The Uncommitted National Movement has announced a number of demands in the run-up to the Democratic national convention (DNC) later this month, part of an effort to use its voting power to influence Kamala Harris and the Democratic party’s stance on Israel’s war in Gaza.
In a press call on Thursday, movement leaders demanded that the DNC allow Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, an American physician who’s worked in Gaza, to speak at the convention about the humanitarian crisis that she witnessed first-hand. They have also requested that an uncommitted delegate be given five minutes to speak at the convention, and for Kamala Harris to meet with movement leaders about their concerns.
Uncommitted leaders say that hearing from Haj-Hassan will help the Democratic party and Harris make informed policy decisions on Gaza, where more than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed since the 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas, according to health officials.
More than 700,000 Americans voted “uncommitted” or its equivalent in the Democratic party primaries this year in a message to Joe Biden that he could not count on their support if he did not change his approach to the war. The movement has particular influence in Michigan, where more than 100,000 people cast “uncommitted” ballots in the primary. It will send 30 delegates to the DNC in Chicago.
Kamala Harris says ‘I will not be silent’ on suffering in Gaza after Netanyahu talks
The movement’s latest appeal follows demands announced last week that include an arms embargo on Israel and support for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Convention planners received the demands in writing, say movement leaders, but they have yet to receive a response.
Still, Abbas Alawieh, an uncommitted delegate from Michigan, said that the movement is “hopeful that the vice-president will take this opportunity to turn a new page as it relates to Gaza policy, and hopefully that can start with this specific initiative”.
During the Thursday call, several doctors who volunteered in Gaza and have experience in other conflicts said that the scale of atrocities they witnessed in Gaza were the worst that they’d ever seen. Haj-Hassan shared that she’d seen Palestinians “being killed in 1,001 ways”. In the emergency department, she often saw the dead bodies of entire families, with only one surviving child who was fighting for their life. “We received children maimed, killed, beheaded, shot,” she said.
“And it is for that reason I have decided to become very vocal and go beyond my capacity as a pediatric intensive care doctor confined by the walls of the ICU,” said Haj-Hassan, “to get on the media to speak to politicians and to advocate for this genocide to come to an end.” Last week, Haj-Hassan and dozens of other US doctors and nurses delivered a letter to Biden that described the scene in Gaza’s hospitals and urged him to withdraw military support for Israel.
Alawieh said that Harris’s team has signalled a greater openness to engaging with their movement than Biden did. “She’s expressed a level of concern about the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza that perhaps we weren’t seeing from the president,” said Alawieh. He was also encouraged that her team was in touch with Arab and Muslim American leaders. “We’re getting more engagement than we did under President Biden being at the top of the ticket, and so I’m hopeful that we can move in a direction that leads to her engaging directly.”
Layla Elabed, a Palestinian American organizer with the Uncommitted National Movement, said a meaningful response from Harris could influence her success against Donald Trump in November. “To have any chance in fighting authoritarianism and fascism that will be on the ballot in November, then the demands of Uncommitted need to be taken seriously.”
The movement plans to host programming at the convention regardless of the DNC’s response to their demands, said Elabed, and referenced the famous address at the 1964 DNC delivered by civil rights giant Fannie Lou Hamer, who recounted the violence that she experienced when registering to vote and called for integration of the all-white Mississippi delegation.
“We will find a way for Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan to speak officially or unofficially, one way or another,” said Elabed, “in the tradition of Fannie Lou Hamer and the civil rights movement, who made moral witness in the 1964’s convention to human suffering.”
Melissa Hellmann is a senior reporter on the Guardian US's race and equity team.
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