This February, President Joe Biden was eating an ice cream cone with Late Night host Seth Meyers in Manhattan when a reporter asked about the chances of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. “Well,” Biden replied, prompting breaking news posts, “I hope, by the end of the weekend.” The president then assured the public: “We’re close.”
Nearly seven months later, no ceasefire is in sight. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that multiple US officials told the paper that there is little chance of a ceasefire.
The report continued a horrific week for Biden’s foreign policy record in the Middle East. Each of the past five days has brought its own grim news about the vanishing chances of peace in the region:
Monday: Israel formally expanded its war aims to include the return of residents evacuated out of the north. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the “possibility for an agreement is running out” with Hezbollah. Gallant explained, “Therefore, the only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes will be via military action.” It suggested a much heightened potential for a wider war between Lebanon and Israel.
Tuesday: Israel began detonating explosive-rigged pagers and walkie-talkies in an attack that targeted members of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed political and militant group. Axios reported that US officials were not warned of the operation. The indiscriminate approach killed dozens—including at least two children—and injured thousands. In doing so, Israel greatly increased the odds of a regional war (that the United States does not want to be dragged into).
Wednesday: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that his kingdom will not normalize relations with Israel without the “establishment of a Palestinian state.” The announcement appeared to kill off any chance of success for a years-long (and widely criticized) effort by the Biden administration to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, while largely sidestepping the concerns of Palestinians. That effort had begun under the Trump administration in the much touted Abraham Accords that the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had helped broker.
Thursday: A Wall Street Journal story headlined “US Officials Concede Gaza Cease-Fire Out of Reach for Biden,” cited senior US officials who have concluded that a ceasefire deal is unlikely during Biden’s presidency. “No deal is imminent,” one said. “I’m not sure it ever gets done.”
Friday: Israel killed at least 12 people in an airstrike in Beirut targeting senior Hezbollah commanders. As Gallant made clear earlier in the week in reference to Lebanon, “we are at the start of a new phase in the war” and the “center of gravity is moving north.”
Initially, one of the few bright spots of Biden’s approach was that no regional war had broken out. The recent Israeli assaults in Lebanon, along with Gallant’s comments about a “new phase” of the war, suggest that may soon change. For Netanyahu, who is widely believed to favor a second Donald Trump presidency, a new phase of conflict that makes a Biden-Harris administration look ineffectual just as some Americans begin voting may carry additional rewards.
This string of havoc was all, sadly, predictable. In response to the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, Biden embraced what was labeled a “bear hug” approach to his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In keeping with a decades-old personal approach for managing relations with Israel, he made sure there was “no daylight” between him and the Israeli Prime Minister in public. Biden thought it would allow him to shape the direction of the war in private.
Without US weapons, Israeli military experts have made clear that the country would not be able to carry on fighting at such scale.
Biden’s faith in a no daylight approach had been repeatedly disproven prior to October 7 but he stuck with it anyway. That decision reflected an effectively limitless commitment to supporting Israel. As I reported in December on the roots of Biden’s flawed response to the war, his Israel record was unusual:
Biden has long gone further than many of his fellow Democrats in defense of Israel. As a senator, he backed moving the American embassy to Jerusalem decades before Donald Trump made that a reality, boasted about attending more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other senator, and savaged an effort by George H.W. Bush to push Israel toward negotiating with Palestinians. As vice president, he undercut Barack Obama’s efforts to push Israel toward peace. As president prior to October 7, he continued policies implemented by Trump that sidelined Palestinians.
The death toll in Gaza stood at around 20,000 when that story came out. It is now double that, and the full death toll may prove far higher. Nearly 100,000 people have been injured. Israeli hostages remain in captivity in large part due to Netanyahu’s repeated efforts to derail ceasefire negotiations.
What has not changed is Biden’s almost complete unwillingness to use the United States’ extensive leverage over Israel. Aside from some 2,000-pound bombs, his administration has ensured that arms keep flowing. That decision has been made despite substantial evidence that doing so violates US laws that prevent weapons from being sent to foreign units implicated in major human rights violations. Without US weapons, Israeli military experts have made clear that the country would not be able to carry on fighting at such scale.
The Uncommitted movement announced on Thursday that it will not be endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. The decision comes in response to Harris declining to break with the Biden administration over its response to the war in Israel and Palestine and after a tumultuous Democratic National Convention in which Palestinian voices were largely shut out from speaking about the horrors happening in Gaza.
The group, which represents the hundreds of thousands of Democrats who voted “uncommitted” during the primaries in protest of Biden’s Gaza policy, said in a statement released Thursday that “Vice President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing US and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her.”
At the same time, the movement’s leaders stressed that they oppose Donald Trump and are not recommending that supporters vote for a third-party candidate because doing so could help elect Trump.
“I told VP Harris through the tears that Michigan voters want to vote for her, but we need a policy change that is going to save lives.”
“We must block Donald Trump, which is why we urge Uncommitted voters to vote against him and avoid third-party candidates that could inadvertently boost his chances, as Trump openly boasts that third parties will help his candidacy,” the group said in a statement released on Thursday. “We urge Uncommitted voters to register anti-Trump votes and vote up and down the ballot.”
Uncommitted leaders, throughout the past months, have been eager to endorse Harris and organize on her behalf if she were willing to move more aggressively towards ending the war. In early August, when organizer Layla Elabed briefly met the vice president, she told her as much. “I told VP Harris through the tears that Michigan voters want to vote for her,” Elabed said at the time, “but we need a policy change that is going to save lives.” Elabed stressed that “pro-war forces like AIPAC may want to drive us out of the Democratic Party, but we’re here to stay.”
Uncommitted had asked Vice President Harris to respond by September 15 to a request to meet with Palestinian Americans in Michigan whose family members have been killed during the war. That meeting has not happened and the Harris campaign has not committed to making it happen.
“The Vice President is committed to work to earn every vote, unite our country, and to be a President for all Americans,” the Harris campaign said in a statement. “She will continue working to bring the war in Gaza to an end in a way where 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.”
The latest announcement from Uncommitted comes one month after the group made news with a sit-in at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Uncommitted made two main policy asks at the convention: an immediate ceasefire and a US arms embargo on Israel to help bring one about. But Uncommitted delegates also made much smaller demands in the lead up to and during the convention.
Most notably, they asked that an American doctor who has volunteered in Gaza, or a Palestinian American, be given a brief speaking slot from the convention’s main stage. After convention organizers rejected Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor, the group eventually began pushing for a speaking slot for Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian American Democrat.
Lexis Zeidan, an organizer with the Uncommitted national movement, said that in their refusal to allow even one Palestinian American speaker, “the DNC and the vice president’s campaign fumbled even a small gesture.”
“Now, the vice president’s team is courting people like Dick Cheney, while sidelining these incredibly important anti-war voices,” she said. Some leaders within Uncommitted are voting for Harris—and others will not be voting at the top of the ticket at all. Zeidan, who is Palestinian American, said that on a personal level, she “simply cannot go to the ballot box and cast a vote for a candidate that is not hearing the demands of her people.” Her fellow organizer, Abbas Alawieh, will be voting for Harris, a choice he describes as a “chess move” against Donald Trump.
“If you’re willing to get some satisfaction out of feeling like you punished Harris, and that’ll help you sleep at night, I can respect that,” Alawieh said. But, he added, “In order for me to try and start sleeping at night, I need to know that I’m blocking Donald Trump because his plans are very clearly to enable Netanyahu to do more murdering.”
Mother Jones reported during the convention that Romman, who was not an Uncommitted delegate, planned to explicitly endorse Harris from the main stage. Nevertheless, national Democrats denied her and any other Palestinian American Democrat a speaking slot without asking to see their remarks. Uncommitted had made clear that any speech would be vetted and pre-approved by convention planners. As we reported:
By denying someone of Palestinian descent the chance to speak, the Harris campaign missed an easy opportunity to create distance between itself and President Biden’s failing and highly unpopular response to the war. A June poll by CBS News and YouGov found that 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents believe that the United States should not send weapons and supplies to Israel, despite the Biden administration’s support for continuing to do so. Only 23 percent of Democrats, compared with 76 percent of Republicans, told Gallup in June that they support Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 100,000 have been injured in Gaza, according to the local health ministry. Public health experts fear that the full death toll may be far higher. Nearly a year into the war, the chances for a ceasefire in the near future still appear low.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears committed to prolonging the war—even if it means the death of more hostages—to appease far-right cabinet members and remain in power. President Biden has largely refused to use the United States’ extensive leverage to push Netanyahu toward a ceasefire.
In last week’s debate, Harris reiterated her support for Israel and once again called for the US to have the “most lethal fighting force in the world.”
“Our organizing around the presidential election was never about endorsing a specific candidate,” Alawieh, the Uncommitted cofounder, made clear on Thursday. “It has always been about building a movement that saves lives.”
Update, September 19: This post has been updated with a statement from the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris.
At the center of the two biggest controversies of JD Vance’s short political career have been cats. The first came from his attacks against the “childless cat ladies” on the left. More recently, the Republican vice presidential candidate has been spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets.
One possible conclusion to draw from these missives is that he is an angry man who spends too much time on the internet. Another is that he is a liar. But there is much more to what Vance is doing than mere trolling.
Vance’s cat rhetoric is a purposeful attempt to simplify Great Replacement hysteria—hoping to convince voters that their fears of a migrant invasion and childless women are an existential threat. The controversies derive from two fixations: the number of children American women are having and the rate at which foreigners are coming to the United States. Vance wants a United States where the birth rate is high and the immigration rate is low.
In championing low immigration, mass deportation, and an increase in fertility, Vance is aligning himself with white nationalists who were once shunned by the Republican establishment. These days, he is spending less time openly espousing his ideas than he used to on podcasts. Instead, Vance—as he has explained is part of his project—is finding uncomplicated ways to get his points across (whether they are factual or not). “I do think that political rhetoric is fundamentally [about] dealing with people at their particular level,” he said earlier this year. “I think you get too deep into the theory, you actually miss a lot of the truth.” On Sunday, he went further, telling CNN’s Dana Bash during an exchange about Springfield, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Lying about Haitian immigrants eating cats and attacking childless cat ladies is a perfect example of this plan. Vance thinks he can sell what critics have called “blood and soil nationalism”—invoking the Nazi slogan—with dumb memes.
Vance has not hidden his influences for this theory of change. “I read this book when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan,” Vance said during a 2021 podcast appearance. “And that was a really influential book for me.” Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Republican presidential candidate, was not subtle about his white nationalism in the Death of the West. When it came to immigration, he accused Mexican Americans of waging a “reconquista” of land they’d lost to the United States. He spoke of declining birth rates in extreme terms—claiming that “Western women” were committing an “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” by having too many abortions.
It is not hard to trace the line between Buchanan’s fears and Vance’s anxieties about “childless cat ladies.” The subtitle of Buchanan’s book cuts to the heart of Vance’s current preoccupations: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.
Buchanan’s worldview was rooted in a paleoconservatism that rejected the view that America is an idea and instead saw America as a people. In doing so, he embraced a framework that justified exclusion and a permanent white majority.
Vance has been emphasizing the claim that Americans are a “people” for much of this year. During a speech to the hard-right group American Moment earlier this year, Vance made a point of bringing up “this thing that increasingly bothers me, which is the concept that American is an idea.” Vance made the same point about Americans as a people in July at the National Conservatism Conference in which he railed about the influx of Haitian migrants in Springfield. But the clearest explanation of this obsession, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, came during the Republican National Convention:
America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.
Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.
Vance went on to talk about the cemetery plot in Kentucky that he hopes that he; his wife, Usha, the child of Indian immigrants; and, eventually, their kids will be buried in. (Her family came on “our terms” in this formulation.)
“There will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky,” Vance said. “Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”
Vance was born in Ohio. It was his grandparents who came to the state in search of economic opportunity in the 1940s. His kids would likely be buried in the family plot in Kentucky sometime around 2100—roughly 160 years after any of their paternal ancestors lived there. But for Vance, it doesn’t seem to matter. He believes his blood is connected to that soil. That is what it means for him for America to be a people.
Behind the silly memes of Donald Trump running with cats is a much darker story. Vance sees a rapid demographic shift that is being forced upon the American “people” through immigration and childless women. Vance is determined to stop it. If he has to talk about cats along the way, he will.
At the center of the two biggest controversies of JD Vance’s short political career have been cats. The first came from his attacks against the “childless cat ladies” on the left. More recently, the Republican vice presidential candidate has been spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets.
One possible conclusion to draw from these missives is that he is an angry man who spends too much time on the internet. Another is that he is a liar. But there is much more to what Vance is doing than mere trolling.
Vance’s cat rhetoric is a purposeful attempt to simplify Great Replacement hysteria—hoping to convince voters that their fears of a migrant invasion and childless women are an existential threat. The controversies derive from two fixations: the number of children American women are having and the rate at which foreigners are coming to the United States. Vance wants a United States where the birth rate is high and the immigration rate is low.
In championing low immigration, mass deportation, and an increase in fertility, Vance is aligning himself with white nationalists who were once shunned by the Republican establishment. These days, he is spending less time openly espousing his ideas than he used to on podcasts. Instead, Vance—as he has explained is part of his project—is finding uncomplicated ways to get his points across (whether they are factual or not). “I do think that political rhetoric is fundamentally [about] dealing with people at their particular level,” he said earlier this year. “I think you get too deep into the theory, you actually miss a lot of the truth.” On Sunday, he went further, telling CNN’s Dana Bash during an exchange about Springfield, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Lying about Haitian immigrants eating cats and attacking childless cat ladies is a perfect example of this plan. Vance thinks he can sell what critics have called “blood and soil nationalism”—invoking the Nazi slogan—with dumb memes.
Vance has not hidden his influences for this theory of change. “I read this book when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan,” Vance said during a 2021 podcast appearance. “And that was a really influential book for me.” Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Republican presidential candidate, was not subtle about his white nationalism in the Death of the West. When it came to immigration, he accused Mexican Americans of waging a “reconquista” of land they’d lost to the United States. He spoke of declining birth rates in extreme terms—claiming that “Western women” were committing an “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” by having too many abortions.
It is not hard to trace the line between Buchanan’s fears and Vance’s anxieties about “childless cat ladies.” The subtitle of Buchanan’s book cuts to the heart of Vance’s current preoccupations: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.
Buchanan’s worldview was rooted in a paleoconservatism that rejected the view that America is an idea and instead saw America as a people. In doing so, he embraced a framework that justified exclusion and a permanent white majority.
Vance has been emphasizing the claim that Americans are a “people” for much of this year. During a speech to the hard-right group American Moment earlier this year, Vance made a point of bringing up “this thing that increasingly bothers me, which is the concept that American is an idea.” Vance made the same point about Americans as a people in July at the National Conservatism Conference in which he railed about the influx of Haitian migrants in Springfield. But the clearest explanation of this obsession, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, came during the Republican National Convention:
America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.
Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.
Vance went on to talk about the cemetery plot in Kentucky that he hopes that he; his wife, Usha, the child of Indian immigrants; and, eventually, their kids will be buried in. (Her family came on “our terms” in this formulation.)
“There will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky,” Vance said. “Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”
Vance was born in Ohio. It was his grandparents who came to the state in search of economic opportunity in the 1940s. His kids would likely be buried in the family plot in Kentucky sometime around 2100—roughly 160 years after any of their paternal ancestors lived there. But for Vance, it doesn’t seem to matter. He believes his blood is connected to that soil. That is what it means for him for America to be a people.
Behind the silly memes of Donald Trump running with cats is a much darker story. Vance sees a rapid demographic shift that is being forced upon the American “people” through immigration and childless women. Vance is determined to stop it. If he has to talk about cats along the way, he will.
On Monday, JD Vancewrote a more than 1,200 word post on X in response to a second apparent assassination attempt targeting Donald. In it, Vance said the “threat of violence is disgraceful,” called on people to “reject political violence,” and said he admired President Joe Biden for “calling for peace and calm.”
Vance’s rejection of political violence would be more persuasive had he not recently endorsed a book that celebrates right-wing political violence and dictators who committed some of the most notorious atrocities of the 20th century. Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) by Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and coauthor Joshua Lisec, a professional ghostwriter, was published in July with a forward by Steve Bannon. As my colleague David Corn reported in July, Vance wrote a blurb used to promote the book:
In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.
Even by today’s standards, Unhumans is extreme, transparently authoritarian, and evocative of Nazi propaganda in its insistence on the complete dehumanization of political opponents. The thesis of the book is that the right is up against “unhumans” intent on destroying civilization. It defines unhumans broadly—saying that the label applies to communists, socialists, leftists, and so-called progressives. In summarizing their argument, they write:
This is a book about unhumans, and this is what they do: With power, unhumans undo civilization itself. They undo order. They undo the basic bonds of society that make communities and nations possible. They destroy the human rights of life, liberty and property—and undo their own humanity in the process by fully embracing nihilism, cynicism, and envy.
Vance and Posobiec appear to be close. During a speech in March to the hard-right group American Moment, the Ohio senator began began by shouting out “good friends” in the audience like fellow Peter Thiel acolyte Blake Masters and “Jack P,” an apparent reference to Posobiec, who was in the audience that night. Vance’s blurb appeared a few months later.
But it is really in their account of 20th century politics that the full extent of their revisionism comes into view. A section dealing with the Spanish Civil war comes with the subhead: “Fransciso Franco, a Great Man of History.”
“Ironically, for being remembered in the West as a fascist dictator,” the authors claim, “the eventual [sic] victorious general Franco—the self-proclaimed caudillo, or leader, of postwar new Spain—didn’t actually do a lot of fascism or dictating.” This will come as news to the Spaniards whose ancestors’ remains are still being identified in mass graves that Franco was responsible for.
As I read their paeon to Franco, who took power as a result of a military coup, I remembered Mother Jones co-founder Adam Hochschild’s book on Americans who fought against Franco, Spain in Our Hearts. In it, Hochschild describes how Franco’s troops boasted about having Moorish soldiers rape Spanish women who opposed them. Franco’s Nationalist troops, he writes, celebrated raping perceived enemies by scrawling on walls: “Your women will give birth to Fascists.” Hochschild continues:
Beyond the rapes, in town after town, women whose only crime was to be supporters of Popular Front parties had their heads shaved. In a practice borrowed from Italian Fascists, they were then forcefed castor oil (a powerful laxative) and paraded through the streets, sometimes naked or half naked, to be jeered as they soiled themselves.
Posobiec and Lisec take a different view of Franco. They suggest that the Spanish civil war is rarely described as what it is: “a righteous, justified war for the sake of the cross—that is, for the honor and glory of Jesus Christ.”
Elsewhere in the book, Posobiec and Lisec celebrate Augusto Pinochet, who came to power in a CIA-backed coup that deposed Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende. One of the defining atrocities of Pinochet’s dictatorship were the “death flights” in which political dissidents were killed and forcibly disappeared after being dropped from the air into the ocean or mountains. Posobiec and Lisec write that the “story of tossing communists out of helicopters hails from Pinochet’s elimination of communism.” They continue approvingly, “Wherever Pinochet was, there was no communism.”
Other subjects of the author’s adulation include Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Joseph McCarthy. In closing, they argue that “Great Men of Means,” which they effectively define as dictators, are one of the best ways to crush their subhuman opponents. Supporting such a strongman is depicted as all but the opportunity of a lifetime. “You’ll know them when you see them,” the authors explain, “as they attract all the literal and metaphorical firepower of the enemy.”
Vance may abhor some political violence. But his endorsement of Unhumans raises questions about how he feels about the kind directed at his political enemies.
On Monday morning, a friend texted Vilès Dorsainvil to ask if he’d seen the claims circulating on social media. Dorsainvil, the leader of Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center, had not. He quickly saw that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) had posted that “reports now show” that Springfield residents were having their “pets abducted and eaten” by “Haitian illegal immigrants.”
“It was so painful,” Dorsainvil explained. “I had to leave my job because I was so perturbed that I could not concentrate.” He took the week off from working as a bilingual specialist who processes applications for government assistance to support his community and focus on his mental health.
City officials quickly made clear there is no evidence to support the lies Vance and many other top Republicans, including Donald Trump, are spreading. Vance didn’t care. As he wrote on Tuesday, “Keep the cat memes flowing.” (Vance’s Senate office did not respond to a request for comment that asked for any evidence that would support his recent claims.)
These aren’t harmless memes. The prototypical example looks like what would happen if someone typed “Black people in a third world country chasing Donald Trump holding a cat” into an AI-powered image generator.
In recent months, Vance has been the key figure in making Springfield a national target for the far right. “I blame JD Vance for it. Our city leaders reached out to JD Vance, our senator, asking for help,” Carl Ruby, the senior pastor at Central Christian in Springfield, said about a request for federal assistance Vance drew attention to this summer. “Instead, he brought it up at a Senate hearing and referenced it as a crisis and began amplifying these lies.” In doing so, Vance has put his own constituents at risk. Bomb threats have now led to multiple Springfield schools being evacuated.
The initial gut reaction many people are having to this racist smear campaign is the correct one: It’s vile. Nor is it new. The first ad of his political career in 2022 (titled “Are you a racist?”) opened with Vance asking “Do you hate Mexicans?”He went to to attack the media for calling “us” racist for wanting to build the wall and to invoke the Great Replacement theory—claiming in the ad that “Democrat voters” were “pouring into this country” from across the southern border.
Vance’s lies about Springfield are the latest iteration of what could be mistaken for only cynical race-baiting. The reality is that they reflect much deeper-seated biases about who the country belongs to. As Vance stressed in his Republican National Convention speech, “America is not just an idea” but a “people with a shared history and a common future.” He went on, “When we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” His rhetoric about Springfield should leave little doubt about who he means by we.
Springfield is about an hour northeast of where Vance grew up in Middletown, and shares many similarities to the economically depressed hometown Vance described in Hillbilly Elegy. If anything, the decline in Springfield was more severe. Middletown’s population has remained relatively steady since 1970, while in Springfield it dropped from more than 80,000 in 1970 to fewer than 60,000 in 2020.
That has changed in recent years as a result of an influx of what local officials and community leaders estimate to be about 15,000 Haitian immigrants. Ruby explained that the large majority of Haitians in Springfield have some form of legal authorization to live in the United States such as Temporary Protected Status. Many work for Topre America, a Japanese auto parts manufacturer. Others have found jobs at a Dole food processing plant and countless local businesses. Their success in finding jobs and opening businesses of their own has led other Haitian immigrants to come to Springfield through word of mouth.
Ruby has lived in Springfield for about 40 years. “Our county is projected to lose about 25,000 people between now and 2050,” Ruby told me on Tuesday. “Having an influx of immigrants, from my perspective, is a wonderful thing.”
In another world, Vance might view Haitian migrants seeking opportunity sympathetically. Hillbilly Elegy is, in many ways, a memoir of domestic migration. It chronicles how the so-called hillbilly highway brought his grandparents out of Appalachia in the 1940s. Vance is intimately acquainted with both the promise and perils that can flow from a family’s decision to leave home.
One difference is that Haitians in Springfield appear to be doing much better than the relatives and community members Vance put in the pillory in Hillbilly Elegy. Local employers, Ruby said, view them as hard workers who, unlike some other residents, can be counted on to pass drug tests. Ruby added that many Haitians in Springfield were professionals back home and are now significantly underemployed. Contrary to what Vance’s fearmongering suggests, there has been no increase in property or violent crime in Springfield, according to local data.
Vance’s demonization of the Haitian community comes despite the fact that he spent much of his brief career as a venture capitalist whose stated mission was to create jobs in places like Springfield. Politico reported during his Senate run that his venture firmwas “part of a group of at least 46 investors who together invested in three companies that created a total of about 750 jobs in the state of Ohio between 2019 and 2022.” The economic growth happening today in Springfield is more impressive.
The difference is that it is being propelled to a large degree by immigrants. Vance appears to oppose it for the same reasons he obsesses over native-born American womens’ declining fertility, while also calling for mass deportations. “You would never be able to get him to answer why it is that he simultaneously thinks ‘our people’ need to have more babies to reverse the decline in fertility and also we need to remove so-called illegal aliens…to increase American workers’ labor market power,” the University of Chicago historian Gabriel Winant argued on a recent podcast. “Those two positions are only reconcilable through racism.”
Vance has spoken about his affinity for a 2002 screed by Patrick Buchanan that decries the “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” caused by “Western women” having too many abortions. As Vance explained in a 2021 podcast appearance, “I read this book, when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West [How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization] by Patrick Buchanan. And that was a really influential book for me.”
It is also true that roughly 15,000 Haitians quickly arriving in a city of less than 60,000 has caused challenges. Ruby said the Rocking Horse Community Health Center has been “absolutely overwhelmed” and needs more resources to help deal with the influx. Rent prices have increased—partly due to landlords taking affordable housing units and converting them to market rate ones. The New York Times has reported that school officials are worried about whether they’ll have enough funding to support students in the coming years.
Mayor Rob Rue and other political leaders in the city have pleaded for extra federal assistance. Last month, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who represents Springfield, said he was working to secure more federal funding to help the city. “This obviously has not risen to a crisis level but it is probably a burdensome level where we have to make sure that this community receives the support they need so they’re not isolated,” Turner explained at the time.
Dorsainvil,who has lived in Springfield for four years, says he and fellow Haitians initially received a largely positive response from the community. He traced the beginning of a more intense backlash from some Springfield residents to an August 2023 accident in which a Haitian driver without a valid license collided with a school bus. The crash killed Aiden Clark, an 11-year-old boy, and injured at least 20 children.
The tragedy led some residents to rail against Haitian immigrants at community meetings. Clark’s parents have been adamantly opposed their son’s death being used to demonize people. “We do not want our son’s name to be associated with the hate that’s being spewed at these meetings,” Nathan and Danielle Clark wrote in a statement read at a community meeting last October. “Please do not mix up the values of our family with the uninformed majority that vocalize their hate. Aiden embraced different cultures and would insist you do the same.”
It was only after Vance started talking about Springfield that the city attracted significant national attention, according to Dorsainvil and Ruby. In July, Vance brought up Springfield’s Haitian community during a hearing with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. “In my conversations with folks in Springfield, it’s not just housing,” Vance said. “It’s also hospital services, it’s school services. There are a whole host of ways in which this immigration problem, I think, is having very real human consequences.” One day later, Vance brought up Springfield in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference.
Vance’s remarks appear to have gotten the attention of producers at Fox News. Within days, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and City Manager Bryan Heckappeared on the channel for what proved to be a typically sensationalistic segment. Rue and Heck’s main ask was similar to one that has been made by mayors across the country: They wanted federal aid to support a rapid increase in the city’s immigrant population. “I feel like they were kind of blindsided,” said Ruby. “It made them look anti-immigrant, when, in fact, I think they’ve worked really hard to try to manage the situation.” (Rue told the New York Times this week that, “It’s frustrating when national politicians, on the national stage, mischaracterize what is actually going on and misrepresent our community.”)
Springfield alsobegan to attract more attention from the extreme right. On August 10, a dozen neo-Nazis affiliated with the group Blood Tribe marched through Springfield carrying Swastika flags. On August 27, one of those Nazis, Drake Berentz, spoke at a Springfield community meeting before being ejected for threatening rhetoric. (Berentz falsely identified himself as Nathaniel Higgers, a fake name meant to evoke the racist slur it resembles.)
Still, nothing compared to what has happened in the past week. Last Friday, the right-wing X account End Wokeness, which has 2.9 million followers, shared a post in which someone claimed that the friend of his neighbor’s daughter had said that Haitian residents of Springfield had killed her cat and hung it from a tree branch. The rumor quickly went viral.
Still, the claim mostly lived on social media before Vance took it up.
When I spoke to Ruby on Tuesday, he told me his big fear was that Springfield would come up in the presidential debate that night. “Springfield is a powder keg right now,” Ruby added. He feared what might happen if there were another tragedy like the one that killed Aiden Clark.
Just before the debate, Nathan Clark spoke at a Springfield City Commission meeting. “Using Aidan as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose,” Clark said. “And speaking of morally bankrupt, politicians—Bernie Moreno, Chip Roy, JD Vance, and Donald Trump—they have spoken my son’s name and used his death for political gain. This needs to stop now.”
Nathan Clark — the father of 11-year-old Aiden Clark, who was killed in a car accident in Springfield, Ohio — tells JD Vance and Donald Trump to stop using his son’s name and the city of Springfield to demonize Haitian immigrants. “This needs to stop now!” pic.twitter.com/3J8FtZ82Ts
That did not stop Trump from bringing up Springfield and the claims about pets being eaten during the debate. Vance defended Trump’s decision to do so afterwards. The result is that some Haitian families in Springfield are reportedly now keeping their kids home from school out of fear for their safety. On Thursday morning, Springfield city hall was evacuated following a bomb threat, as was a local elementary school.
On Friday morning, Springfield received newbomb threats targeting city commissioners and multiple schools.A middle school was closed and three schools were evacuated.
Two hours later, Vance posted about Springfield again. Americans, he wrote, should be talking about Springfield “every single day.”
On Monday morning, a friend texted Vilès Dorsainvil to ask if he’d seen the claims circulating on social media. Dorsainvil, the leader of Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center, had not. He quickly saw that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) had posted that “reports now show” that Springfield residents were having their “pets abducted and eaten” by “Haitian illegal immigrants.”
“It was so painful,” Dorsainvil explained. “I had to leave my job because I was so perturbed that I could not concentrate.” He took the week off from working as a bilingual specialist who processes applications for government assistance to support his community and focus on his mental health.
City officials quickly made clear there is no evidence to support the lies Vance and many other top Republicans, including Donald Trump, are spreading. Vance didn’t care. As he wrote on Tuesday, “Keep the cat memes flowing.” (Vance’s Senate office did not respond to a request for comment that asked for any evidence that would support his recent claims.)
These aren’t harmless memes. The prototypical example looks like what would happen if someone typed “Black people in a third world country chasing Donald Trump holding a cat” into an AI-powered image generator.
In recent months, Vance has been the key figure in making Springfield a national target for the far right. “I blame JD Vance for it. Our city leaders reached out to JD Vance, our senator, asking for help,” Carl Ruby, the senior pastor at Central Christian in Springfield, said about a request for federal assistance Vance drew attention to this summer. “Instead, he brought it up at a Senate hearing and referenced it as a crisis and began amplifying these lies.” In doing so, Vance has put his own constituents at risk. Bomb threats have now led to multiple Springfield schools being evacuated.
The initial gut reaction many people are having to this racist smear campaign is the correct one: It’s vile. Nor is it new. The first ad of his political career in 2022 (titled “Are you a racist?”) opened with Vance asking “Do you hate Mexicans?”He went to to attack the media for calling “us” racist for wanting to build the wall and to invoke the Great Replacement theory—claiming in the ad that “Democrat voters” were “pouring into this country” from across the southern border.
Vance’s lies about Springfield are the latest iteration of what could be mistaken for only cynical race-baiting. The reality is that they reflect much deeper-seated biases about who the country belongs to. As Vance stressed in his Republican National Convention speech, “America is not just an idea” but a “people with a shared history and a common future.” He went on, “When we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” His rhetoric about Springfield should leave little doubt about who he means by we.
Springfield is about an hour northeast of where Vance grew up in Middletown, and shares many similarities to the economically depressed hometown Vance described in Hillbilly Elegy. If anything, the decline in Springfield was more severe. Middletown’s population has remained relatively steady since 1970, while in Springfield it dropped from more than 80,000 in 1970 to fewer than 60,000 in 2020.
That has changed in recent years as a result of an influx of what local officials and community leaders estimate to be about 15,000 Haitian immigrants. Ruby explained that the large majority of Haitians in Springfield have some form of legal authorization to live in the United States such as Temporary Protected Status. Many work for Topre America, a Japanese auto parts manufacturer. Others have found jobs at a Dole food processing plant and countless local businesses. Their success in finding jobs and opening businesses of their own has led other Haitian immigrants to come to Springfield through word of mouth.
Ruby has lived in Springfield for about 40 years. “Our county is projected to lose about 25,000 people between now and 2050,” Ruby told me on Tuesday. “Having an influx of immigrants, from my perspective, is a wonderful thing.”
In another world, Vance might view Haitian migrants seeking opportunity sympathetically. Hillbilly Elegy is, in many ways, a memoir of domestic migration. It chronicles how the so-called hillbilly highway brought his grandparents out of Appalachia in the 1940s. Vance is intimately acquainted with both the promise and perils that can flow from a family’s decision to leave home.
One difference is that Haitians in Springfield appear to be doing much better than the relatives and community members Vance put in the pillory in Hillbilly Elegy. Local employers, Ruby said, view them as hard workers who, unlike some other residents, can be counted on to pass drug tests. Ruby added that many Haitians in Springfield were professionals back home and are now significantly underemployed. Contrary to what Vance’s fearmongering suggests, there has been no increase in property or violent crime in Springfield, according to local data.
Vance’s demonization of the Haitian community comes despite the fact that he spent much of his brief career as a venture capitalist whose stated mission was to create jobs in places like Springfield. Politico reported during his Senate run that his venture firmwas “part of a group of at least 46 investors who together invested in three companies that created a total of about 750 jobs in the state of Ohio between 2019 and 2022.” The economic growth happening today in Springfield is more impressive.
The difference is that it is being propelled to a large degree by immigrants. Vance appears to oppose it for the same reasons he obsesses over native-born American womens’ declining fertility, while also calling for mass deportations. “You would never be able to get him to answer why it is that he simultaneously thinks ‘our people’ need to have more babies to reverse the decline in fertility and also we need to remove so-called illegal aliens…to increase American workers’ labor market power,” the University of Chicago historian Gabriel Winant argued on a recent podcast. “Those two positions are only reconcilable through racism.”
Vance has spoken about his affinity for a 2002 screed by Patrick Buchanan that decries the “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” caused by “Western women” having too many abortions. As Vance explained in a 2021 podcast appearance, “I read this book, when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West [How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization] by Patrick Buchanan. And that was a really influential book for me.”
It is also true that roughly 15,000 Haitians quickly arriving in a city of less than 60,000 has caused challenges. Ruby said the Rocking Horse Community Health Center has been “absolutely overwhelmed” and needs more resources to help deal with the influx. Rent prices have increased—partly due to landlords taking affordable housing units and converting them to market rate ones. The New York Times has reported that school officials are worried about whether they’ll have enough funding to support students in the coming years.
Mayor Rob Rue and other political leaders in the city have pleaded for extra federal assistance. Last month, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who represents Springfield, said he was working to secure more federal funding to help the city. “This obviously has not risen to a crisis level but it is probably a burdensome level where we have to make sure that this community receives the support they need so they’re not isolated,” Turner explained at the time.
Dorsainvil,who has lived in Springfield for four years, says he and fellow Haitians initially received a largely positive response from the community. He traced the beginning of a more intense backlash from some Springfield residents to an August 2023 accident in which a Haitian driver without a valid license collided with a school bus. The crash killed Aiden Clark, an 11-year-old boy, and injured at least 20 children.
The tragedy led some residents to rail against Haitian immigrants at community meetings. Clark’s parents have been adamantly opposed their son’s death being used to demonize people. “We do not want our son’s name to be associated with the hate that’s being spewed at these meetings,” Nathan and Danielle Clark wrote in a statement read at a community meeting last October. “Please do not mix up the values of our family with the uninformed majority that vocalize their hate. Aiden embraced different cultures and would insist you do the same.”
It was only after Vance started talking about Springfield that the city attracted significant national attention, according to Dorsainvil and Ruby. In July, Vance brought up Springfield’s Haitian community during a hearing with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. “In my conversations with folks in Springfield, it’s not just housing,” Vance said. “It’s also hospital services, it’s school services. There are a whole host of ways in which this immigration problem, I think, is having very real human consequences.” One day later, Vance brought up Springfield in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference.
Vance’s remarks appear to have gotten the attention of producers at Fox News. Within days, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and City Manager Bryan Heckappeared on the channel for what proved to be a typically sensationalistic segment. Rue and Heck’s main ask was similar to one that has been made by mayors across the country: They wanted federal aid to support a rapid increase in the city’s immigrant population. “I feel like they were kind of blindsided,” said Ruby. “It made them look anti-immigrant, when, in fact, I think they’ve worked really hard to try to manage the situation.” (Rue told the New York Times this week that, “It’s frustrating when national politicians, on the national stage, mischaracterize what is actually going on and misrepresent our community.”)
Springfield alsobegan to attract more attention from the extreme right. On August 10, a dozen neo-Nazis affiliated with the group Blood Tribe marched through Springfield carrying Swastika flags. On August 27, one of those Nazis, Drake Berentz, spoke at a Springfield community meeting before being ejected for threatening rhetoric. (Berentz falsely identified himself as Nathaniel Higgers, a fake name meant to evoke the racist slur it resembles.)
Still, nothing compared to what has happened in the past week. Last Friday, the right-wing X account End Wokeness, which has 2.9 million followers, shared a post in which someone claimed that the friend of his neighbor’s daughter had said that Haitian residents of Springfield had killed her cat and hung it from a tree branch. The rumor quickly went viral.
Still, the claim mostly lived on social media before Vance took it up.
When I spoke to Ruby on Tuesday, he told me his big fear was that Springfield would come up in the presidential debate that night. “Springfield is a powder keg right now,” Ruby added. He feared what might happen if there were another tragedy like the one that killed Aiden Clark.
Just before the debate, Nathan Clark spoke at a Springfield City Commission meeting. “Using Aidan as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose,” Clark said. “And speaking of morally bankrupt, politicians—Bernie Moreno, Chip Roy, JD Vance, and Donald Trump—they have spoken my son’s name and used his death for political gain. This needs to stop now.”
Nathan Clark — the father of 11-year-old Aiden Clark, who was killed in a car accident in Springfield, Ohio — tells JD Vance and Donald Trump to stop using his son’s name and the city of Springfield to demonize Haitian immigrants. “This needs to stop now!” pic.twitter.com/3J8FtZ82Ts
That did not stop Trump from bringing up Springfield and the claims about pets being eaten during the debate. Vance defended Trump’s decision to do so afterwards. The result is that some Haitian families in Springfield are reportedly now keeping their kids home from school out of fear for their safety. On Thursday morning, Springfield city hall was evacuated following a bomb threat, as was a local elementary school.
On Friday morning, Springfield received newbomb threats targeting city commissioners and multiple schools.A middle school was closed and three schools were evacuated.
Two hours later, Vance posted about Springfield again. Americans, he wrote, should be talking about Springfield “every single day.”
A young racist man who spends too much time online should have heard a lot to like from Donald Trump during Tuesday’s debate. But from what I saw from the usual suspects on the right, his performance didn’t earn their praise. Winning is most important in their hierarchy of power and they knew they were watching a loser.
Trump’s open embrace of far-right disinformation started from the very beginning of the debate, when he alluded to Springfield, Ohio. In case listeners didn’t catch the blatantly racist reference to a fake story that’s been circulating about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio, he made it explicit later in the debate.
"I’ve seen people on television!": Trump’s open embrace of far-right disinformation started from the very beginning of the debate when he alluded to Springfield, Ohio. pic.twitter.com/tmnnmaCGvQ
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in,” Trump said. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in this country and it’s a shame.”
This was not the first time that Trump has referenced Springfield in recent days. JD Vance has done the same, as has a who’s who of right-wing influencers. It has all felt like a mob with pitchforks in hand.
Trump, of course, was not done. In a word salad of MAGA paranoia, Trump claimed that Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” As others quickly pointed out, it was not far off from a chyron from Succession meant to parody right-wing media.
When it came to foreign policy, Trump went out of his way to praise Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban. This might have been welcome news to New Right figures who’ve spent years posting about Orban and the authoritarian crackdowns he has used to shore-up his self-proclaimed “illiberal democracy.” But Trump couldn’t even make his odious points coherently. As he put it:
I’m just quoting [Orban]. China was afraid of [Trump]. North Korea was afraid of him. Look at what’s going on with North Korea by the way. He said Russia was afraid of him. I ended the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and Biden put it back on day one. But he ended the XL pipeline. The XL pipeline in our country. He ended that but he let the Russians build the pipeline going all over Europe and heading into Germany. The biggest pipeline in the world. Look, Viktor Orban said it. He said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump.
Rod Dreher, a right-wing blogger who moved from the United States to Hungary largely due to his affinity for Orban and the direction he is taking the country, accepted that Trump had lost.
Hate to say it, but Kamala won this by looking and sounding normal. Trump blustered and failed to keep focus. Yeah, moderators on her side, but that can’t excuse Trump’s missing so many chances to go after her. Trump barely laid a glove on her all night. Depressing.
As Trump flailed during his Orban tangent, Harris looked on with a mix of amusement and seemingly genuine confusion. Across the stage was an angry and unhinged old man walking into every trap she laid for him when he was not stepping into ones of his own making.
Denying this was pointless for his fans. So, they turned to a tactic that losers have likely embraced for as long as debating has existed: From Catturd on down they blamed the moderators.
Near midnight last week, Democratic delegates with the Uncommitted movement sat in protest outside Chicago’s United Center. Elected by hundreds of thousands of primary voters who oppose President Joe Biden’s response to the war in Gaza, the delegates were sent to the DNC “uncommitted”—not pledged to support any candidate at the convention. Earlier in the week, the group did what they were elected to do by calling for a permanent ceasefire and immediate arms embargo. They also continued a simpler request they’d started making before the convention: a spot for a speaker on the main stage to talk about Palestine.
On Wednesday evening, the DNC and Harris campaign finally told them that no Palestinian American would be allowed to speak from the main stage of the convention. Here was their last ditch effort. They hoped a sit-in—and the Civil Rights history it evoked—would push party leaders to change their minds.
As the delegates waited, I watched a middle-aged man walk past. He shouted at the protesters: “Free the hostages!”
“We agree,” a chorus of Uncommitted supporters replied.
He shouted again: “Free the hostages!”
“We agree,” a woman wearing a hijab repeated. The man, seemingly confused, wandered away.
That image, over the past week after the DNC, has stuck in my mind. Despite being a group of staunch Democrats working to affect change from within the party, the Harris campaign—and many Democrats—mostly treated Uncommitted and their allies as outsiders ruining a party at the DNC. And, often, it seemed without even understanding what they were saying or where agreement could be had. The result was a four-day convention that managed to find space for seemingly everyone on the main stage except those willing to speak personally about what is happening in Palestine.
Donald Trump’s former communications director Stephanie Grisham, who stayed through family separations but called it quits after January 6? Yes. An American doctor who saved the lives of children in Gaza? No. A former Republican Lieutenant Gov. of Georgia who Democrats said in March was on the “frontlines of banning abortion, restricting the right to vote, and cutting taxes for the rich and powerful?” Yes. Rep. Ruwa Romman, a Georgia Democrat currently fighting against that agenda in the state legislature? No.
By denying someone of Palestinian descent the chance to speak, the Harris campaign missed an easy opportunity to create distance between itself and President Biden’s failing and highly unpopular response to the war. A June poll by CBS News and YouGov found that 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents believe that the United States should not send weapons and supplies to Israel, despite the Biden administration’s support for continuing to do so. Only 23 percent of Democrats, compared with 76 percent of Republicans, told Gallup in June that they support Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
Nevertheless, Biden has pursued a policy of effectively unconditional support for Israel that is more in line with the preferences of Republican voters than independents and members of his own party. A Palestinian American speaker would have given Uncommitted delegates something to bring back to the voters who elected them to show that Harris understands this reality.
“If we go to [uncommitted voters] right now and say, Hey, trust us there’s been a change at the top and we feel like maybe Vice President Harris feels a little bit differently in her heart,” Uncommitted co-founder Abbas Alawieh explained at the group’s first press conference of the convention, “that’s not going to win back voters. We need a plan. We need to know how the killing is going to be stopped.”
The Uncommitted delegates made clear throughout the week that they want to defeat Trump. But they want Harris to take positions that will help them to convince their voters to support her. It is a remarkably pragmatic message for a movement that believes Harris has served as vice president in an administration enabling a genocide. Uncommitted delegates were not the communists I saw carrying a hammer and sickle–adorned banner at a protest outside the convention’s security perimeter. They were Democrats sent to Chicago by Democratic voters to pursue the inside track.
It was always going to be hard to sustain US media attention on Gaza as the presidential election came to dominate the minds of journalists and their bosses. Uncommitted, in a stroke of depressingly clear-eyed organizing tact, launched a movement that asked Democrats to vote uncommitted instead of backing Biden. And in doing so, Waleed Shahid, a Democratic strategist who previously served as the spokesperson for the Squad-adjacent Justice Democrats, along with Alawieh and fellow co-founder Layla Elabed, turned the effort to end the war into the kind of campaign story journalists could cover.
Alawieh, a large and gentle man who previously worked as Rep. Cori Bush’s (D-Mo.) chief of staff, served as an emotional spokesperson throughout the DNC. As a teenager, he survived Israeli bombs that fell on south Lebanon. “I remember what those bombs feel like when they drop,” Alawieh explained. “I remember how your bones shake within your body.”
The overarching message of his speeches was that the more than 16,000 children who have died in Gaza are just as human as the boy he once was. The need to make that point again and again was its own form of dehumanization. But Alawieh hoped that repeating the message would get Democrats to accept his help and change their course on Gaza.
As he staged the sit-in, Alawieh struggled to accept that there would be no speaker at the DNC: “We did everything right, you know?” Again and again, Alawieh told reporters he was waiting for party leaders to call and tell him they’d changed their mind.
Often, during the DNC, I was struck by the restraint of the Uncommitted movement. So much, it seemed, was set up for Democrats to accept. And all of this was despite what they had seen—and their families had experienced.
What often got lost in commentary about the Uncommitted movement during the DNC were the atrocities that forced this moment. Israelis and Palestinians are now almost one year into the war that began with the brutal October 7 Hamas-led attack that took the lives of nearly 1,200 people in Israel. Since then, Israel has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza and injured nearly 100,000—most of whom have been civilians, according to the local health ministry. (Relative to Gaza’s population, this is the equivalent to the United States suffering 20 million casualties in less than a year.)
Thousands of bodies are believed to be buried under the rubble and potentially tens of thousands of others may die due to malnutrition, disease, and the destruction of medical infrastructure caused by the Israeli siege. This suffering is happening in a small strip of land that was considered by many experts to be an “open-air prison” long before October 7 as a result of a devastating Israeli blockade. Beyond the damage to human life, Gaza has been reduced to rubble by one of the most intense aerial bombing campaigns in human history. Top Israeli officials have spoken openly about wanting to destroy Gaza. Thanks in part to a steady stream of American armaments, they have now succeeded to an extent that is still not fully understood.
When I spoke in March with Omer Bartov, an Israeli military veteran who is now the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, he believed Israel’s actions in Gaza were on the verge of genocide. Since then, Bartov has concluded that the line has been crossed. (He is far from alone in that conclusion among genocide scholars and human rights experts.)
At the DNC, most of this went largely unheard. The focus was understandably on the joy and unity inspired by Harris replacing Biden atop the ticket. For the first time in more than a decade, Democrats seemed to have the swagger of the Obama era. They didn’t want to jinx it but they knew a Trump-ending victory was tantalizingly close. They mocked the former president as a morally—and perhaps anatomically—small man.
But, for others, it was impossible to fully take part in that celebration with Gaza in mind. A Tuesday Uncommitted press conference made that clear. Featuring American doctors who have volunteered in Gaza, their testimony was at times punctuated by the sobbing of those listening. Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish American orthopedic surgeon in North Carolina, said in a statement read by fellow surgeon Feroze Sidhwa:
Never before have I seen a small child shot in the head and then in the chest, and I could never have imagined that I would see two such cases in less than two weeks. Never before have I seen a dozen small children screaming in pain and terror—crowded into a trauma bay smaller than my living room, their burning flesh filling the space so aggressively that my eyes started to burn… And, worst of all, I could never have imagined that my government would be supplying the weapons and funding that keeps this horrifying slaughter going. Not for one week. Not for one month. But for nearly an entire year now. To this day, I wear my late father’s mezuzah around my neck. Since returning from Gaza, I have also draped a keffiyeh over my shoulders. And there is no contradiction.
These horrors are not abstractions for many Uncommitted voters and their allies. At the Monday panel on Palestinian human rights attended by hundreds of people, Hala Hijazi introduced herself as a moderate Democrat and civil servant from San Francisco. Hijazi said that more than 100 of her family members had been killed in Gaza—including two the previous week.
“I’m here because they can no longer speak,” she said. “I’m here because it’s the least that I can do as an American, as a person of faith, and as a Democrat.”
Like other convention speeches, the Uncommitted movement knew that the speaker and remarks would have been edited and vetted beforehand. Initially, Uncommitted organizers put forward Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor who spoke at Uncommitted press conferences.
Wrenching moment as Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor who did heroic work volunteering in Gaza, describes people trying to discredit her by claiming and assuming she is Palestinian. As she makes clear, it shouldn’t matter. But she is not Palestinian. pic.twitter.com/fYovf67zCU
After Dr. Haj-Hassan was rejected for unspecified reasons, organizers sent over the names of people who have lost relatives in Gaza, as well as Palestinian American elected officials. Uncommitted organizers had heard that it was a good sign that their speaking request was still in limbo.
One of their top choices was Romman, the Georgia state representative. Romman’s message would have complemented the one delivered by Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, who gave a moving speech about how their son Hersh Goldberg-Polin was taken hostage on October 7. Romman saw letting an elected Democrat like herself give a carefully worded speech as the “bare minimum” party leaders could do. But they never contacted her to see what she wanted to say.
As a result, the Harris campaign likely did not see the speech Romman hoped to give until Mother Jones published it during the convention. Once it was out, even more moderate writers like Jonathan Chait wondered what all the fuss was about. Why go through so much trouble and sow so much disunity to prevent an elected Democrat from giving a speech that included lines like:
Let’s commit to each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur. Let’s fight for the policies long overdue—from restoring access to abortions to ensuring a living wage, to demanding an end to reckless war and a ceasefire in Gaza.
It was the refusal to let a Palestinian American say even that that led to the sit-in on Wednesday night. Instead, on the final night of the convention, Rep. Romman ended up reading the speech she’d hoped to give to the many members of the media assembled before her outside the United Center. Later that night, the delegates locked arms and made their way back into the United Center. As they made their way in, it was increasingly possible to imagine a Democratic Party that one day saw them not as disruptors but champions of the values the party purports to hold. But by the time that moment arrives, there may be far fewer Palestines left to save.
As Romman has made clear, there is a long tradition of this kind of activism at the DNC. In 1988, the Reverend Jesse Jackson famously invoked how liberals have lauded history they might have said was too controversial at the time of its happening. After mentioning apartheid in South Africa, Jackson spoke of the need for the party to not shy away from controversy if it meant keeping a conscience. “Fannie Lou Hamer didn’t have the most votes in Atlantic City, but her principles have outlasted the life of every delegate who voted to lock her out,” Jackson argued. “If we are principled first, our politics will fall in place.” Romman invoked their legacy, adding that “I hope we listen now instead of in the future.”
Back inside the arena, delegates—committed and uncommitted—heard Harris accept the nomination.
“What has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating,” the vice president said during the section of her speech that addressed the war. “So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”
This was, if anything, a step backward from March, when Biden said in his State of the Union:
This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed. Most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands are innocent women and children. Girls and boys also orphaned. Nearly 2 million more Palestinians under bombardment or displaced. Homes destroyed, neighborhoods in rubble, cities in ruin. Families without food, water, medicine. It’s heartbreaking.
Either way, focusing on rhetoric is a distraction from the policy decisions that matter. As Uncommitted delegates said too many times to count at the convention: “Palestinians can’t eat words.”
In announcing the sit-in, Alawieh referenced how the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin had talked in their DNC speech about the idea in the Jewish tradition “every person is an entire universe.” He connected it to a Muslim idea that harming one person harms all of humanity. “As I was seated inside as a delegate, and hearing about the 109 hostages still in Gaza,” he explained. “I sat with them. Every one of those 109 people are universes.”
“And I was also thinking of the 16,000 children,” Alawieh continued. “I could have been one of those children.”
Why did no Palestinian go on that stage? Perhaps because it is easier for those enabling Israel’s war in Gaza not to hear these pleas of shared humanity. It would require them to maybe reckon with how easy it is to forget about who is at the end of the bombs we send to Israel. “We are talking about children,” Alawieh said outside the arena. “President Biden, Vice President Harris, what are we talking about here? We’re talking about children.”
Near midnight last week, Democratic delegates with the Uncommitted movement sat in protest outside Chicago’s United Center. Elected by hundreds of thousands of primary voters who oppose President Joe Biden’s response to the war in Gaza, the delegates were sent to the DNC “uncommitted”—not pledged to support any candidate at the convention. Earlier in the week, the group did what they were elected to do by calling for a permanent ceasefire and immediate arms embargo. They also continued a simpler request they’d started making before the convention: a spot for a speaker on the main stage to talk about Palestine.
On Wednesday evening, the DNC and Harris campaign finally told them that no Palestinian American would be allowed to speak from the main stage of the convention. Here was their last ditch effort. They hoped a sit-in—and the Civil Rights history it evoked—would push party leaders to change their minds.
As the delegates waited, I watched a middle-aged man walk past. He shouted at the protesters: “Free the hostages!”
“We agree,” a chorus of Uncommitted supporters replied.
He shouted again: “Free the hostages!”
“We agree,” a woman wearing a hijab repeated. The man, seemingly confused, wandered away.
That image, over the past week after the DNC, has stuck in my mind. Despite being a group of staunch Democrats working to affect change from within the party, the Harris campaign—and many Democrats—mostly treated Uncommitted and their allies as outsiders ruining a party at the DNC. And, often, it seemed without even understanding what they were saying or where agreement could be had. The result was a four-day convention that managed to find space for seemingly everyone on the main stage except those willing to speak personally about what is happening in Palestine.
Donald Trump’s former communications director Stephanie Grisham, who stayed through family separations but called it quits after January 6? Yes. An American doctor who saved the lives of children in Gaza? No. A former Republican Lieutenant Gov. of Georgia who Democrats said in March was on the “frontlines of banning abortion, restricting the right to vote, and cutting taxes for the rich and powerful?” Yes. Rep. Ruwa Romman, a Georgia Democrat currently fighting against that agenda in the state legislature? No.
By denying someone of Palestinian descent the chance to speak, the Harris campaign missed an easy opportunity to create distance between itself and President Biden’s failing and highly unpopular response to the war. A June poll by CBS News and YouGov found that 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents believe that the United States should not send weapons and supplies to Israel, despite the Biden administration’s support for continuing to do so. Only 23 percent of Democrats, compared with 76 percent of Republicans, told Gallup in June that they support Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
Nevertheless, Biden has pursued a policy of effectively unconditional support for Israel that is more in line with the preferences of Republican voters than independents and members of his own party. A Palestinian American speaker would have given Uncommitted delegates something to bring back to the voters who elected them to show that Harris understands this reality.
“If we go to [uncommitted voters] right now and say, Hey, trust us there’s been a change at the top and we feel like maybe Vice President Harris feels a little bit differently in her heart,” Uncommitted co-founder Abbas Alawieh explained at the group’s first press conference of the convention, “that’s not going to win back voters. We need a plan. We need to know how the killing is going to be stopped.”
The Uncommitted delegates made clear throughout the week that they want to defeat Trump. But they want Harris to take positions that will help them to convince their voters to support her. It is a remarkably pragmatic message for a movement that believes Harris has served as vice president in an administration enabling a genocide. Uncommitted delegates were not the communists I saw carrying a hammer and sickle–adorned banner at a protest outside the convention’s security perimeter. They were Democrats sent to Chicago by Democratic voters to pursue the inside track.
It was always going to be hard to sustain US media attention on Gaza as the presidential election came to dominate the minds of journalists and their bosses. Uncommitted, in a stroke of depressingly clear-eyed organizing tact, launched a movement that asked Democrats to vote uncommitted instead of backing Biden. And in doing so, Waleed Shahid, a Democratic strategist who previously served as the spokesperson for the Squad-adjacent Justice Democrats, along with Alawieh and fellow co-founder Layla Elabed, turned the effort to end the war into the kind of campaign story journalists could cover.
Alawieh, a large and gentle man who previously worked as Rep. Cori Bush’s (D-Mo.) chief of staff, served as an emotional spokesperson throughout the DNC. As a teenager, he survived Israeli bombs that fell on south Lebanon. “I remember what those bombs feel like when they drop,” Alawieh explained. “I remember how your bones shake within your body.”
The overarching message of his speeches was that the more than 16,000 children who have died in Gaza are just as human as the boy he once was. The need to make that point again and again was its own form of dehumanization. But Alawieh hoped that repeating the message would get Democrats to accept his help and change their course on Gaza.
As he staged the sit-in, Alawieh struggled to accept that there would be no speaker at the DNC: “We did everything right, you know?” Again and again, Alawieh told reporters he was waiting for party leaders to call and tell him they’d changed their mind.
Often, during the DNC, I was struck by the restraint of the Uncommitted movement. So much, it seemed, was set up for Democrats to accept. And all of this was despite what they had seen—and their families had experienced.
What often got lost in commentary about the Uncommitted movement during the DNC were the atrocities that forced this moment. Israelis and Palestinians are now almost one year into the war that began with the brutal October 7 Hamas-led attack that took the lives of nearly 1,200 people in Israel. Since then, Israel has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza and injured nearly 100,000—most of whom have been civilians, according to the local health ministry. (Relative to Gaza’s population, this is the equivalent to the United States suffering 20 million casualties in less than a year.)
Thousands of bodies are believed to be buried under the rubble and potentially tens of thousands of others may die due to malnutrition, disease, and the destruction of medical infrastructure caused by the Israeli siege. This suffering is happening in a small strip of land that was considered by many experts to be an “open-air prison” long before October 7 as a result of a devastating Israeli blockade. Beyond the damage to human life, Gaza has been reduced to rubble by one of the most intense aerial bombing campaigns in human history. Top Israeli officials have spoken openly about wanting to destroy Gaza. Thanks in part to a steady stream of American armaments, they have now succeeded to an extent that is still not fully understood.
When I spoke in March with Omer Bartov, an Israeli military veteran who is now the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, he believed Israel’s actions in Gaza were on the verge of genocide. Since then, Bartov has concluded that the line has been crossed. (He is far from alone in that conclusion among genocide scholars and human rights experts.)
At the DNC, most of this went largely unheard. The focus was understandably on the joy and unity inspired by Harris replacing Biden atop the ticket. For the first time in more than a decade, Democrats seemed to have the swagger of the Obama era. They didn’t want to jinx it but they knew a Trump-ending victory was tantalizingly close. They mocked the former president as a morally—and perhaps anatomically—small man.
But, for others, it was impossible to fully take part in that celebration with Gaza in mind. A Tuesday Uncommitted press conference made that clear. Featuring American doctors who have volunteered in Gaza, their testimony was at times punctuated by the sobbing of those listening. Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish American orthopedic surgeon in North Carolina, said in a statement read by fellow surgeon Feroze Sidhwa:
Never before have I seen a small child shot in the head and then in the chest, and I could never have imagined that I would see two such cases in less than two weeks. Never before have I seen a dozen small children screaming in pain and terror—crowded into a trauma bay smaller than my living room, their burning flesh filling the space so aggressively that my eyes started to burn… And, worst of all, I could never have imagined that my government would be supplying the weapons and funding that keeps this horrifying slaughter going. Not for one week. Not for one month. But for nearly an entire year now. To this day, I wear my late father’s mezuzah around my neck. Since returning from Gaza, I have also draped a keffiyeh over my shoulders. And there is no contradiction.
These horrors are not abstractions for many Uncommitted voters and their allies. At the Monday panel on Palestinian human rights attended by hundreds of people, Hala Hijazi introduced herself as a moderate Democrat and civil servant from San Francisco. Hijazi said that more than 100 of her family members had been killed in Gaza—including two the previous week.
“I’m here because they can no longer speak,” she said. “I’m here because it’s the least that I can do as an American, as a person of faith, and as a Democrat.”
Like other convention speeches, the Uncommitted movement knew that the speaker and remarks would have been edited and vetted beforehand. Initially, Uncommitted organizers put forward Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor who spoke at Uncommitted press conferences.
Wrenching moment as Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor who did heroic work volunteering in Gaza, describes people trying to discredit her by claiming and assuming she is Palestinian. As she makes clear, it shouldn’t matter. But she is not Palestinian. pic.twitter.com/fYovf67zCU
After Dr. Haj-Hassan was rejected for unspecified reasons, organizers sent over the names of people who have lost relatives in Gaza, as well as Palestinian American elected officials. Uncommitted organizers had heard that it was a good sign that their speaking request was still in limbo.
One of their top choices was Romman, the Georgia state representative. Romman’s message would have complemented the one delivered by Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, who gave a moving speech about how their son Hersh Goldberg-Polin was taken hostage on October 7. Romman saw letting an elected Democrat like herself give a carefully worded speech as the “bare minimum” party leaders could do. But they never contacted her to see what she wanted to say.
As a result, the Harris campaign likely did not see the speech Romman hoped to give until Mother Jones published it during the convention. Once it was out, even more moderate writers like Jonathan Chait wondered what all the fuss was about. Why go through so much trouble and sow so much disunity to prevent an elected Democrat from giving a speech that included lines like:
Let’s commit to each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur. Let’s fight for the policies long overdue—from restoring access to abortions to ensuring a living wage, to demanding an end to reckless war and a ceasefire in Gaza.
It was the refusal to let a Palestinian American say even that that led to the sit-in on Wednesday night. Instead, on the final night of the convention, Rep. Romman ended up reading the speech she’d hoped to give to the many members of the media assembled before her outside the United Center. Later that night, the delegates locked arms and made their way back into the United Center. As they made their way in, it was increasingly possible to imagine a Democratic Party that one day saw them not as disruptors but champions of the values the party purports to hold. But by the time that moment arrives, there may be far fewer Palestines left to save.
As Romman has made clear, there is a long tradition of this kind of activism at the DNC. In 1988, the Reverend Jesse Jackson famously invoked how liberals have lauded history they might have said was too controversial at the time of its happening. After mentioning apartheid in South Africa, Jackson spoke of the need for the party to not shy away from controversy if it meant keeping a conscience. “Fannie Lou Hamer didn’t have the most votes in Atlantic City, but her principles have outlasted the life of every delegate who voted to lock her out,” Jackson argued. “If we are principled first, our politics will fall in place.” Romman invoked their legacy, adding that “I hope we listen now instead of in the future.”
Back inside the arena, delegates—committed and uncommitted—heard Harris accept the nomination.
“What has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating,” the vice president said during the section of her speech that addressed the war. “So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”
This was, if anything, a step backward from March, when Biden said in his State of the Union:
This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed. Most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands are innocent women and children. Girls and boys also orphaned. Nearly 2 million more Palestinians under bombardment or displaced. Homes destroyed, neighborhoods in rubble, cities in ruin. Families without food, water, medicine. It’s heartbreaking.
Either way, focusing on rhetoric is a distraction from the policy decisions that matter. As Uncommitted delegates said too many times to count at the convention: “Palestinians can’t eat words.”
In announcing the sit-in, Alawieh referenced how the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin had talked in their DNC speech about the idea in the Jewish tradition “every person is an entire universe.” He connected it to a Muslim idea that harming one person harms all of humanity. “As I was seated inside as a delegate, and hearing about the 109 hostages still in Gaza,” he explained. “I sat with them. Every one of those 109 people are universes.”
“And I was also thinking of the 16,000 children,” Alawieh continued. “I could have been one of those children.”
Why did no Palestinian go on that stage? Perhaps because it is easier for those enabling Israel’s war in Gaza not to hear these pleas of shared humanity. It would require them to maybe reckon with how easy it is to forget about who is at the end of the bombs we send to Israel. “We are talking about children,” Alawieh said outside the arena. “President Biden, Vice President Harris, what are we talking about here? We’re talking about children.”
Delegates with the Uncommitted movement at the Democratic National Convention have continued pushing this week for either a Palestinian American or a doctor who has volunteered in Gaza to be allowed to speak on the main stage of the arena. There are thirty uncommitted delegates at the DNC representing the hundreds of thousands who voted uncommitted in lieu of supporting President Joe Biden’s primary campaign. They have been calling for a ceasefire and a halt to arms transfers to Israel while in Chicago. As we reported on August 1, the Uncommitted movement has also been continually requesting a speaker for the main stage.
Last night, national Democrats denied their request for a speaker. Yesterday, ceasefire delegates began a sit-in to continue pushing for a brief speaking slot tonight.
Those concerned about the war in Gaza have been able to hold an unprecedented panel on Palestinian human rights. And at a press conference on Tuesday organized by the Uncommitted movement, doctors told heartwrenching stories of what they’ve seen. But they have not been allowed to address the convention as a whole.
On Wednesday evening, Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg gave a moving speech from the main stage about their son Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was taken hostage during Hamas’ attack on October 7. Uncommitted activists supported the decision to provide an opportunity for a hostage family to speak at the convention. But they believe it is also important for delegates and voters to hear from someone who can speak to the suffering in Gaza, where more than 40,000 people have been killed, according to the local health ministry.
Mother Jones obtained the speech that Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian American and Democrat, is still hoping to give.
Romman has been a vocal and prominent activist for Uncommitted. Waleed Shahid, a strategist for the movement, said that she was among a list of potential speakers given to national Democrats. Initially, the Uncommitted movement pushed for Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor who volunteered in Gaza, to speak. (She is not Palestinian.) Shahid said this request was denied earlier in the week. After, the movement sent a list of more names for potential speakers, including Rep. Romman. (Shahid said he heard that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office was pushing for a speech from Romman.)
In an interview, Romman called herself a safe, last resort. “If an elected official in a swing state who is Palestinian cannot make it on that stage nobody else can,” she told Mother Jones.
Below, you can find the speech Romman wants to give. Uncommitted says it was open to multiple speakers. Rep. Romman and Uncommitted organizers both confirmed that this was the speech she was planning to give if allowed for a potential 2-minute speaking slot. Uncommitted said they were open to the speech being edited and vetted. They said the DNC did not ask to see the speech.
“We prepped the speech,” Romman told Mother Jones. “We don’t know why the campaign said no. We literally have no feedback. We are in the dark.”
The DNC did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication about why Romman—or another speaker—would not have been acceptable.
“I want to be clear,” Romman said. “We’ve been in negotiations for days. This did not just come up…We’ve been talking about this for at least a week. In addition, the campaign told us that not getting a ‘no’ [initially upon first hearing the request] was a really good sign. For them to give us a ‘no’ the same day that Geoff Duncan [a Republican from Georgia] was on the stage—especially when it was my name—was just absolutely a slap in the face.”
Here is the text of Romman’s speech:
My name is Ruwa Romman, and I’m honored to be the first Palestinian elected to public office in the great state of Georgia and the first Palestinian to ever speak at the Democratic National Convention. My story begins in a small village near Jerusalem, called Suba, where my dad’s family is from. My mom’s roots trace back to Al Khalil, or Hebron. My parents, born in Jordan, brought us to Georgia when I was eight, where I now live with my wonderful husband and our sweet pets.
Growing up, my grandfather and I shared a special bond. He was my partner in mischief—whether it was sneaking me sweets from the bodega or slipping a $20 into my pocket with that familiar wink and smile. He was my rock, but he passed away a few years ago, never seeing Suba or any part of Palestine again. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss him.
This past year has been especially hard. As we’ve been moral witnesses to the massacres in Gaza, I’ve thought of him, wondering if this was the pain he knew too well. When we watched Palestinians displaced from one end of the Gaza Strip to the other I wanted to ask him how he found the strength to walk all those miles decades ago and leave everything behind.
But in this pain, I’ve also witnessed something profound—a beautiful, multifaith, multiracial, and multigenerational coalition rising from despair within our Democratic Party. For 320 days, we’ve stood together, demanding to enforce our laws on friend and foe alike to reach a ceasefire, end the killing of Palestinians, free all the Israeli and Palestinian hostages, and to begin the difficult work of building a path to collective peace and safety. That’s why we are here—members of this Democratic Party committed to equal rights and dignity for all. What we do here echoes around the world.
They’ll say this is how it’s always been, that nothing can change. But remember Fannie Lou Hamer—shunned for her courage, yet she paved the way for an integrated Democratic Party. Her legacy lives on, and it’s her example we follow.
But we can’t do it alone. This historic moment is full of promise, but only if we stand together. Our party’s greatest strength has always been our ability to unite. Some see that as a weakness, but it’s time we flex that strength.
Let’s commit to each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur. Let’s fight for the policies long overdue—from restoring access to abortions to ensuring a living wage, to demanding an end to reckless war and a ceasefire in Gaza. To those who doubt us, to the cynics and the naysayers, I say, yes we can—yes we can be a Democratic Party that prioritizes funding our schools and hospitals, not for endless wars. That fights for an America that belongs to all of us—Black, brown, and white, Jews and Palestinians, all of us, like my grandfather taught me, together.
Delegates with the Uncommitted movement at the Democratic National Convention have continued pushing this week for either a Palestinian American or a doctor who has volunteered in Gaza to be allowed to speak on the main stage of the arena. There are thirty uncommitted delegates at the DNC representing the hundreds of thousands who voted uncommitted in lieu of supporting President Joe Biden’s primary campaign. They have been calling for a ceasefire and a halt to arms transfers to Israel while in Chicago. As we reported on August 1, the Uncommitted movement has also been continually requesting a speaker for the main stage.
Last night, national Democrats denied their request for a speaker. Yesterday, ceasefire delegates began a sit-in to continue pushing for a brief speaking slot tonight.
Those concerned about the war in Gaza have been able to hold an unprecedented panel on Palestinian human rights. And at a press conference on Tuesday organized by the Uncommitted movement, doctors told heartwrenching stories of what they’ve seen. But they have not been allowed to address the convention as a whole.
On Wednesday evening, Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg gave a moving speech from the main stage about their son Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was taken hostage during Hamas’ attack on October 7. Uncommitted activists supported the decision to provide an opportunity for a hostage family to speak at the convention. But they believe it is also important for delegates and voters to hear from someone who can speak to the suffering in Gaza, where more than 40,000 people have been killed, according to the local health ministry.
Mother Jones obtained the speech that Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian American and Democrat, is still hoping to give.
Romman has been a vocal and prominent activist for Uncommitted. Waleed Shahid, a strategist for the movement, said that she was among a list of potential speakers given to national Democrats. Initially, the Uncommitted movement pushed for Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor who volunteered in Gaza, to speak. (She is not Palestinian.) Shahid said this request was denied earlier in the week. After, the movement sent a list of more names for potential speakers, including Rep. Romman. (Shahid said he heard that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office was pushing for a speech from Romman.)
In an interview, Romman called herself a safe, last resort. “If an elected official in a swing state who is Palestinian cannot make it on that stage nobody else can,” she told Mother Jones.
Below, you can find the speech Romman wants to give. Uncommitted says it was open to multiple speakers. Rep. Romman and Uncommitted organizers both confirmed that this was the speech she was planning to give if allowed for a potential 2-minute speaking slot. Uncommitted said they were open to the speech being edited and vetted. They said the DNC did not ask to see the speech.
“We prepped the speech,” Romman told Mother Jones. “We don’t know why the campaign said no. We literally have no feedback. We are in the dark.”
The DNC did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication about why Romman—or another speaker—would not have been acceptable.
“I want to be clear,” Romman said. “We’ve been in negotiations for days. This did not just come up…We’ve been talking about this for at least a week. In addition, the campaign told us that not getting a ‘no’ [initially upon first hearing the request] was a really good sign. For them to give us a ‘no’ the same day that Geoff Duncan [a Republican from Georgia] was on the stage—especially when it was my name—was just absolutely a slap in the face.”
Here is the text of Romman’s speech:
My name is Ruwa Romman, and I’m honored to be the first Palestinian elected to public office in the great state of Georgia and the first Palestinian to ever speak at the Democratic National Convention. My story begins in a small village near Jerusalem, called Suba, where my dad’s family is from. My mom’s roots trace back to Al Khalil, or Hebron. My parents, born in Jordan, brought us to Georgia when I was eight, where I now live with my wonderful husband and our sweet pets.
Growing up, my grandfather and I shared a special bond. He was my partner in mischief—whether it was sneaking me sweets from the bodega or slipping a $20 into my pocket with that familiar wink and smile. He was my rock, but he passed away a few years ago, never seeing Suba or any part of Palestine again. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss him.
This past year has been especially hard. As we’ve been moral witnesses to the massacres in Gaza, I’ve thought of him, wondering if this was the pain he knew too well. When we watched Palestinians displaced from one end of the Gaza Strip to the other I wanted to ask him how he found the strength to walk all those miles decades ago and leave everything behind.
But in this pain, I’ve also witnessed something profound—a beautiful, multifaith, multiracial, and multigenerational coalition rising from despair within our Democratic Party. For 320 days, we’ve stood together, demanding to enforce our laws on friend and foe alike to reach a ceasefire, end the killing of Palestinians, free all the Israeli and Palestinian hostages, and to begin the difficult work of building a path to collective peace and safety. That’s why we are here—members of this Democratic Party committed to equal rights and dignity for all. What we do here echoes around the world.
They’ll say this is how it’s always been, that nothing can change. But remember Fannie Lou Hamer—shunned for her courage, yet she paved the way for an integrated Democratic Party. Her legacy lives on, and it’s her example we follow.
But we can’t do it alone. This historic moment is full of promise, but only if we stand together. Our party’s greatest strength has always been our ability to unite. Some see that as a weakness, but it’s time we flex that strength.
Let’s commit to each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur. Let’s fight for the policies long overdue—from restoring access to abortions to ensuring a living wage, to demanding an end to reckless war and a ceasefire in Gaza. To those who doubt us, to the cynics and the naysayers, I say, yes we can—yes we can be a Democratic Party that prioritizes funding our schools and hospitals, not for endless wars. That fights for an America that belongs to all of us—Black, brown, and white, Jews and Palestinians, all of us, like my grandfather taught me, together.
On Tuesday morning, as the party coalesced around Vice President Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention, doctors spoke at a press conference in Chicago about what they witnessed in Gaza since last October as volunteers. At many points, their testimony proved unbearable.
Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor, described treating children with no surviving relatives—a situation so common an acronym has been needed in the hospitals: WCNSF (Wounded Child, No Surviving Family). She told the audience about holding hands with children as they breathed their final breaths.
Uncommitted delegates to the DNC have been pushing for Haj-Hassan to be able to speak from the main stage of the convention. But, so far, national Democrats have not agreed to that request.
I interviewed two of the doctors after the event. Dr. Ahmad Yousaf is an internist and pediatrician from New Jersey who now practices in Arkansas—primarily in the intensive care unit. He volunteered at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Gaza for three weeks in June and July. Dr. Nabeel Rana is a vascular surgeon in North Carolina who overlapped with Yousaf at the Al-Aqsa hospital. They did not know each other before meeting in Gaza, but quickly developed a bond born out of shared trauma.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
We’ve seen the images on social media and elsewhere of the scale of the destruction in Gaza. How did that compare with what you saw firsthand?
Dr. Rana:There are no words, pictures, or videos that can really capture what’s happening. As soon as we got to the other side of the Gaza border crossing, it was like this dystopian image out of a movie. I mean it was just dust. It was an annihilation of the entire land. It’s not just buildings that were destroyed. There were things that looked like dirt fields, but I was told, That was an orchard. That was this farm.
Going from the border to our hospital in the middle segment of Gaza, there was nothing normal, no building untouched. Everything was decimated for miles and miles. It wasn’t like this was a target, that was a target. It was like someone steamrolled through the entire city.
Dr. Yousaf: It felt like we were entering a post-apocalyptic movie scene, or a Mad Max world where none of the roads were drivable and none of the homes were habitable. There were people strewn across the streets in tents because that’s all they had. There were others living within the rubble of homes because it was better to have something over your head even if it was completely unstable.
Initially, I thought that it was going to be what we saw on the news and Telegram and Instagram. But when we got there, the devastation was so much worse than I could have imagined was possible in the period of time that this war has been going on.
What were conditions like inside the hospital?
Dr. Yousaf: To call it a hospital at that point was kind of a stretch. It was serving as a temporary shelter for at least half the people on the property. There were tents in and around it. Even within the hospital, the hallways were full of families because they knew that it was a building that was relatively protected.
It was an obstetrics hospital before the war, but it became a trauma ward. The place wasn’t meant to take care of trauma patients. They had three operating theaters and two delivery rooms had been modified into operating theaters. But they were not truly capable of taking care of those kinds of patients.
I watched Dr. Rana do a surgery in which the lights went out multiple times. That was common. The ventilators in the ICU would go out of oxygen. You were just trying to survive and keep people alive in the short term. It didn’t function like any other medical facility I’ve ever been in.
Dr. Rana: It’s a small hospital. Now it’s all over the news and it seems like this big medical care center, but it’s a tiny hospital. The day we arrived there were 700 patients in a 200-bed facility.
The hallways were just packed with people. You don’t know who’s a patient and who’s not—other than one is missing a limb. There’s no air conditioning. The hospital is running on generators because there’s no electricity. Those generators start and stop.
People in there were just suffering 24 hours a day. All the time. There was just no way just to give them even brief relief.
From a surgical standpoint, there are no supplies. There are no gowns. You don’t have the right instruments. You do a surgery, then you don’t have the right sutures to close those wounds. Everything is just damage control all the time. You can’t ever step out of that mode to where you can actually start helping someone heal—to where they can actually start recovering.
The staff would say that if there’s a couple days where the bombing is minimal and massive traumas are not coming in, we try to get patients out of the hospital to open up space—not even beds—for the next onslaught of patients. Dr. Yousaf and I were there long enough to witness that cycle multiple times.
What would happen during a mass casualty event?
Dr. Yousaf:First, there is the constant buzz of drones above our heads. It sounds like your neighbor is mowing their lawn. You also hear artillery shells or bomb blasts. But if it was close enough—if we felt the earth shake under us or if the building moved—we knew that we’d be getting the patients from that bomb blast 30 or 45 minutes later. They’d often come in on donkey carts and ambulances and other vehicles. Or they’d just be carried in their arms by family or community members.
They would rush into the OR in panic while their family member was dead or dying. We’d say: Put them over there on the floor because we don’t have space anymore. And there could be 16,17,18 people coming in like that consecutively.
We’d really try our best. And by we, I really mean the Gazan medical staff. They would be saying: That person’s not going to live. Leave them there. That person is dead already. Here’s the people we can try to save.
Gloves were a luxury. We were using hemostats to pull shrapnel out of people, and we’d have to pour Betadine on it between patients because we didn’t have enough sterilization to go around. Every mass casualty event overwhelmed the system. Right when you felt like you were catching up, there was another explosion and you knew that more people were coming.
What was available in terms of painkillers and anesthetic?
Dr. Yousaf:We had one medicine, ketamine, that prevented a lot of misery. It’s a sedative medicine we would never use in any other environment in the way that we used it there.
People came in with legs torn off and their skin burned off and visible bone-crushing wounds. Dr. Rana and I saw a 10-year-old who came in with no pelvic bone. The only relief we could give was to push ketamine—hoping it would sedate them until we had time to really assess what was going on. In the long term, we had very little to nothing. Outside of the trauma room, we were using ibuprofen and Tylenol often for full body skin burns.
Dr. Rana: People in there were just suffering 24 hours a day. All the time. There was just no way just to give them even brief relief.
As a surgeon used to working in an American hospital, what was it like to be in such a helpless position?
Dr. Rana: You heard some of this before you went so I was familiar with a bit of it. But when I got there, it was a very steep learning curve. Nothing is normal. Nothing is what you’re used to having here.
It was very humbling because in the very beginning I was learning from Gazan medical workers. They had been doing this for months. The physicians and surgeons there would use their phones as OR lights when the lights went out. They were using instruments that should not normally have been used for the things that we were doing, but they just kept going. One of our colleagues, a surgeon from Australia, did an entire colon resection without electrocautery, which we use for controlling bleeding during surgery.
Maybe you didn’t have lights. Maybe you didn’t have suction. There were all these things that would absolutely halt an operating room here because you can’t give quality care without those things—at least with what our standard is. But over there, you don’t have a choice.
During the press conference, you mentioned a pregnant woman you treated up until her death. What happened?
Dr. Yousaf: The first day I was in Al-Aqsa hospital, there was a mass casualty event. I want to say 15 or 20 people came in simultaneously. She was plopped down right next to me—belly down, initially—with full burns. Her hair had been burned away. Her face was completely burned. Seventy percent of the surface area of her body was burned. And the first thing we noticed during our primary survey, which is the kind of first quick glance, is that she had shattered her leg from an explosive injury. I could see the tendons.
Then we heard screaming in Arabic outside the door saying, She’s pregnant. She’s pregnant. It took me a minute to really process what they were saying because you couldn’t tell this patient’s age due to the burns. When we realized what was happening, we flipped her over and somebody put an ultrasound on her belly and noticed that she had a viable, kicking, 18-to-20 week old pregnancy.
When you hear of a pregnant lady, everybody’s sensitivity gets even sharper and we did what we could. She was rushed to the OR, got the orthopedic surgery, got taken care of. She ended up undergoing an amputation of the leg because there was no way that it was savable.
But every single doctor and nurse and health care provider realized an inevitable reality; she was going to die.
She ended up in the ICU for many days, where I cared for her as part of a team. Every day on rounds, we would pass by her bed. She moaned and groaned in pain the entire time. We could only provide her relief intermittently with very, very inadequate medications until the day came where we rounded on her and she was no longer in the bed. We all knew what that meant. The nurse said to me in Arabic that it was a mercy—for her and for her husband, who was with her the entire time. The guy never left her bedside. He watched her suffer. She suffered. And there was no happy ending there.
There are so many stories of the Gazan people that don’t have a happy ending. In the privilege we live in, we imagine: Yousaf is going to say that the baby was born and the baby lives on. No, no. The baby died. Her mother died. Her husband is now a widower with a lifelong trauma that he’ll never be able to overcome.
I don’t know if there are other family members. I don’t know who else died in the explosion.
In many cases, the bombs causing these injuries and deaths were likely made in America. And in some cases, the weapons may have been paid for by American taxpayers. How does that connect to your decision to come to Chicago?
Dr. Rana:There’s a lot of talk about ceasefire, and what everyone needs to understand is that we’re so far past the point of where a ceasefire should have happened. There’s so much destruction, death, devastation, annihilation, genocide, all of these things have continued to happen under our watch.
What we’re telling you as Americans who were there on the ground is that innocent people and an entire society is being decimated. We’re not only standing by and watching it, we are contributing to it. We are actively doing it. And it’s unbelievable to me. I just can’t understand how we continue to supply bombs then talk about a ceasefire. The hypocrisy of it is just astounding.
Was there a consensus among the doctors you were working with that you were witnessing a genocide?
Dr. Yousaf: There was no doubt.
Dr. Rana: Without a doubt.
Dr. Yousaf: I’d love to meet a doctor who was there for more than seven days who would say that what they saw wasn’t a genocide.
Dr. Rana:In terms of war crimes and things like that, we saw targeting of children. We saw young men targeted with rifle shots to their thighs to try to require amputation of their legs.
There were quadcopters targeting men in their groins and genitals. They would come in with no other injuries and would lose their testicles. They’re healthy young men, but they’ll never have kids. One of the surgeons I was speaking to said, This is the seventh one like this I’ve seen.This is something they do. A quadcopter comes in and just targets a young man.
I asked the urologist who was doing the operation, How many of these have you seen?
Too many to count, he said.
The reason I believe him is that when he finished reconstructing this young man, I was so amazed at his proficiency. This was obviously somebody who’d done a ton of this type of case. Either you’re trying to decimate the future of a society, or it’s just sick entertainment for sociopaths. And I don’t know which one it is.
Have you ever gotten involved in politics like this before?
Dr. Rana:No, I haven’t. I went with an organization called Humanity Auxilium and the founder of that organization is very active in medical aid and relief. We had a discussion before I went and she said that as physicians, when we go to these places, you also have to be an advocate. I told her that I’m not a public speaker. I’m not a politician. I’m just a physician who has a set of skills. I’m going to go there and do what I can do and help people, and that’s my role.
But the one thing that everybody there asked was: Please, go back and tell everybody about us. They didn’t ask for help. They didn’t ask for anything other than that they don’t want to be forgotten and neglected. And so the responsibility I feel is to tell what I saw. I also feel an obligation to speak out because the hypocrisy is not just on our country’s part but on our side, too. I paid for those missiles that were being used there. My tax dollars were used to do that.
In his convention speech on Monday night President Biden said he’s been working around the clock to surge humanitarian aid and secure a ceasefire. What’s it like to hear that?
Dr. Yousaf: I’m going to curse here, but that’s bullshit, right? It’s bullshit because you can only judge somebody by what they’ve done. Words mean nothing anymore. Gazans over there showed us what humanity and human dignity mean in an environment where they are being treated inhumanely and without dignity. Nobody should get away with sleeping comfortably at night knowing that they can say one thing on one side and then do something else on the other.
What are the most important steps you want to see the United States take?
Dr. Yousaf: We’re not politicians and we’re not military strategists so I don’t know what all the steps are. But the basic steps are pretty simple: Let’s stop sending bombs to people who are using them to kill children and civilians. Let’s allow open access to medical supplies, humanitarian aid, and international news agencies so we can have more witnesses than a couple of doctors. And let’s allow for an environment where we treat the Palestinian people like they deserve: as human beings who deserve the same rights as and the same access to humanitarian aid and health supplies and health care as the rest of us.
The most significantaspect of the press conference held by the Uncommitted movement on Monday morning at the Democratic National Convention was that it happened at all. Never before has there been an official delegation at the DNC devoted to defending the rights of Palestinians.
Since President Joe Biden stepped aside, Democrats have tried to frame the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris as one of “joy” and “unity.” Despite fears of infighting, the party quickly coalesced around Harris and moved beyond the questions about Biden’s age. But one of the central problems of the primary still looms large: How to handle the war in Gaza.
“Unity is great,” said Uncommitted organizer Natalia Latif. “But that unity can’t come at the cost of Palestinian lives.”
Inside the hall are the thirty uncommitted delegates elected by primary voters in states including Minnesota, Michigan, and Washington. At the Monday press conference, these delegates repeatedly emphasized their main two demands: a permanent ceasefire and an arms embargo against Israel.
They are vastly outnumbered by the more than 4,000 delegates pledged to Harris. But the presence of uncommitted delegates elected by a grassroots movement remains a powerful sign of many Democratic voters’ outrage over Israel’s actions in Gaza and their vote to push for a ceasefire and overall shift in how Democrats work with Israel.
“Unity is great,” said Uncommitted organizer Natalia Latif. “But that unity can’t come at the cost of Palestinian lives.”
The efforts to pressure Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party are split between those within the convention hall and the protesters outside. And not all these groups are in total agreement on every issue, or on methods for pushing Democrats.
Outside the arena, a major protest is scheduled for later on Monday. Protest organizers have said they expect up to 40,000 people to attend. The march is sponsored by a coalition of more than 200 groups including the Arab American Action Network, American Friends Service Committee, and the Democratic Socialists of America, along with the Chicago chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Other groups in the march coalition such as the Denver Communists have much smaller national profiles.
"Palestinian children can't eat words." —@luluelabed
Thus far, Harris has not broken from Biden on Gaza, even if she has shown more empathy for suffering Palestinians. But some delegates and other pro-peace activists see her as more persuadable than Biden, whose fervent support for Israel calcified back when he was a senator in the 1980s.
Over the past month, delegates with the Uncommitted movement have been pushing for a speaking slot for Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor who saw the carnage inflicted by the Israeli assault on Gaza while volunteering at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
“I’m hoping to provide moral witness to the delegates of the Democratic National Convention because an end to this military campaign is the only way to preserve human life under the current circumstances,” Haj-Hassan said on an Uncommitted movement Zoom call on August 1. Thus far, the DNC has not agreed to let Haj-Hassan or Palestinian American elected officials speak from the mainstage of the DNC. Relatives of hostages taken by Hamas during its attack on October 7 have also reportedly not been told whether they will have a speaking slot.
“I think that building bridges is going to be the most effective approach in this specific space.”
“It’s definitely telling that there’s not going to be a Palestinian speaking on the convention stage,” Latif, the Uncommitted organizer, said. The DNC will, for the first time in its history, host an official panel on Palestinian human rights on Monday afternoon.
Sabrene Odeh, a delegate from Washington, said on Friday that those associated wtih the Uncommitted movement will speak to as many fellow Democratic delegates as possible this week to build support for their movement. “A lot of it’s real old school,” said Odeh, who is Palestinian American. “I think most of my days are going to be spent giving my elevator speeches to folks—and I really hope that they care about what’s going on in Gaza.”
Odeh and other uncommitted delegates are trying to build support for a broader ceasefire delegation that includes Harris delegates. “I think that building bridges is going to be the most effective approach in this specific space,” she explained.
To that end, Uncommitted organizers estimated some 200 delegates have already pledged to sign a petition calling to make an arms embargo part of the Democratic Party platform this campaign cycle. Organizers plan to send the petition to Harris. The 91-page platform the party unveiled Sunday evening, according to the Washington Post, makes no mention of an arms embargo and is expected to pass as written.
Latif said that Harris delegates who sign on to the “ceasefire” pledge and walk around the convention with “not another bomb” pins and t-shirts will help show Harris and Biden that “even their own delegates are in line with this policy.”
“A ceasefire and an arms embargo is actually in line with what a majority of Democrats want, and our leadership right now is actually out of step with those desires,” Latif said. According to one Data for Progress poll in May, 83 percent of Democratic voters support a permanent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Latif and the Uncommitted Movement believe that a permanent ceasefire can only come about when coupled with an arms embargo.
Uncommitted delegates are clear-eyed about the challenges they face. Harris has served as vice president while Biden has offered Israel almost unconditional support as it wages a war on Gaza that has killed more than 40,000 people. The International Court of Justice has found that Israel’s actions may constitute genocide, and has argued that the country’s conduct in the West Bank and Gaza is equivalent to apartheid. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for crimes against humanity for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, along with leaders of Hamas for their actions on October 7.
“At the end of the day, what we really want folks to realize is this movement has been pulled together in like six months,” Odeh said. “This is incredibly, incredibly successful—especially for really something that is one issue. We don’t see this happen very often. And so as a Palestinian, I’m just incredibly proud.”
Update, August 19, 2024, 3:48 p.m.: This story has been updated to reflect more signatories of the call for an arms embargo.
The most significantaspect of the press conference held by the Uncommitted Movement on Monday morning at the Democratic National Convention was that it happened at all. Never before has there been an official delegation at the DNC devoted to defending the rights of Palestinians.
Since President Joe Biden stepped aside, Democrats have tried to frame the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris as one of “joy” and “unity.” Despite fears of infighting, the party quickly coalesced around Harris and moved beyond the questions about Biden’s age. But one of the central problems of the primary still looms large: How to handle the war in Gaza.
“Unity is great,” said Uncommitted organizer Natalia Latif. “But that unity can’t come at the cost of Palestinian lives.”
Inside the hall are the thirty uncommitted delegates elected by primary voters in states including Minnesota, Michigan, and Washington. At the Monday press conference, these delegates repeatedly emphasized their main two demands: a permanent ceasefire and an arms embargo against Israel.
They are vastly outnumbered by the more than 4,000 delegates pledged to Harris. But the presence of uncommitted delegates elected by a grassroots movement remains a powerful sign of many Democratic voters’ outrage over Israel’s actions in Gaza and their vote to push for a ceasefire and overall shift in how Democrats work with Israel.
“Unity is great,” said Uncommitted organizer Natalia Latif. “But that unity can’t come at the cost of Palestinian lives.”
The efforts to pressure Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party are split between those within the convention hall and the protesters outside. And not all these groups are in total agreement on every issue, or on methods for pushing Democrats.
Outside the arena, a major protest is scheduled for later on Monday. Protest organizers have said they expect up to 40,000 people to attend. The march is sponsored by a coalition of more than 200 groups including the Arab American Action Network, American Friends Service Committee, and the Democratic Socialists of America, along with the Chicago chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Other groups in the march coalition such as the Denver Communists have much smaller national profiles.
"Palestinian children can't eat words." —@luluelabed
Thus far, Harris has not broken from Biden on Gaza, even if she has shown more empathy for suffering Palestinians. But some delegates and other pro-peace activists see her as more persuadable than Biden, whose fervent support for Israel calcified back when he was a senator in the 1980s.
Over the past month, delegates with the Uncommitted movement have been pushing for a speaking slot for Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor who saw the carnage inflicted by the Israeli assault on Gaza while volunteering at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
“I’m hoping to provide moral witness to the delegates of the Democratic National Convention because an end to this military campaign is the only way to preserve human life under the current circumstances,” Haj-Hassan said on an Uncommitted Movement Zoom call on August 1. Thus far, the DNC has not agreed to let Haj-Hassan or Palestinian American elected officials speak from the mainstage of the DNC. Relatives of hostages taken by Hamas during its attack on October 7 have also reportedly not been told whether they will have a speaking slot.
“I think that building bridges is going to be the most effective approach in this specific space.”
“It’s definitely telling that there’s not going to be a Palestinian speaking on the convention stage,” Latif, the Uncommitted organizer, said. The DNC will, for the first time in its history, host an official panel on Palestinian human rights on Monday afternoon.
Sabrene Odeh, a delegate from Washington, said on Friday that those associated wtih the Uncommitted movement will speak to as many fellow Democratic delegates as possible this week to build support for their movement. “A lot of it’s real old school,” said Odeh, who is Palestinian American. “I think most of my days are going to be spent giving my elevator speeches to folks—and I really hope that they care about what’s going on in Gaza.”
Odeh and other uncommitted delegates are trying to build support for a broader ceasefire delegation that includes Harris delegates. “I think that building bridges is going to be the most effective approach in this specific space,” she explained.
To that end, Uncommitted organizers estimated 120 delegates have already pledged to sign a petition calling to make an arms embargo part of the Democratic Party platform this campaign cycle. Organizers plan to send the petition to Harris. The 91-page platform the party unveiled Sunday evening, according to the Washington Post, makes no mention of an arms embargo and is expected to pass as written.
Latif said that Harris delegates who sign on to the “ceasefire” pledge and walk around the convention with “not another bomb” pins and t-shirts will help show Harris and Biden that “even their own delegates are in line with this policy.”
“A ceasefire and an arms embargo is actually in line with what a majority of Democrats want, and our leadership right now is actually out of step with those desires,” Latif said. According to one Data for Progress poll in May, 83 percent of Democratic voters support a permanent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Latif and the Uncommitted Movement believe that a permanent ceasefire can only come about when coupled with an arms embargo.
Uncommitted delegates are clear-eyed about the challenges they face. Harris has served as vice president while Biden has offered Israel almost unconditional support as it wages a war on Gaza that has killed more than 40,000 people. The International Court of Justice has found that Israel’s actions may constitute genocide, and has argued that the country’s conduct in the West Bank and Gaza is equivalent to apartheid. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for crimes against humanity for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, along with leaders of Hamas for their actions on October 7.
“At the end of the day, what we really want folks to realize is this movement has been pulled together in like six months,” Odeh said. “This is incredibly, incredibly successful—especially for really something that is one issue. We don’t see this happen very often. And so as a Palestinian, I’m just incredibly proud.”
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