Is a New Palestinian Movement Being Born?
7 min read
In the months before the Democratic National Convention came to Chicago, the city prepared for massive protests against U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Pundits raced to draw parallels with 1968, when anti-war protesters overshadowed the Democratic convention and helped hand the White House back to the GOP.
But history doesn’t always repeat itself. The 2024 convention won’t be remembered for violent clashes between demonstrators and police, or for the sparsely attended rallies against the war. Instead, it may have facilitated the birth of a new Palestinian movement—one quite distinct from the street protests we’ve become familiar with.
The most impressive pro-Palestinian effort at the DNC was organized by the Uncommitted National Movement. Launched in February, when President Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee, the movement encouraged voters across the country to voice their displeasure with the president’s backing of Israel’s war in Gaza by casting an “uncommitted” vote in the Democratic primaries. Hundreds of thousands of voters around the country answered the call, with especially impressive numbers in swing states such as Michigan and Wisconsin. This translated to 30 elected delegates who brought their message to Chicago.
Behind the scenes, Uncommitted had been negotiating with Democratic leaders for days. It was able to secure a first-ever panel at a Democratic convention about Palestinian human rights. Instead of merely protesting beyond the security perimeter, the Uncommitted delegates worked the halls, their buttons and keffiyehs making them a visible presence, and signed up hundreds of “cease-fire delegates” supporting the movement’s demand for a permanent cease-fire.
But one central ask brought the Uncommitted national attention on the final day of the convention: a demand for a speaking slot for a Palestinian American onstage. The support this request garnered augurs well for the future of a new pro-Palestinian movement in the United States. At least eight sitting congresspeople backed the request, including not just progressive firebrands such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib but also Lloyd Doggett, the dean of Texas’s congressional delegation. The Democratic chairs in Michigan, North Carolina, and Colorado signed on, as did the United Auto Workers.
Some progressive Zionists also backed the request. This included the liberal pro-Israel advocacy groups J Street and Americans for Peace Now. Hadar Susskind, the latter’s president and CEO and a former sergeant in the Israel Defense Forces, called the absence of a Palestinian American speaker “a mistake, not just a political one, but a moral one.” Alana Zeitchik, a family member of and advocate for the hostages held by Hamas, was also supportive. When a columnist mocked the demand for a speaking slot, an Israeli group representing the families of hostages responded by suggesting a Palestinian as a potential speaker.
The unexpected solidarity ran both ways. Uncommitted showed remarkable message discipline and highlighted a set of demands that, unlike many of those aired in pro-Palestinian demonstrations of the past few months, could have been shared by many Zionists and Israelis. When the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli American hostage being held in Gaza, addressed the convention, Uncommitted delegates praised their speech even as they demanded to be heard. “They deserve a spot on this stage,” one Uncommitted delegate told The Jerusalem Post. “But a Palestinian American also deserves a spot on that stage.” When an Uncommitted press conference was heckled by someone demanding that the hostages be freed, the movement’s leaders said they agreed with this demand.
The movement’s lead candidate for a speaking slot was Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian American state representative from Georgia. A longtime Democratic activist who knocked on doors for Biden in 2020, Romman is a former Deloitte consultant and the self-declared chair of the Swiftie Caucus—in other words, not your average campus radical. The speech she proposed to deliver was an attempt at speaking to a broad base. Like the best speeches of the convention, it centered her personal story—being born in Jordan to displaced Palestinian parents. If it included some language that Zionist groups might have found objectionable—such as referring to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails as “hostages”—its overall tone was still strikingly moderate. It included a demand to free hostages held by Hamas alongside a cease-fire, avoided the contentious term genocide, and pushed for “building a path to collective peace and safety.”
You need only compare this rhetoric with what was on display at the People’s Conference for Palestine, held in May in Detroit and addressed by Tlaib, to appreciate the difference. That meeting included an opening call that mocked “all backers of Zionism, Israel, and U.S. imperialism.” It featured speakers lauding the October 7 attacks by Hamas and had sponsors supportive of dictatorships in Russia and China. Such groups often dominate the pro-Palestinian messaging in U.S. politics and have helped secure its marginality.
The disappointing exclusion of Palestinian Americans from the Democratic National Convention might encourage some activists to turn away from the Democrats and from the carefully calibrated tactics pursued by Uncommitted.
But there is another potential path, one that would lead to a durable coalition, like the one that backed Uncommitted’s speaking demand in Chicago. This would require a focus on policies shared by large sections of the broad liberal camp, especially within its progressive Zionist corners: a recognition of the state of Palestine, conditioning the supply of arms to Israel on standards for their use, and sanctioning illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Salim Yaqub, a Palestinian American historian, told me he supported Uncommitted’s demand for a speaker and was impressed with its “wide spectrum of support among Democrats.” Yet he was not surprised that the demand went unheeded, because “the Harris campaign believed it was staging a virtually flawless convention and didn’t want to do anything that could possibly interrupt the momentum or sound a discordant note.”
Yaqub also told me he was “cautiously optimistic that the sort of organizing we’ve seen over the last several months can make a small but positive difference in U.S. policy on this issue—provided Harris wins the election.” He is crystal clear that a victory for Donald Trump would entail “certainly disastrous policies” on Palestine.
Jo-Ann Mort, a board member of Americans for Peace Now and a longtime activist, is excited about the possibility of a coalition between the pro-Palestinian and progressive Zionist movements. A founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America in the 1980s, Mort left the organization long ago and has been dismayed by the left’s entrenched anti-Israel attitudes in recent years.
“There should have been a voice given on the main stage for Palestinian American anguish,” she told me. “But I also think that the pro-Palestinian movement must include voices like mine—progressive Zionists who urgently want self-determination for two peoples, Israeli and Palestinian. This can mainstream the movement.”
The exclusion of Palestinian American voices in Chicago revealed how lopsided U.S. politics can be on this issue. Few Arab Americans have addressed a Democratic convention since James Zogby in 1988. But the past week showed that if the Palestinian movement does act in more strategic ways, it can gather major support inside the party.
In her acceptance speech, Vice President Kamala Harris affirmed that she wanted the war to end so that Israel can be secure but also so that “Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”
If the pro-Palestinian movement in the U.S. sets aside its campaign to delegitimize Israel and question its right to exist, it can find reliable allies in the mainstream of American politics to support a future of peace and coexistence for both of the national communities between the river and the sea. It could take a cue from Senator Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, two democratic socialists who moved from “protest to politics,” as the civil-rights activist Bayard Rustin once put it, and in the process became enormously influential figures within the Democratic Party.
Ironically, in Israel itself, leaders of the country’s Arab community regularly partner with the Israeli Zionist left. Just last month, a massive peace conference in Tel Aviv attracted 6,000 people with its call for a diplomatic process that could help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Among its organizers were the Israeli Maoz Inon and the Palestinian Aziz Abu Sarah, peace activists who could use more support from the American left. If the pro-Palestinian movement replaces its aim of a blanket boycotting of Israelis with a hand extended toward them, it could achieve unprecedented results.
That isn’t the only possible approach for either the pro-Israel or the pro-Palestinian camp in the U.S. At a time when Israeli and Palestinian politics both seem to be dominated by hard-liners, the quest for a politics of peace might feel quixotic. For those who demand a Palestinian or a Jewish state from the river to the sea, such a coalitional approach, with its necessary compromises, has understandably little appeal.
But last week showed that another path was possible for the rest of us.
