CHICAGO — On the first day of the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC), two very different accounts of the American immigrant experience were presented at two very different events. At the morning meeting of the Small Business Council, restaurant owner Rohini Dey told her story of how she came to the United States “fiercely determined to save the world,” earned her doctorate, and worked at McKinsey and the World Bank before becoming an entrepreneur.
“I’m actually the poster child for Project 2025,” she said. “I think there’s so much to be optimistic about. We’re doing wonderfully.”
Later in the day, Hala Hijazi, the Palestinian-American founder and CEO of a San Francisco-based consulting firm, spoke about her own journey at a panel discussion on Palestinian human rights — the first such event held at the DNC. Hijazi, a “proud moderate,” had entered Democratic politics in the late 1990s, working for former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. She eventually became one of the party’s top donors and fundraisers, raising more than $2 million and joining the boards of several liberal nonprofits. But she didn’t celebrate those successes.
“I am a failure. I am a fraud,” she said through tears. More than a hundred of her family members have been killed since Israel began destroying Gaza, including two last week alone, she claimed. While she lived her American dream, her family in Gaza suffered under the Israeli occupation, she said – an occupation and now a war that, as many in the audience no doubt recognized, was inadvertently funded by U.S. taxpayers like themselves.
It was an emotional, harrowing moment in an emotional, harrowing event. The panel of pro-Palestinian activists, moderated by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, was not part of the day’s original program but was added as an afterthought. It was a concession by the “undecided” movement — which won more than 700,000 votes in state primaries across the country earlier this year, including in swing states like Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin — and a concession that organizers and activists hoped would allow them to speak directly to Democratic insiders about the horrors being wreaked by President Joe Biden’s Gaza policy.
Even for those who have followed Israel’s destruction of Gaza from the beginning, it was difficult to listen to. Panelists and audience members were often in tears. Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, who had volunteered in the area for Doctors Without Borders, spoke of the case of a young boy whose entire family had been killed and half of his face and neck blown off. He regretted surviving, although a skin transplant saved him from dangerous disfigurement.
“Everyone I love has gone to heaven and I don’t want to be here anymore,” she remembered him saying.
Despite widespread speculation of a 1968-style mess, the antiwar forces of the unaffiliated movement took a different tack at the opening of the DNC, hoping that latent sympathy for their cause within the Democratic establishment might bear fruit. Unaffiliated activists I spoke with all said they received a surprising amount of support from Kamala Harris delegates and other party bigwigs as they paraded around the convention grounds wearing keffiyehs and handing out antiwar literature.
“People were very grateful,” unaffiliated Hawaiian delegate Eric Schrager told me, adding that Democratic Party members seemed to understand that someone would have to put pressure on the government to force a ceasefire. Inga Gibson, an unaffiliated delegate from the state, said people had been coming up to them all day to thank them.
As a result, one panelist, the movement’s unaffiliated founder Layla Elabed, told me that the organizers who rallied the Democrats to support an arms embargo found it “the easiest organizing job they’ve ever had to do.” According to the organizers, about two hundred Democratic delegates pledged to sign a petition calling for an arms embargo on Israel to be included in the party’s platform.
“They reflect the call of the majority of Democrats for a ceasefire,” Elabed said.
“People sympathize with the cause, but they also run for office,” said Sarah Arveson, a United Auto Workers (UAW) member and delegate for California.
Even the protests were more subdued than expected. While some demonstrators were arrested for breaching a security fence, the protests were largely peaceful and, with a few thousand participants, far smaller than the tens of thousands that organizers had hoped for. As convention attendees pushed forward in the long, snaking line to enter the United Center that evening, protesters mostly did not heckle them but urged them to use their presence to fight for peace.
“Let us remain true to our democratic principles,” one shouted. “Think of Martin Luther King.”
“Please stand up for human rights,” another pleaded with the congress participants. “We need your voice from within.”
Activists expressed optimism that Harris could still deviate from her own administration’s policies. “I have confidence in her, but we need more from her,” former Michigan Rep. Andy Levin said at the podium. The vice president could subtly deviate from Biden while remaining loyal to the president, he said, by publicly declaring that the United States would follow international law under her administration or by calling an emergency diplomatic session and calling on her counterparts among allied states to do so together.
Levin rejected the notion that she would face a similar rush of money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as he did in 2022. He insisted that the dynamics of a presidential election are fundamentally different from the Democratic primaries in which the lobby has intervened.
“How much money did she raise in twenty-four hours?” he asked.
The decision to allow the panel was seen as a victory, but not The victory that activists are seeking, namely a policy shift that ends US arms sales to Israel and forces a ceasefire agreement. The activists’ hope is that if they get the chance to speak directly to Harris delegates and other party hardliners at the DNC, they can persuade the Harris campaign team and the Biden administration to change course on Gaza.
Yesterday’s discussion was a step in that direction. But it remains an open question as to the extent to which it reflects Harris’ support for the anti-war movement or is simply a ploy to keep those perceived as troublemakers in the tent.
Beneath all the decency and unity, rancor and division continue to lurk. The Democrats’ platform on Israel and Palestine reads little more than an AIPAC pamphlet, complete with a promise of unwavering support for “Israel in the fight against Hamas,” subtle criticism of the United Nations for “unilateral efforts to condemn Israel,” and a condemnation of Hamas sexual violence that makes no mention of the Israeli prison rape scandal currently rocking the country.
“How many of you are Palestinians?” one attendee mockingly asked a Code Pink protester outside the convention. Inside the stadium, party supporters aggressively tore down a “Stop Arming Israel” banner and beat one of the hijab-wearing activists who was holding it on her head. “I’m all for civil disobedience, but what were you trying to accomplish?” I heard one attendee say as we all left the hall.
The Palestinians were treated little better in the evening’s speeches and were largely absent. President Biden, who after Benjamin Netanyahu bears primary responsibility for the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, said the Chicago protesters had “a point” before quickly moving on. But that small comment went further than even some of the Palestinian allies on the program. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has sharply criticized the war and voted against military aid to Israel earlier this year, nevertheless dubiously assured the crowd that Harris was “working tirelessly to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza.” Shawn Fain, president of the UAW — which had a delegation to the Palestinian Human Rights Panel and officially supports a ceasefire in Gaza — made no mention of this at all.
The excitement and positivity at the DNC that was unimaginable a month ago is on shaky ground. Harris’s lead nationally and in swing states, while consistent, is small, a few percentage points at most – far less than Biden had when he won his narrow victory over Donald Trump four years ago, and less than Hillary Clinton had when she lost to him four years earlier. Ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas are at an impasse as Netanyahu continues to sabotage peace efforts, and a regional war looms in the Middle East.
And although undecided activists are playing along and waiting for a tangible change, despite all the respectful attitude of undecided activists at the DNC, it is still the case that a hundred thousand voters in the state of Michigan, which is predominantly Arab and Muslim, have signaled that they would refuse to vote in November if Israel is allowed to continue its genocide.
“Unbound delegates want to vote for Harris,” says Schrager.
It remains to be seen whether the party will make the necessary changes to actually achieve this goal.
