to listen. Nothing could better represent the Democratic Party’s current attitude.
Maybe they’ll get away with it. It’s too soon to know. But remember those delegates covering their ears if Donald Trump returns to the White House.