Throughout the week of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Palestine and US support for Israel’s ongoing genocidal war on Gaza was the issue that could not be ignored or silenced. From the protests that took place in the streets to Uncommitted delegates staging a sit-in at the DNC to demand the inclusion of a Palestinian voice on the Convention main stage, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Chicago writer, scholar, and activist Eman Abdelhadi about the presence of the Palestine Solidarity Movement at the DNC and what comes next.
Videography: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
Maximillian Alvarez: We’re here in Union Park, in Chicago. It’s Thursday, Aug. 22, and just hours from now, the final night of the Democratic National Convention is going to kick off. Kamala Harris, who’s formally accepted the party’s nomination to take on Donald Trump in the general elections, is going to speak.
And in just a short time, the Coalition to March on the DNC will be leading their final march of the week, starting here at Union Park. This is also the site where the march on the DNC on Monday took place, within sight and sound of the United Center, which is within a mile from where we are currently standing.
I’m standing here right now with the great Eman Abdelhadi, a writer, an activist based here in Chicago, who’s been doing incredible coverage all week for our amazing partners at In These Times magazine.
Eman, thank you so much for chatting with me today. You’ve been doing really critical coverage, focusing a lot on the Uncommitted campaign, on the Gaza solidarity protests, and also the role that Gaza is playing in everything that’s happening this week. I wanted to ask if you could start from the beginning of this week, before even the convention started. What were you going into this week looking for? And over the course of this week, inside the convention center and here in the streets, what did you find?
Eman Abdelhadi: Let me go back even a step further. I think over the last 11 months, the Palestine Solidarity Movement has developed more than we’d seen in the decades of amazing work that we’d already been doing. And what we’ve been seeing is that people are fighting on all fronts for Palestine, whether that’s people who are committed to the Democratic Party and are trying to push it, or people who see their work mostly on these streets, mostly in terms of protests, mostly through disrupting the status quo and showing a disaffection with Democratic politics and electoral politics.
What I was hoping to see this week, and I think what we’ve seen, is both of these parts of the movement really coming home, really stepping it up, really trying to send a unified message to the Democratic Party that a weapons embargo is our floor. A weapons embargo is the bare minimum that we would accept as a movement, because we have seen over the last 11 months that the war is going to keep going if the endless supply of weapons and money keep going to Israel.
So we wanted to send a strong message to the Democrats that, for a lot of us, you haven’t earned back our votes. We’ve watched you enact a genocide for 11 months, and you haven’t given us any reason to trust you. You changed the top of the ticket. The platform is the same. There have been no meaningful policy changes.
So we wanted to be out here on the street to say this protest movement is not going away, and the Uncommitted folks want it to be in the halls of the DNC to say there’s a protest movement even within this party.
Maximillian Alvarez: What did that protest movement look like for you on the ground over the course of the week? We saw you on Sunday speaking at the Bodies Outside of Unjust Laws march, so that was like a kicking off, in many ways, the week of protests. But tell us what else you found and what you saw happening over the course of this week as part of that movement.
Eman Abdelhadi: We are seeing exactly how coalitional this movement is. So the Bodies march was about reproductive justice, was about queer and trans rights, and about Palestine. It was about linking those issues together, reaffirming that these are not separate issues for us. These are issues that are interrelated substantively but also are interrelated in terms of the people working for them. We are all on the same page about wanting this genocide to end, and wanting queer and trans rights, and wanting reproductive justice.
I think we’ve seen that, throughout every march, protest, and rally, that we’ve seen folks from the Black community, folks who work on defunding the police, folks who work in grassroots organizations that are pro-migrant. We’ve seen Labor out here. We have seen, really every segment of the left has been represented.
So a coalescing around Palestine as a core issue of the left, that the genocide is a red line for us, and we’re united in that stance. Just because you changed the top of the ticket for the Democratic Party doesn’t mean that members of this coalition are going to abandon the Palestine Solidarity Movement. We’ve seen that here on the ground today.
Maximillian Alvarez: Right, and we’ve seen it in the first march that happened on Monday, like you said, we saw it — This is not to say that every direct action, every protest is all necessarily coordinated by the same groups, of course. Resistance is cropping up in a lot of places.
But we had our own reporter, Mel Buer, at the Israeli Consulate earlier this week, where there were protesters there clashing with police and Zionist counterprotesters. We’re here back again for the march on the DNC, where a lot of those coalitions, labor, reproductive justice, are going to be here as well. As we speak, there is a sit-in of Uncommitted delegates who sat through the night out front of the United Center, demanding that Kamala Harris and the party allow a Palestinian American voice to be on that stage tonight. So it’s looked, sounded, and felt a lot of ways in a lot of different places.
But I think one thing that is really clear to both of us, as we’ve been discussing off camera, is that Gaza looms incredibly large over this entire week, whether it’s people actively discussing or decrying it in the streets or people cheering when a ceasefire is mentioned on stage. If it’s not that, it is the thing that others are really actively trying not to discuss. So it’s this presence even when it’s not there.
So that leaves us with the question of, where do things go from here after the convention’s done, heading into the election while the genocide in Gaza continues? Where are you sensing this movement’s going and this struggle within the Democratic Party over Gaza, over the genocide, over US support for Israel is going?
Eman Abdelhadi: Regardless of what happens in November with this election, we are going to be continuing to push for the end of this genocide. If Kamala Harris wins, we are going to be pushing her administration to end their support for Israel, and we’re going to be doing it with the majority of her base.
Poll after poll shows that the clear majority of Democrats, 80% of Democrats, want a ceasefire, but a majority of Democrats also want a weapons embargo or conditioning of aid to Israel.
So I think that there’s this attempt to say, okay, well, let’s put this aside until the election. Well, 200,000 people are dead. 40,000 directly through bombs that we supplied, and another 160,000 are dead because of the conditions of the war. So there’s no sidestepping Gaza. There’s no sidestepping it for whoever comes into power. There’s no sidestepping it on any level.
Right now, we’re focused on the elections because they’re looming large. But the reality is that people have been organizing for Gaza on the local level, on the state level, and that’s why you’re seeing so much support, even from the Democratic base.
So none of that is going to go away. In fact, we have been building power. We’ve been building institutional power, and so all of that is actually going to ramp up.
So what I would like us to do is to continue to flesh out the flanks of our movement. I would like us to get smarter about the direct actions that we do. I would like us to continue consistent, large protests. I would like us to be building in grassroots organizations and in labor unions and pushing not just for symbolic support of Gaza, but what would it look like to give us material support?
What would it look like to withhold labor? What would it look like to schedule a walkout? We know that the ruling class does not give us anything if we do not demand it and if we do not impose a cost on the status quo.
That’s precisely why we’re here. That’s how our movement got to where it is. Because we impose costs. We impose costs on universities. We impose costs on cities. We impose costs on this system, and it’s working. We’ve seen big BDS wins, like Intel pulling out of Israel.
So all of that is going to continue regardless of what happens with the election. So I think it’s important to push on the electoral front, but to not mistake it for our main arena of the fight. Our main arena has always been on the streets and in our grassroots coalitions.
Maximillian Alvarez: What would you say to folks out there? What are the biggest misconceptions that you’re seeing about this movement and what the goals are right now, heading into the election and after? What are the things you would most want folks out there in the country to know about what you’ve seen from inside this movement all week?
Eman Abdelhadi: This is fundamentally a movement about peace and about transitioning our relationship as a nation to the world. This is just another case of America acting like an empire, another case of America acting like the big military dog in the world.
It hasn’t served us. It serves our ruling class. It serves the weapons manufacturers, and it serves the tech companies, but it doesn’t serve you and me. In fact, it robs us of our resources.
That’s what this movement is about. It’s about bringing our resources back here and having a relationship with the world that is not about empire and domination.
I think that we’re long overdue for that relationship. We’re long overdue for that transition. Over and over, we’ve engaged in wars in this country that Americans have disapproved of, and our ruling elite come back and act all mea culpa about them. Oh, whoops, we shouldn’t have gone to Vietnam. Oh, oops, we shouldn’t have done Iraq. Oh, oops. Afghanistan was a mistake. Well, Israel is a mistake too. Supporting Israel is a mistake too.
So I want people to know that the demands of this movement are actually so basic, are actually so basic. A weapons embargo is literally following US and international law. It is illegal for us to be funding a government that is killing civilians. It is illegal for us, by our own laws, to be funding a government that is committing war crimes, and those are well documented.
So when we say we want a weapons embargo, that means we want to follow our own laws. What does it mean when our ruling elite tell us that’s impossible. That’s so hard. That’s so complicated. You don’t know what you’re doing? What they’re telling us is, you don’t deserve a democracy. You don’t deserve to know where your money goes, and you don’t deserve a voice in how this goes. We have to reject that, not just for Palestine, but for the way this country runs overall.
So in the Palestine Liberation Movement, we always say Palestine liberates us. We’re not liberating Palestine. And this is another way that that’s happening. That if we change this relationship, we assert a power as a people that we need to have asserted, we have tried to assert over and over, and we can win this time.
And hopefully we’re done. Hopefully, after that, we’re done with senseless wars. After that, we’re done with our money going to weapons manufacturers. That’s the horizon of this. But first, we have to start with the weapons embargo. We have to stop killing Gazans today.
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