CHICAGO — Day one of the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) saw two very different accounts of the American immigrant experience, at two very different events. At the morning’s Small Business Council meeting, restaurant owner Rohini Dey shared her story of coming to the United States “hell-bent on saving the world,” getting her PhD and doing stints at McKinsey and the World Bank before becoming an entrepreneur.
“I am actually the poster child as the antithesis of Project 2025,” she said. “I think there is so much to be optimistic about. We are doing wonderfully.”
Later in the day, at a panel on Palestinian human rights — the first ever such event held at the DNC — Hala Hijazi, the Palestinian American founder and CEO of a San Francisco–based consulting firm, talked about her own journey. A “proud moderate,” Hijazi had gotten involved in Democratic politics working for former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown in the late 1990s, eventually becoming a major donor and fundraiser for the party, raising more than $2 million and joining the board of a variety of liberal nonprofits. But she wasn’t celebrating these achievements.
“I’m a failure. I’m a fraud,” she said through tears. More than one hundred of her family members had been killed since the start of Israel’s razing of Gaza, including two just last week, she claimed. All the time she had been living her American dream, she said, her family back in Gaza was suffering under Israeli occupation — an occupation and now war that, many in the audience doubtless realized, has been inadvertently underwritten by US taxpayers like themselves.
It was an emotional, harrowing moment in an emotional, harrowing event. The panel of pro-Palestinian activists, moderated by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, had not been part of the day’s original programming but a late addition. It was a concession won by the “uncommitted” movement — which had won…
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Auteur: Branko Marcetic
