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AN UNCOMMITTED COFOUNDER EXPLAINS THE MOVEMENT’S STRATEGY  
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Abbas Alawieh innterviewed by Alex N. Press
September 9, 2024
Jacobin
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_ We spoke with Uncommitted movement cofounder Abbas Alawieh about
the movement’s accomplishments at the DNC, the disaster of a Trump
presidency for Palestine, and Uncommitted’s vision to change the
Democratic Party’s support for slaughter in Gaza. _

Abbas Alawieh during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago,
Illinois, on August 20, 2024., Photo credit: Nick Oxford for the
Washington Post // Jacobin

 

The Uncommitted movement started as a way for voters to register
their discontent with the position of the Democratic Party leadership
in general, and Joe Biden in particular, with respect to Israel’s
current war on the Palestinian people. When the campaign got underway
in February 2024, Israel had been bombing the Gaza Strip for months,
killing tens of thousands of civilians as well as expanding deadly
operations throughout the West Bank, and President Biden had been
sending the weapons that allowed them to do so.

Rather than voting for Biden in the presidential primary, the campaign
urged voters to choose “uncommitted” or “no preference” in
select primaries. The numbers bore out the movement’s contention:
given the short amount of time the campaign had to organize before the
primaries, the numbers were impressive
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reaching double-digit percentages in multiple states. Especially in
swing states like Michigan, the Democratic Party is at risk of voters
deciding to either sit out the presidential race or vote for a
candidate other than theirs.

In the months since, Biden has backed out of the 2024 presidential
race, with Vice President Kamala Harris taking his place. But Biden is
still sending Israel weapons, and he will remain in the White House
until January 2025, by which time many more Palestinians will have
been killed by American arms. Harris, while not sharing Biden’s
notably ardent Zionism
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not committed to any significant change in the current policy toward
Israel should she win the presidency.

So the Uncommitted movement switched gears: their delegation to the
Democratic National Convention (DNC) at the United Center in Chicago
last month used the gathering to continue pushing Harris and the rest
of the party leadership for a very simple demand
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not another bomb to Israel. The delegation secured an official panel
on the crisis during the convention, which featured health care
professionals who have volunteered in Gaza during the bombardment, as
well as Palestinian American elected officials.

They also asked party leadership to allow a Palestinian American or a
health care provider who had spent time in Gaza to speak from the
stage during the gathering in Chicago. Despite diverse support for
that reasonable demand — Uncommitted even accepted having
the proposed speech
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by party leadership — the party refused. It was hard to understand
that decision as anything other than a reflection of what the movement
has long said: Democratic Party leadership is out of touch with the
public, opposed not only to the liberation of Palestinians but even
their mere existence, and captured by the likes of the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other pro-war, pro-Israel
lobbyists.

Abbas Alawieh was at the center of the events inside the United
Center. Formerly a congressional staffer — he last worked for Cori
Bush, who lost
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campaign for reelection last month, thanks in part to AIPAC pouring
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into the race to unseat her — and cofounded the Uncommitted
movement. A Lebanese American from Michigan, Alawieh staged a sit-in
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of the convention center to raise attention to the movement’s
demands, not merely for a speaker but also for an arms embargo. The
party leadership never caved on Uncommitted’s request to speak from
the stage, nor have they shown any sign of agreeing to stop sending
bombs to Israel.

With the convention concluded, the election approaching, and Israel
expanding its repression in the West Bank even as it continues killing
civilians in Gaza, _Jacobin_’s Alex N. Press spoke to Alawieh about
the Harris campaign’s response to Uncommitted, pushing for an arms
embargo, and what Biden and Harris’s support for Benjamin Netanyahu
might mean come November.

ALEX N. PRESS: 

Let’s start with where things stand right now. As the DNC came to a
close, the Uncommitted movement gave the Harris campaign a September
15 deadline for meeting with you.

ABBAS ALAWIEH:

At this moment, we’re still trying to engage with the Harris
campaign in the hopes of continuing to raise our request for a change
in the policy that she’ll support, because we think that it’s not
only unsustainable, but immoral and illegal for her to continue
supporting a policy that sends weapons to kill civilians and harm
people we love. We’re hoping that she will update her policy so it
can be in line with what we know the majority of Democratic voters
want, which is a stop to the unconditional flow of weapons to
Netanyahu’s government.

 
A Democratic voter outside of a polling location on February 27,
2024, in Dearborn, Michigan. (Kevin Dietsch  //  Jacobin)
We have followed up on our long-standing request to meet with the vice
president and to meet with senior members of her team to discuss our
policy asks. We’ve also included in our follow up specific requests
for her to meet with Palestinian Americans who have family in Gaza. So
far, we haven’t heard much of anything.

We followed up a couple of times. Thankfully, even if she and her
campaign fails to take the opportunity to engage with us and try and
rebuild trust with voters for whom Gaza is a top policy issue, we’re
not going anywhere. We’re going to continue insisting that the
policy changes so that we can save lives.
 

ALEX N. PRESS:

Biden is still the president for several more months, and he is still
sending weapons that are killing Palestinians. The Uncommitted
movement’s focus on Harris makes sense, but what is the assessment
and thinking about the current situation with President Biden?

ABBAS ALAWIEH:

The pressure needs to be on both President Biden and Vice President
Harris to change the policy now. If the idea is that, hopefully, the
policy changes after we get a new president, that is a long time away.
That’s January 21; many more civilians could be harmed in the
interim.

Our organizing doesn’t stem from a love of working on presidential
campaigns. It stems from a love of just and humane policies that could
save people’s lives. So our focus is on continuing to keep up the
pressure for not another bomb and continuing to identify opportunities
to keep Gaza in the media in general and in the mainstream media in
particular. Our efforts are just one part of a much larger movement of
folks showing up in their communities, on their college campuses, on
the phones calling into Congress, etc., urging a more humane approach
here.

We certainly view continuing to pressure President Biden as a priority
for getting the policy changed, and we view pressuring Vice President
Harris — given the changing political landscape and given that
she’s at the top of the ticket on the Democratic side — as an
important piece of pushing for a policy change before January 2025.

ALEX N. PRESS:

You mentioned the different wings of the movement: there are different
tactics, different strategies, and different analyses within the
movement for Palestinian liberation. Yet it’s notable that a
movement this diverse agrees on a demand, and one that is very easy to
understand: arms embargo, no more bombs to Israel.

We might consider the Uncommitted movement an inside strategy: you all
are committed Democrats and attended the DNC as delegates, a gathering
that saw protesters outside, demanding an end to the genocide. How do
you think about the relationship between the wings of the movement?

ABBAS ALAWIEH:

What feels really clear is that there isn’t just an antiwar side in
our country. There is a pro-war side too. The antiwar side happens to
be a whole lot of us; the majority of this country does not want
funding for endless war. But there is a small faction within the
Democratic Party that has outsize influence due to the profit
interests of weapons manufacturers and other factors, and that pro-war
side absolutely does not want us on the inside. They don’t want us
at the United Center in Chicago. They don’t want us walking around
the halls of Congress. They want to be able to take the ball and run
it up and down the field within these institutions without any
pushback for their championing of genocidal policies. So to me, it
feels really important that we are on the inside and on the outside.

Those of us in our country who are against this war do not have enough
political power in this moment to stop a genocide. This means that no
one demographic alone will create political conditions necessary to
change this policy.

At the DNC, we got inquiries from folks, some of them
well-intentioned, saying, “Don’t you think that the protesters
outside undermine what you’re trying to do to get a seat at the
table?” But what we’re trying to do with a seat at the table is
push for not another bomb. The thing that’s preventing not another
bomb is the Democratic Party leadership’s offensive and continued
support for sending weapons that kill civilians. We need to be
disciplined, as people who support this urgent policy demand, to not
fall into the traps of attacking different tactics, but to be clear
about who it is that is sustaining this policy and making sure they
feel maximum pressure as long as they continue to support this
horrendous policy.

ALEX N. PRESS:

During the DNC, it was clear that there are a number of other groups
and organizations who supported Uncommitted demands, not just about
getting a Palestinian American speaker on the stage but about an arms
embargo on Israel. From the [United Auto Workers] to Jewish-led
organizations like IfNotNow to youth-led groups and black-led groups,
you had a clear coalition. How are you building that coalition, and
what’s the plan moving forward?

ABBAS ALAWIEH:

It’s our assessment that our antiwar movement is at its strongest
when we recognize what power we do have within the institutions as
they exist, and within the Democratic Party in particular, and what
power we don’t have.

Part of our analysis in this moment on the Uncommitted side of things
is recognizing that those of us in our country who are against this
war do not have enough political power in this moment to stop a
genocide. That is a very difficult reality to sit with, but it means
that part of our analysis too is that no one demographic alone will
create political conditions necessary to change this policy.

It is not just Arab Americans or Muslims or Palestinian Americans
voting one way or another that will change the policy. What’s going
to be required is the party leadership realizing that across our
Democratic Party coalition, whether we’re talking about unions or
youth-led organizations or black-led organizations or Jewish-led
organizations or Arab-led organizations, etc., folks are waking up to
the reality and are continuing to build on, in many cases,
long-standing leadership around this issue. Folks are increasingly
aware that the issue of Palestinian human rights is something that is
very important to a whole lot of Democratic voters, not just a few
Arabs in Dearborn, which is what the more conservative elements within
the Democratic Party coalition would like for the Democratic Party
leadership to believe.

The Democratic Party speaks of being the party of justice and
inclusion, and there are more and more of us within the party who are
insisting that the party change its immoral and illegal support of
sending weapons to harm and kill civilians.

It’s no one candidate who will deliver Palestinian liberation.
It’s our movement that will insist upon our government divesting
from the illegal military occupation, from sustaining the siege, and
from the ongoing genocide. It’s our movement growing that will force
the political conditions necessary to generate the political will to
stop sending weapons. That requires us doing the difficult work of not
merely being preoccupied with the shiny object of November’s
election, but sitting down and having the difficult conversations with
union leaders and Jewish leaders and black leaders and youth leaders
and so on, and deepening those relationships in this moment. We cannot
say that we’ll do that later; we need to do that now.

That has been a critical part of our work and our strategy. We’re
not just concerned with one candidate or the other, we’re concerned
with how we lay the groundwork for a mass antiwar movement in our
country that includes all of us and that includes key parts of the
coalition that Democrats need. So we’re taking extra time to build
with union leaders, before, during, and after the DNC, to build with
everyone, including elected officials who are sympathetic to our
cause. That is a project that outlasts the election. That is the work
of changing the political landscape to deliver a policy of not another
bomb.

ALEX N. PRESS:

Your comrade in the Uncommitted movement Waleed Shahid recently 
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like the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party [MFDP], which
challenged the segregationist stronghold of the Mississippi Democratic
Party but was ultimately denied a seat at the convention, the
Uncommitted movement didn’t win every immediate demand. But the true
victory lies in the alliances forged, the hypocrisies exposed, and the
narrative shift that will reverberate long after the convention doors
have closed.” A lot of people in the movement have cited the MFDP as
a precedent for your approach at the DNC, and the civil rights
movement more generally as a source of strategic organizing insight.

ABBAS ALAWIEH:

In taking the actions that we did at the DNC, we were walking not only
in a very rich history of organizing in our country, but specifically
of black-led organizing that insisted on not just representation in
that moment, but also calling for justice and liberation more broadly.
Understanding those traditions comes with a certain need for
discipline, as I see it.

For example, a lot of the criticism and pushback that we’ve gotten,
even from folks sympathetic to Uncommitted’s work, has been, “Why
make such a big deal out of a Palestinian American speaker? That’s
beneath our movement. Who cares if the Democrats don’t want to hear
from a Palestinian?” But there’s a question of audience, and the
need for a variety of strategies and tactics is one thing we learn
from studying the civil rights movement.

My friend, who is a black American and a leader in his own right,
said, “When I look back at photos of black people in the civil
rights movement holding up signs saying, ‘I want to use this water
fountain’ or ‘I want to cross this bridge,’ there’s something
in me that cringes. Why are you asking for something so basic?” And
the historical record shows that you know others in the movement did
say at the time, “We need to be asking for our full liberation.”
But what we glean from the civil rights movement is that there’s a
moment when the audience isn’t just others who agree with us. At
times we need to appeal to the broader public, including many who
sympathize with this cause, and say, this is how badly these folks
have dehumanized us. The Democratic Party leadership feels so okay
about dehumanizing Palestinians and people who are allied with this
cause that they are willing to engage in a blatant act of
discrimination by not allowing a Palestinian American speaker.
 
Uncommitted delegates holding a press conference outside the DNC in
Chicago. (Uncommitted National Movement  //  Jacobin)
We’re looking at those lessons and trying to stay disciplined even
through the complexities of what it means to engage within the system
and keep in mind the matter of what compromises we are making. We need
to be disciplined about keeping it our demand while also recognizing
that these sort of symbolic moments are necessary, not only for
growing consciousness for folks who already agree with us but growing
the broader American consciousness about what’s going on here.

ALEX N. PRESS:

I heard throughout the DNC from various friends in the movement who
felt the conversation went from “arms embargo” to “we want a
speaker.” I think part of the blame for that falls on the mainstream
media, who did a very poor job covering what you were actually saying.

ABBAS ALAWIEH:

Every time we talked about a speaker, we talked about not another
bomb. We frequently said, “We didn’t come here for a speaker, we
came here because we want not another bomb.” But yes, the way that
the mainstream media captured the story, it was about the speaker
fight. That said, the flash point being about something so basic ended
up being an on-ramp to so many people who don’t really understand
the issue of Palestinian human rights, but understand that it’s not
right that the Democratic Party isn’t even okay with letting
Palestinians speak. A lot of people felt there was something wrong
there.

ALEX N. PRESS:

I’m sure you’ve heard criticism from other folks in the movement
that Uncommitted is being naive in thinking that Democratic leadership
are ever going to sign on to an arms embargo. The argument there is
that it more or less doesn’t matter to Democratic leaders that the
public, including the majority of Democratic voters, want the US to
stop arming Israel because the weapons industry, AIPAC, and so on are
not actually responsive to public pressure, so you are wasting your
time trying to pressure Democratic leaders. What do you say to the
idea that this is a dead-end strategy?

ABBAS ALAWIEH:

I say, as someone who has family who lives in South Lebanon right now
— who are living under the terror of US weapons raining down on them
from the Israeli military — I do not have the luxury of giving up on
the only one of the two major parties where there is room for this
debate.

As someone who has family who lives in South Lebanon right now, I do
not have the luxury of giving up on the only one of the two major
parties where there is room for this debate.

To be clear, there’s room for this debate not because the Democratic
Party is friendly to Palestinian human rights. There’s room for this
debate because A) the Republican Party is not the party where we can
have this conversation; not a single federal elected official on the
Republican side even supports a cease-fire as this genocide has raged
on, and B) the Democratic Party speaks of being the party of justice
and inclusion, and there are more and more of us within the party who
are insisting that the party change its immoral and illegal support of
sending weapons to harm and kill civilians.

What we’re saying isn’t that if we just ask the party long enough
then one day, they will wake up and see our humanity. What we’re
saying is that we want to be on the inside and the outside. We want to
become the people who are making those decisions, to be the folks who
have the influence within the party to shape policy positions right
now.

The Democratic Party represents me on a whole range of issues that I
care very deeply about, but on a few issues, this being one of them,
the party does not represent me. The party leadership’s decisions do
not represent me. That’s precisely why I think we need to grow our
movement. We need to have an eye toward: How do we grow our movement
everywhere, within the Democratic Party and outside of it? How do we
grow our movement so that we force the political pressure necessary to
inspire the political will in the Democratic Party leadership to
change this policy — and if they won’t change it themselves, then
to take their positions, to build the strength to take power within
the Democratic Party. and wield it in the service of life and
prosperity and not destruction as it relates to issues of war and
peace.

That’s a longer-term project. It’s clear that the pro-war side in
our country has a whole lot of power when the first time Vice
President Harris is speaking as the Democratic Party’s nominee, she
talks about wanting the most lethal military in the entire world. The
pro-war side is working overtime, and they’re achieving this type of
maximalist language from Democratic Party leadership that is out of
touch with the pro-peace sentiments of the majority of Democratic
voters. But it’s also clear that they’re working overtime because
they’re spending more money than they ever have trying to obfuscate
this issue and trying to eliminate any champions of peace or of
Palestinian human rights, as they did in Cori Bush’s and Jamaal
Bowman’s races.

To me, all of that is evidence that our movement is not only growing,
but it is strong, and we’ve got to keep going. Now is not the time
to say, okay, let’s just give up on the project of trying to
influence the Democratic Party. I don’t have the luxury of doing
that. My family is calling me from South Lebanon saying, “Have you
convinced your country to stop bombing us?”

There are two major parties: the Democrats and the Republicans. I wish
it weren’t that way. I wish we had a multiparty system, but this is
the reality that we live in and as we work toward a more sensible
political system long term, right now, we’ve got to pressure the
Democrats. That feels urgent.

ALEX N. PRESS:

Is there anything that hasn’t come up that you want to say, be it
about what people are getting wrong about Uncommitted, how these
conversations are going in your own community in Michigan, or anything
else?

ABBAS ALAWIEH:

A lot of us who are deeply in touch with the humanity of Palestinians
in Gaza are operating from a place of deep pain. I don’t think any
of us could have imagined that it would have gone on this long, and so
I think we’re being asked to do a lot in oscillating between dealing
with our grief and coming up with strong political strategies. So I
think it’s important for us to not fall into the trap of attacking
one political strategy versus another as we’re trying to achieve not
another bomb, as we’re trying to achieve an arms embargo. We must
not attack support for one strategy or another as the reason why the
genocide persists. The reason why the genocide persists is because the
people who can make the decision are making the decision to continue
sending the bombs.
 
Uncommitted delegates holding a press conference outside the DNC in
Chicago. (Fatih Aktas / Anadolu  //  Jacobin)
It’s important for us to have an eye toward not just the next week
or two or the next month or two, even though that can be really hard
for us to do through our pain, but to the question of how we build an
antiwar movement in our country that gets more power than the pro-war
side. As part of that analysis, I’m looking at what Donald Trump has
planned for us, what he has planned for anyone working on Palestinian
human rights, what he and Republicans have planned as far as taking
away nonprofit status for any organization working on Palestinian
human rights or funding that work, and what he has planned for our
loved ones in Gaza and the West Bank.

Trump’s son-in-law is fantasizing about million-dollar condos on
Gaza’s beach. He’s taking campaign contributions from people who
want the full annexation of the West Bank. So we also have to be very
clear about the rise of global authoritarianism, of which Trump and
the Republican Party’s MAGA extremism is a face. We have to take
stock of what it would look like for Trump to be president and whether
we’re doing the difficult work of this moment — which is not
pretty, and a lot of folks don’t want to hear it — in the sense of
telling people and being clear about what our organizing would look
like under Donald Trump.

The reality is that it would be really, really difficult to see
student protesters deported, as Trump is promising, and it’s not
just that. What is our responsibility to the people we love who are
there? A few weekends ago, I was on the phone with my uncle, who’s
living in South Lebanon now, and it was the heaviest bombardment
he’d experienced since the war in 2006. He was asking me, “Do
people over there know that if Trump becomes president, that he’ll
give Netanyahu the green light to kill a lot more of us?”

Unfortunately, there isn’t a major party candidate — and I would
argue that there hasn’t been one in the past several decades — who
represents our antiwar movement’s values on this issue. We have to
understand that it’s really not about the election. It’s about how
we ensure that our movement continues growing rather than have our
power undermined. We have a responsibility to our siblings there to
grow our movement rather than undermine it, and that has to include
charity in our analysis about what living under Donald Trump’s
America would mean for our antiwar efforts.

_[ABBAS ALAWIEH is the cofounder of the Uncommitted movement. He is a
political strategist and organizer based in Michigan._

_ALEX N. PRESS is a staff writer at Jacobin who covers labor
organizing.]_

_“Town & Country,” our focusing on rural politics, is out
now. Subscribe to our print edition today.
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