At some point on the first evening of the Democratic National Convention, somewhere between the land recognitions and the Jesse Jackson Tribute, I was struck by how relatively few white people I saw on the show. Of course they were there, and by the end of the evening, the white speakers seemed to be, if not the majority, then at least the majority. I don’t know if that first day looked like America, but it certainly looked like what people who use the phrase “looks like America” imagine the country to look like. A wave of risqué jokes flooded my various group chats. I was happy to join in, but the truth is that I’m a lover, not a fighter, and so I sincerely believe in the importance of the symbolic as something that goes beyond cynical political manipulation. In the case of the DNC, the symbols communicated the breadth of the Democratic Party’s coalition as well as its limitations. Perhaps that’s why I’ve spent the last two days pondering the one major failing of the party that claims diversity as its strength.
The DNC is hosted by Chicago, whose metropolitan area is home to more Palestinian Americans than any other place in the country. But you wouldn’t know that by looking at the stage. Despite pleas from Palestinian-American delegates and activists, no Palestinian American is scheduled to speak on the convention’s main stage. I suspect that’s because of what such a speaker might be compelled to say. In response to the massacre perpetrated by Hamas last October, the State of Israel has killed some 40,000 Palestinians. The intent behind this carnage has been openly stated. “We are fighting human animals,” said Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said. “And we are acting accordingly.” Acting accordingly meant the extermination of about two percent of the entire population of the Gaza Strip, a fact that should not be mourned because, according to the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog“There are no innocent civilians in Gaza.”
The most destructive bombs that made this rhetoric of destruction a reality came from America, more precisely from the head of the Democratic Party. In February, when President Joe Biden sought to secure that party’s nomination, activists gathered in Michigan to register voters in the state and check “uncommitted” in protest of the Biden administration’s support of the war. The campaign received 13 percent of the vote and quickly spread to other states. Under Democratic Party rules, this entitled the Uncommitted movement to 29 delegates, who are here in Chicago to make their case against what, I might add, has been convincingly called genocide.
On Tuesday, the co-founders of Uncommitted Abbas Alawi And Layla Elabed The event was hosted by a group of doctors who had been to Gaza to speak to a group of reporters about what they had seen. Alawieh began optimistically. “Vice President Harris is working with us on this issue,” he told the assembled press. “We see this as a step in the right direction.” He noted, however, that their request to bring a “Palestinian voice” to the stage had not yet been answered. As important as that request was, it was secondary to the group’s ultimate goal: “Stop sending bombs,” Alawieh said.
The task of the assembled doctors was to make the significance of these bombs clear. Their testimony was encouraging. They spoke of a campaign that had “destroyed life and everything that comes with it” and “wiped out entire families.” Dr. Tammy Abughnaim of Chicago said that when she practiced in Gaza in March, she had hoped for a quick end. “I remember thinking, this is going to be over soon. This has to be over soon,” she said. Instead, conditions have only gotten worse. “Every single child in Gaza is either undernourished or malnourished. Every single child needs psychological care that they will not get for a long time.”
Dr. Ahmad Yousaf, a pediatrician who worked shifts at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza, told us about his first day in the emergency room. “We could hear the bombs and knew people were coming in pieces,” he said. He described a woman who was admitted with burns on 70 percent of her body, “a death sentence in a place with no gauze and no water.” And then the doctors made a discovery – the woman was pregnant. He imagined this “pregnant woman sitting at home until a bomb fell on her head.” After that, he said, “she was in pain every day of her life, until the day she died.”
Then I saw that Alawieh and Elabed were openly crying – as were several doctors. I took that as evidence of the imminent proximity of the violence hitting Gaza and now spreading to the West Bank. Elabed’s mother’s family is from Beit Ur, a West Bank village where conditions have only worsened since the war began. “When I talk to my cousins and family members, they are just trying to survive. They have no freedom of movement,” she told me. “They try to keep their heads down.”
Alawieh’s family is from southern Lebanon, and one of his formative childhood memories is of the bombs dropped during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. For the most part, during the press conference, he and Elabed maintained a diplomatically open attitude toward a party that seemed to keep them and their community at arm’s length. But at the end, during the question-and-answer session with reporters, the pain broke through. “President Biden, you are lying to us,” Abbas said. “You are lying when you say you are working on a ceasefire, but you keep sending more bombs that are killing babies… The question for President Biden is: Do you want to send more bombs to blow up more children as your last act in office? Do you want that to be your last act in office?”
That formulation relies on seeing Palestinians and Palestinian life with the same clarity as any other human life. That clarity and equality is expressed in our society, among other things, in our art, our media and our public rituals—rituals like national political gatherings. Perhaps more than any other year, this DNC has called on its diverse constituencies to highlight their identities and the collective pain that animates them. Racism, forced births, land theft. It was a demonstration of what the Palestinian scholar Edward Said called “the permission to tell,” and that is precisely the permission that Palestinian Americans have been denied. They have heard their names mentioned fleetingly by a handful of speakers, but have not been granted the right to say them themselves. Perhaps out of fear of what else a Palestinian-American speaker might name. I can’t say that this fear is unwarranted.
