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The performances on the first night of the Democratic National Convention were impeccable. Responses to the speeches on the convention floor and throughout liberal corners of social media were ecstatic.
To chants of “We love Joe,” President Joe Biden gave a statesmanly blessing to his would-be successor, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Hillary Clinton spoke of shattering the “glass ceiling.” Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., a pastor, delivered a soaring oratory that “a vote is a kind of prayer.” And Rep. Alexandria Ocasia Cortez, D-N.Y., lambasted Donald Trump as a “two-bit union-buster” to cheers of “AOC, AOC.”
The display of Democratic Party unity was as pitch perfect as it was tone deaf to what is arguably the most pressing moral issue of our time.
Blink, and you would have missed any mention of the U.S.-backed genocidal war Israel continues to carry out.
Blink, and you would have missed any mention of the U.S.-backed genocidal war Israel continues to carry out against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The fact that tens of thousands of anti-war protesters gathered in solidarity with Palestinians this week in barely registered on the convention floor Monday night. The silence persisted despite a possibility that Harris’s campaign could pay a price of over half a million votes in key swing states, particularly Michigan, for refusing to stop the arms flow to Israel.
As Biden spoke, one small group of audience members silently unfurled a white banner, which read “Stop Arming Israel.” Zeteo’s Prem Thakker reported from Chicago’s United Center that chants of “We Love Joe” from surrounding spectators grew louder. “Stadium lights over this spot then dimmed and [the] banner was ripped away,” wrote Thakker on X.
The few fleeting mentions of the war, Israel, and Palestine in Monday night’s speeches were dismissive and misleading, while devaluing of Palestinian lives in comparison to those of Israelis.
Ocasio-Cortez said, “Kamala is working tirelessly for a ceasefire” — to thunderous applause. It may or may not be true, but such an approach would stand in contrast to the Biden–Harris administration’s record. Since Harris accepted the presidential nomination, the administration approved a $20 billion weapons sale to Israel, without any conditions. If this is “working tirelessly” for an end to the fighting, Harris is bad at her job.
Since Harris accepted the presidential nomination, the administration approved a $20 billion weapons sale to Israel, without any conditions.
That calls for a ceasefire were warmly welcomed on the convention floor could be seen as a promising sign — another signal to the Democratic establishment that there is popular support for a permanent ceasefire from the mainstream. But this has long been the case. There’s nothing encouraging about cheers for an empty gesture toward the idea of ceasefire, which obfuscates the administration’s complicity in the war.
In his speech, Biden nodded to the protests: “Those protesters out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.” Yet even his shoutout managed to mangle the Gaza solidarity movement’s long-held positions.
The demonstrations over the Gaza war — whether over the last 10 months, this week in Chicago, or the organizing of “Uncommitted” delegates attending the convention — are not making the point that innocent people on “both sides” are being killed. They are part of an international struggle against the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the U.S.-backed Israeli military.
What Protesters Want
Earlier on Monday, the DNC granted the Uncommitted campaign space to hold a separate panel specifically focused on Gaza and Palestinian human rights. According to reports, hundreds attended and listened to intolerable accounts from doctors who had worked in Gaza’s decimated hospitals, where a vast number of the patients who arrive are maimed children.
Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a Palestinian American surgeon who treated patients in Gaza, told the story of a little boy who had lost all of his family members and said he wished to die too because everybody he loved “is now in heaven.”
Haj-Hassan said that even the children who she had been able to successfully treat and discharge would leave the hospital to face potential death because of bombings, starvation, and dehydration. There were, she said, “alarming reports” of the first confirmed cases of childhood polio in Gaza.
Another panelist, Hala Hijazi, described herself as a “longtime” and “moderate” Democrat, who has worked as a party fundraiser, raising over $12 million in the past. “I’m here because my family is dead,” she said, explaining that she has lost over 100 family members in the current onslaught.
Hijazi, who serves on the board of the reproductive rights political action committee NARAL Pro-Choice California, told the audience that she fights for reproductive freedoms at home, “but I can’t help the women in Gaza who are pregnant right now.” The remarks were a tacit rejection of criticisms that those pushing Harris to commit to an arms embargo are single-issue voters, neglecting other areas like, for example, the threat to reproductive rights in the U.S. posed by a second Trump administration.
The organizers, protesters, and concerned individuals who have come to Chicago will not be satisfied by a sidelined convention panel and specious lip service from politicians on the main stage. As of now, the Democratic Party’s 92-page platform has no mention of conditioning weapons provisions to Israel, let alone the arms embargo called for by Uncommitted delegates and the 200-plus groups in the Coalition to March on the DNC.
Monday night’s blockbuster performances gave no sense that the refreshed, vibes-fueled Harris campaign would be changing course on Palestine, focusing instead on abortion, Trump’s authoritarian threat to democracy, and protecting workers. In a domestic vacuum, this would be well and good. I, too, could laugh along with United Auto Workers’ delightful President Shawn Fain referencing a dated Nelly song and calling Trump a scab. But not on the same day that, in the same convention center, among other horrors, a surgeon described treating a child in Gaza whose face had been blown off in an Israeli strike.
At a time of a genocidal war waged with U.S. arms, dollars, and diplomatic support — an assault that an American president could severely curtail — the Democratic National Convention cannot remain a myopic, unpunctured bubble.
As the proceedings continue until Thursday night, so too will the protests and likely with escalating desperation; if the Harris campaign decides it can win without listening, then that’s nothing to celebrate.