Near midnight last week, Democratic delegates with the Uncommitted movement sat in protest outside Chicago’s United Center. Elected by hundreds of thousands of primary voters who oppose President Joe Biden’s response to the war in Gaza, the delegates were sent to the DNC “uncommitted”—not pledged to support any candidate at the convention. Earlier in the week, the group did what they were elected to do by calling for a permanent ceasefire and immediate arms embargo. They also continued a simpler request they’d started making before the convention: a spot for a speaker on the main stage to talk about Palestine.
On Wednesday evening, the DNC and Harris campaign finally told them that no Palestinian American would be allowed to speak from the main stage of the convention. Here was their last ditch effort. They hoped a sit-in—and the Civil Rights history it evoked—would push party leaders to change their minds.
Despite being a group of staunch Democrats working to affect change from within the party, the Harris campaign—and many Democrats—mostly treated Uncommitted and their allies as outsiders ruining a party at the DNC. And, often, it seemed without even understanding what they were saying or where agreement could be had. The result was a four-day convention that managed to find space for seemingly everyone on the main stage except those willing to speak personally about what is happening in Palestine.
I think that Israel’s habit of constantly fucking with its neighbors makes it more of a liability to the interests of the US. It leads to more local hostility towards US troops in other regions in the area and attacks on US people and interests both abroad and at home (9/11).
A better approach would be to ally with indigenous democracies and help them maintain stability. First, our allies should be at least mostly compatible with our own national values (not theocracies, monarchies, apartheid states, etc). Secondly, allying with an indigenous nation instead of a bunch of settler colonists is less likely to draw the ire of every common person in the region.