OPINION
A Palestinian American’s Place Under the Democrats’ Big Tent?
Though the Uncommitted movement is lobbying to get a Palestinian American on the main stage, the Harris campaign has not yet approved one. Will there be a change before Thursday—and does the Democratic party want that?
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
August 21, 2024
Variety Fair
PHOTO: The DNC stage during the second day of the Convention at the United Center on August 20, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois.By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.At some point during the first evening of the Democratic National Convention, somewhere between the land acknowledgements and the Jesse Jackson tribute, it occurred to me how relatively few white people I was seeing on the program. They were there, of course, and by the end of the night, white speakers seemed, if not a majority, then at least a plurality. I don’t know if that first day looked like America, but it certainly looked like what people who use the phrase “look like America” imagine the country to be. A wave of edgy jokes flooded my various group chats. I was happy to contribute, but the truth is I’m a lover not a fighter, and thus sincerely believe in the meaning of the symbolic as something 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 limits. Perhaps that’s why I’ve spent the past two days sweating the one major omission of the party that claims diversity as its strength.
The host city for the DNC is Chicago, whose metro area is home to more Palestinian Americans than anywhere else in the country. But you would not know this looking at that stage. Despite the appeals of Palestinian American delegates and activists, no Palestinian American is scheduled to address the convention from the main stage. I suspect this is because of what such a speaker might feel compelled to say. In response to the massacre perpetrated by Hamas last October, the state of Israel has killed some 40,000 Palestinian people. The intention behind this carnage has been declared openly. “We are fighting human animals,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said. “And we are acting accordingly.” Acting accordingly has meant the erasing of roughly two percent of the entire population of the Gaza Strip, a fact not to be mourned since, according to Israeli President Isaac Herzog, “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza.”
The most destructive bombs that have actualized this rhetoric of extermination are being furnished by America, and more specifically, by the head of the Democratic party. In February, as President Joe Biden sought to seal the nomination from that party, activists in Michigan rallied registering voters in the state to check “uncommitted” as a protest against the Biden administration’s backing of the war. The campaign garnered 13 percent of the vote and quickly spread to other states. By Democratic party rules, this entitled the Uncommitted movement to 29 delegates, who are here in Chicago to press their case against what has been labeled, convincingly I might add, a genocide.
On Tuesday, the Uncommitted co-founders Abbas Alawieh and Layla Elabed hosted a group of doctors who’d been to Gaza to speak to a group of reporters on what they saw. Alawieh opened on an optimistic note. “Vice President Harris is engaging with us on this issue,” he told assembled press. “We do view that as a step in the right direction.” But he noted that their request for a “Palestinian voice” to take the stage had not yet received a “yes.” As important as this request was, it was also secondary to the group’s ultimate aim: “Stop sending bombs,” Alawieh said.
The assembled doctors were charged with making the import of these bombs apparent. Their testimony was bracing. They spoke of a campaign that was “destroying life and everything needed to sustain it,” of “entire families exterminated.” Dr. Tammy Abughnaim, a Chicagoan, said that when she was practicing in Gaza in March, she was hopeful for a quick end. “I remember thinking this will be over soon. This has to be over soon,” she said. Instead, conditions had only gotten worse. “Every single child in the Gaza strip is either undernourished or malnourished. Every single child is in need of psychological care that they will not get for a long time.”
Dr. Ahmad Yousaf, a pediatrician who did shifts in Al Aqsa hospital in Gaza, told us about his first day in the trauma bay. “We could hear the bombs and we knew the people would come in pieces,” he said. He described a woman brought in with burns over 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 in her home until a bomb dropped on her head.” After that, he said, “every day she lived, until the day she died, she was in pain.”
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I saw then that Alawieh and Elabed were both openly weeping—as were a number of doctors. I took this as a testament to the intimacy of the violence being visited upon Gaza and now spreading out into the West Bank. Elabed’s mother’s family is from Beit Ur, a village on the West Bank, where conditions have only worsened since the onset of war. “When I talk to my cousins and family members, they’re just trying to survive. They don’t have the freedom of movement,” she told me. “They’re trying to keep their heads down.”
Alawieh’s family is from South Lebanon, and one of his defining childhood memories is the bombs dropped during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. For most of the presser he and Elabed projected a diplomatic open posture toward a party which seemed to hold them, and their community, at arm’s length. But by the end, during the Q&A with reporters, the pain broke through. “President Biden, you are lying to us,” Abbas said. “You are lying when you say you are working for a ceasefire, but you are sending more and more bombs that are killing babies…The question is to president Biden, do you want your final act to be sending more bombs to blow more children up? Is that what you want your final act to be?”
This is a formulation that depends on seeing Palestinians, and Palestinian life, with the same clarity as all other human life. One way this clarity and equality is expressed in our society is through our arts, our media, our public rituals—rituals like national political conventions. Maybe more than in any other year, this DNC has urged its various constituencies to highlight their identities and the collective pain that animates them. Racism, forced birth, land theft. It has been an exhibition of what the Palestinian scholar Edward Said called “the permission to narrate,” and it is that 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 speak their names themselves. Perhaps that is for fear of what else a Palestinian American speaker might name. I cannot say that fear is unwarranted.
PHOTO: Attendees hold up signs with the names of people who died in the Gaza war on the second day of the Democratic National Convention.by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP / Getty Images.Last summer I spent ten days traveling the lands under Israeli rule. What I saw was hauntingly familiar. For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel is a state where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person. In Israel itself, I met with Palestinians who were nominally empowered, with the right to vote. But unlike their Jewish countrymen, these Palestinians could not pass on their citizenship to spouses and children. Moreover, discrimination against them was perfectly legal. Frequently they were the subject of outright racism, as when Netanyahu warned his country during the 2016 election that “the right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.”
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are packed onto an archipelago of land. There they have enjoyed local elections through the Palestinian Authority. But that authority is still subordinate to Israeli rule, which Palestinians can neither vote for or against. Meanwhile, their neighbors, Israeli settlers, enjoy the full benefits of Israeli citizenship. And then there is Gaza, which had alarmed human rights advocates and public-health officials well before last October. For 17 years, the people of Gaza have been trapped by a blockade that extends across air, sea, and land. Gaza is commonly referred to as the largest open-air prison in the world, and it is here that so many American bombs have been dropped.
Israel and its defenders often claim that it is the “only democracy in the Middle East.” But what I saw was an ethnocracy, where half the people are first-class citizens, and the other half are something less. And this is a system sponsored and endorsed by the United States of America. The endorsement is not contradictory. For most of its history, America too was an ethnocracy in democratic clothing. The ostensible triumph over that old system, which we call Jim Crow, is one of the most uplifting stories America tells itself, one that has been repeatedly invoked at the DNC. How odd I find it that a people, presently brutalized by a similar system, whose relatives are being erased by that system’s wanton violence, are also being erased from the stage.
As of Tuesday night, the Uncommitted delegates were still hopeful. Alawieh told me they’d managed to recruit a total of 210 delegates to the cause of ceasefire. The energy from their movement was palpable. In McCormick Place and the United Center, it was relatively common to see people in keffiyehs emblazoned with the tag “Democrats for Palestinian Rights,” and they’d be surrounded by other curious convention-goers or media. When we last spoke, Alawieh was still hopeful that one of the speakers they’d submitted would be approved. “We haven’t gotten a no, yet.” The DNC confirmed to me there is not yet a no, but there is not yet a yes—I was told that “there was no update.”
As of Day 3 of the DNC, the Palestinian permission to narrate was still under consideration.
