“Block them! Block them! Block the line of sight!”

This is what Sabrene Odeh, a Palestinian American Washington state delegate for the antiwar “uncommitted” movement, recalls her state’s party leaders and Kamala Harris delegates yelling, as they moved quickly on the convention floor to make sure no one saw her and her colleagues protesting President Joe Biden’s speech. Then it got physical: one particularly zealous state party representative, a young woman, was so close, Odeh recalls, that she was “on my arm,” as Odeh asked her to step away. Odeh’s story was corroborated by another delegate who witnessed the fracas, who described the woman as “practically standing on” her.

“I felt so dehumanized in that moment,” she says.

Odeh’s story is emblematic of the trials and tribulations of being a pro-Palestinian voice at the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC). Uncommitted delegates and antiwar organizers universally report getting a positive reception, even outright support, from Kamala Harris delegates and others over the past four days.

But they also report censorship and intimidation.

As in Odeh’s case, many of these incidents took place on the convention floor, especially during the roll call on day two of the DNC, when each state’s delegates ceremonially nominate the Democratic candidate. Minnesota’s uncommitted delegation opted to do something different: unpledged to an actual candidate, they would instead cast a vote for those Palestinians, mostly children, who had been killed in Gaza by US bombs and other arms, by holding up signs with those children’s names.

“The DNC rules say that when you vote, you can cast your vote for whoever,” says Asma Mohammed, a Minnesota uncommitted delegate and a lead organizer for the movement. “So I cast my vote for this child, to send a message that if we want to win in November, we have to change policy.”

Instead, as described to Jacobin, various mid-tier party officials who were already “perturbed at our presence,” as fellow uncommitted delegate and Minneapolis city council member Jeremiah Ellison put it, got up on their chairs to block them from public view. In the case of Samuel Doten, an uncommitted delegate and Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America member, one of his colleagues in the Minnesota delegation blocked a photographer who tried to take his picture on the floor. “I just have to,” Dotens recalls the colleague saying.

“These are folks I’m on Zoom calls with every week,” he says.

“It was extremely discouraging, because I’ve had a number of conversations with folks in our delegation and experienced nothing but welcome, open, and honest conversation, and that felt like a bit of a heel turn,” says Ellison.

Missouri uncommitted delegate Michael Berg, who observed the scene from above, says he experienced something similar. As he held up a sign with the name of a two-year-old Palestinian child who had been killed in Gaza, a man in front of him held a “USA” sign to cover it up.

“Their motive is, ‘We want to beat Trump,’” he says. “But this is blocking the name of a dead baby. It doesn’t feel very respectful to me.”

Uncommitted delegates and other pro-Palestinian attendees have also received unwanted attention from convention security. Jacobin learned that one group of uncommitted delegates was approached by a security person who informed them he had been hired by the DNC to make sure they weren’t a threat, telling them that while he had been told they might be troublemakers, he found them all quite boring.

Similarly, days before the convention floor episode, Mohammed, clad in a hijab, and a white fellow delegate entered the delegate welcome party at Chicago’s Navy Pier. She and the movement had been granted a panel on the Gaza war on the first day of the convention, a historic first at the DNC.

Both walked in wearing “Not Another Bomb” pins, as many had. Both were carrying flyers for the next day’s panel, an official DNC-sanctioned event. Yet only Mohammed was stopped by security and told she couldn’t bring either in, she says, an account confirmed by several others who were there.

Minnesota uncommitted delegate Dan Engelhart told Jacobin that he learned on the first day that  security had detained women who had been handing out flyers and recruiting delegates on their behalf. Being a union organizer and police liaison, he had to go over to persuade security to release them after they had been held for at least fifteen minutes. Arab American Institute intern Liam Berry said that while his experience at the DNC had been mostly fine, he and others he was with had been stopped around six separate times by security on the convention’s first day.

These were just a few of numerous similar incidents at the DNC that Jacobin learned about, though not all alleged incidents could be corroborated and some were unwilling to speak for fear of reprisal.