Members of the Uncommitted National Movement (UNM), delegates elected in Democratic primaries who refused to support President Biden while he kept aiding and abetting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal actions in Gaza, are in attendance at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. They are trying to pressure Kamala Harris to apply more effective muscle on Israel’s government.
So far, the “ceasefire delegates” have not even been granted one speaker to address the convention. Rather, they were allowed an “official” panel discussion in a side room, yesterday morning. Layla Elabed, a co-founder of the UNM (and a sister of Dem Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib) spoke, along with Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care surgeon who has worked in Gaza; Hala Hijazi, a Democratic Party organizer some of whose relatives have been killed in Gaza; and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. Elabed commented: “We want our voices to be heard in a way that moves us forward.”
Earlier, yesterday morning, some of the UNM delegates told reporters that they could not lobby voters to support Harris as long as she has no plan to urgently address the mass killings of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Elabed said the chances of winning Michigan and other swing states are damaged by Harris’s support of continued arms shipments to Israel. Abbas Alawieh, also a UNM co-founder, from Dearborn, Michigan, noted that “trust us” is not enough from the Harris campaign: “We need Vice President Harris to tell us how she would act differently” from Biden’s failure to use aid to Israel as leverage. Of the dying civilians in Gaza, Alawieh said: “Those are real people. That needs to stop now. In my opinion, this is a change Vice President Harris can begin to address immediately.”
One delegate, Hala Hijazi, a moderate Democrat from northern California, described her guilt for being deaf to the actual situation of her relatives in Gaza, dozens of whom have now died. In phone conversations over recent years, they would say they were fine. But, she realized: “They were never fine. I’m a failure, I’m a fraud for not speaking up more for the past 25 years.” A longtime acquaintance of Harris, she allowed: “We have to hold her accountable, but we have to give her a chance.”
