The DNC Should Have Had a Palestinian American Speaker

Palestinians have, since the start of Israeli retaliation for Hamas’s massacre on October 7 last year, been living through one of the worst calamities in an already tragic history. Attacks by the Israeli military have killed tens of thousands Palestinians in Gaza, and much of the region’s population of 2 million has been displaced—repeatedly—and remains at risk of starvation and illness. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli extremists have launched more than 1,000 attacks against Palestinians in recent months.

Supporters of the Palestinian cause have been left with few options politically. The next occupant of the White House will come from one of the two major parties. On the Republican side, Donald Trump, the obvious favorite of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has vowed to deport pro-Palestinian protesters and uses the word Palestinian as a racial epithet akin to an old southern slur. On the Democratic side, President Joe Biden has sought a cease-fire but has been unable or unwilling to bring the necessary pressure on both sides to reach a truce. The Biden administration has continued to supply Israel with weapons that are then used in a manner that U.S. government analysts have warned could violate U.S. and international law.

During the Democratic primary earlier this year, pro-Palestinian advocates urged their supporters to vote “uncommitted” on the presidential ballot to register disapproval of U.S. policy toward Israel. With Biden as the incumbent, voting “uncommitted,” as tens of thousands of Democrats did, was a means to send a message, demanding an end to U.S. military aid, without endangering the party’s chances in the fall campaign. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, activists from this Uncommitted movement held a sit-in outside the venue, seeking to negotiate a role for a Palestinian American speaker onstage. Their request was ultimately denied.

[Mark Leibovich: The DNC is a big smiling mess]

It is logical for the Democratic Party to want only those willing to unreservedly endorse the presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, to speak at its national convention. Notwithstanding the name of the Uncommitted movement, however, at least one of the speakers it put forth, Palestinian American Georgia State Representative Ruwa Romman, was willing to do just that. A transcript of Romman’s proposed remarks published by Mother Jones begins with a reminiscence about her family’s roots near Jerusalem and concludes with her saying, “Let’s commit to each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur.”

The speech also calls for all the freedom of “all the Israeli and Palestinian hostages” and refers to the “massacres in Gaza.” The Biden administration does not regard Palestinians in Israeli prisons as “hostages” in the same sense that it does the captive Israelis, and it has defended Israel’s conduct in the war as proportionate even as critics have accused the Israeli army of engaging in war crimes. Perhaps Democratic leaders feared that the speech would have risked muddling the party’s messaging on Israel, and potentially drawn negative coverage on an issue that splits the Democratic coalition but unites the GOP. Nevertheless, a party that aspires to be a champion of American democratic pluralism should have been able to figure out a way to accommodate a speaker and a speech such as this.

“We don’t know why the campaign said no,” Romman told Mother Jones. “We literally have no feedback. We are in the dark.”

The horrors of the Israel-Hamas war were not ignored at the convention. Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia said, “I need all of my neighbors’ children to be okay. Poor inner-city children in Atlanta and poor children of Appalachia … the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza.” Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, the Israeli American parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was seized by Hamas during the October 7 massacre, gave a moving speech that called for a deal that “brings this diverse group of 109 hostages home and ends the suffering of the innocent civilians in Gaza.” In her keynote address, Harris reiterated her support for Israel, and also said that she was working to ensure that “the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.” That line was greeted with enthusiastic applause in the convention hall.

As far as the Democratic Party is concerned, it remains cross-pressured by two parts of its coalition, one that sympathizes more with Israel and one that sympathizes more with the Palestinians. But only one part of that coalition was well represented by the convention speakers this week.

This makes the omission of any Palestinian American speaker all the more glaring. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in Vanity Fair, “The symbols communicated the breadth of the Democratic Party’s coalition, as well as its limits.” At a convention that showcased the racial, religious, ethnic, and even ideological diversity of the Democratic Party and the United States, no room could be found for a Palestinian speaker. The coalition on display was almost comically broad—Jared Polis, the first openly gay governor of Colorado, announced that he was also a “gamer”—but Palestinians could only have their story told for them rather than by them.

Pro-Palestinian speech is heavily censored in the United States relative to other kinds of political advocacy. At least 38 states ban participation in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. Student groups have been banned by colleges and universities, and students suspended, for pro-Palestinian advocacy and rhetoric. American politicians frequently characterize any pro-Palestinian speech as anti-Semitic, regardless of whether it can be fairly categorized as such.

[Adam Serwer: Don’t equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism]

That has left little space for the Palestinian version of the story, which by nature will be different when told by actual Palestinians. Yet it is precisely that version of the story that has the most potential to show Palestinians as real human beings, as your friends and fellow citizens, rather than as crude stereotypes or casualty numbers tallied in a distant war.

Political conventions are celebrations of the candidates, yes. But they are also meant to celebrate the coalitions that come together in support of the party. The diversity of the convention’s speakers and events was a way to show rank-and-file Democrats that they are seen, that they are represented, that they matter. What are Palestinian American Democrats to take from their exclusion except that, as far as their party is concerned, they do not?