The vibes were good at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) this week. Unity was on the agenda, and a sense of confidence prevailed in speeches from the lame duck president to the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) Shawn Fain, to the left flank of the party represented by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Given a seven-and-a-half-minute slot during prime time, Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was greeted by thousands of delegates with chants of “AOC! AOC!” A politics of joy was sweeping the Democratic Party in the wake of Joe Biden stepping down as its nominee.
But by the convention’s final morning, down the hall away from the main stage, hearts were breaking at a press conference held by “uncommitted” delegates. The thirty delegates, representing approximately 740,000 uncommitted Democratic primary voters from Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and a half dozen other states, had been pushing all week for a change in course of the administration’s financial, military, and political support of Israel’s war on Gaza. Many saw themselves as fighting to save the soul of the Democratic Party, which espouses to be the party of democracy and human rights but has enabled a genocidal war.
At the heart of the Uncommitted National Movement’s organizing is the call for “not another bomb” through an arms embargo that would stop weapons shipments to Israel. Although the Biden/Harris administration claims to be working to secure a cease-fire, all that is meaningless jargon, they explained, so long as the United States remains Israel’s biggest weapons supplier. As Uncommitted’s cofounder Layla Elabed put it: “How can we have a cease-fire when we provide the fire?”
At Thursday morning’s press conference, speakers and supporters shared anger and tears. Some had been up all night at a sit-in that they had begun the evening before. Wednesday evening, they received word that after weeks of negotiations, the DNC rejected their request…
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Auteur: Hadas Thier
