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The area surrounding the DNC being held this week in Chicago, became, from Day 1, a national meeting ground for scores of people to make their voices heard about the nearly year-long, genocidal assault on Gaza and across Palestine. Some of those voices were in the building too, however, as uncommitted delegates to the DNC. Yesterday they shared with the public that they’d asked but been denied by the Harris campaign their one major request: to have a Palestinian American speak at the convention.
The uncommitted delegates are elected to serve and their status as uncommitted reflects the broad opposition to Biden continuing America’s decades-long support of Israel, whose brutal attacks on Palestinians–from murder to false imprisonment of children to torture to land theft and home destructions and the infamous checkpoint system that isolates many from needed living supplies–goes back to even before the 1948 Nakba when some 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced by the newly arrived Europeans who practiced Judaism.
A Moment of Hope
There had been some signaling that the delegates would support Harris if she allowed a Palestinian American to address the convention. Last night, an American Jewish couple was provided the opportunity to make a plea for their son’s release. He is one of the more than 100 people being held by Hamas forces.
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As moving and respectful as the young man’s parents were, it still landed as a painful double standard, prompting Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress, to see a double standard before she posted on X:
DNC: Why are you saying that Israeli children are more valuable than Palestinian children? Where is our shared humanity? Stop erasing Palestinians. We exist. We deserve to be heard.
More, at no point has mention been made of the thousands and thousands of Palestinians detained by Israeli authorities. According to a Human Rights Watch Report published in The LA Times late last November:
Israeli authorities held nearly 7,000 Palestinians from the occupied territory in detention for alleged security offenses, according to the Israeli human rights organization HaMoked. Far more Palestinians have been arrested since the October 7 attacks in Israel than have been released in the last week. Among those being held are dozens of women and scores of children.
The majority have never been convicted of a crime, including more than 2,000 of them being held in administrative detention, in which the Israeli military detains a person without charge or trial. Such detention can be renewed indefinitely based on secret information, which the detainee is not allowed to see. Administrative detainees are held on the presumption that they might commit an offense at some point in the future. Israeli authorities have held children, human rights defenders and Palestinian political activists, among others, in administrative detention, often for prolonged periods.
Abbas Alawieh, a Michigan delegate and former congressional chief of staff who is a spokesperson for the uncommitted delegates, told NBC News about the campaign, “They weren’t getting back to us, they weren’t getting back to us.”
Final Answer
Eventually, a call did come, Alawieh said, from a Harris campaign official he did not identify. The answer was no, he said. It was particularly discouraging because there had been engagement, which left the delegates encouraged. That encouragement was perhaps elevated even more so because Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Harris’ campaign manager, went to Michigan this week and met with local Arab leaders.
There was a space provided during the DNC for a panel discussion Monday on Palestinian issues (along with another one with Jewish leaders about anti-Jewish prejudice), as well as ensuring that the uncommitted delegates and their staffs were credentialed and that multiple speakers addressed the suffering of Palestinian civilians. But no Palestinian has been on the main stage.
Of the 4,700 delegates in Chicago this week, only 30 are uncommitted. Even still, they said, another 250 delegates who are committed to Harris have signed their letter demanding a cease-fire and an arms embargo on Israel.
For its part, the Democratic Party platform does call for a lasting peace with a two-state solution. That fact provided little comfort to the uncommitted delegates who, upon learning that no Palestinian would be allowed to speak, held one another and wept.
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