CHICAGO — On the first day of the Democratic National Convention, several thousand protesters gathered in Union Park, their numbers growing through the day until they began their march to a park near the United Center — the aggressively-fortified basketball arena where President Joe Biden was set to speak on Monday night — chanting “Free, Free Palestine” as they walked.
Almost four miles away from the United Center, at the Democratic National Committee’s outpost at McCormick Place, a demonstration of a different kind was taking place: the first ever DNC panel on Palestinian human rights. For Jim Zogby, who has occupied leadership roles at the Democratic National Committee for more than three decades, it had been a very long time coming.
“The only two times that the word ‘Palestine’ was mentioned at a Democratic Convention, was 1984 and 1988,” Zogby, who is also founder of the Arab American Institute, said on Monday. One of those instances was when Zogby himself called for justice for the Palestinian people in his speech nominating Rev. Jesse Jackson for president in 1984. “We’ve come a long way. People say to me… You’re just saying the cup is half full. I say ‘No, I remember when we didn’t have a cup, and we are now with a cup and filling it up.”
Zogby added, his eyes set on a ballroom packed with delegates and journalists, “When I look at this panel today, it is not the prize. The prize is a change in policy… But it is something I do not want to dismiss for a minute, how significant this is, [and the] message the Harris campaign is sending by saying: ‘We want to talk about this.’”
More than 700,000 Democratic voters cast “uncommitted” ballots during the Democratic primary to re-elect Biden. Leaders of the Uncommitted Movement had asked, as a gesture to those voters, for two speaking slots at the convention, and for a meeting with the Harris campaign to discuss an arms embargo on Israel. Neither of those requests have been granted. Instead, they were granted space for this panel — a smaller, untelevised venue where the party’s caucuses and councils meet during convention week.
The panel itself was a gutting testament to just how incredibly bleak things had to get in Gaza for the Democratic Party to dedicate official time and space to the Palestinian cause.
Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan — a pediatric intensive care surgeon, and the person that the Uncommitted Movement had requested a speaking slot on the convention’s main stage — recounted harrowing stories from her time working in Gaza.
Since the Israel bombardment began, a new term had been coined in Gaza, Haj-Hassan said: WCNSF — wounded child, no surviving family. It’s a phenomenon she said she “personally witnessed more times than I can count” working in Gaza, where an estimated 17,000 children have lost one or more parents in the last ten months.
Haj-Hassan spoke of a young boy, who arrived in her hospital with half of his face and part of his neck blown off. He lost all of his family — except his sister, whom he kept asking for — in a bombing. She was lying in the next bed over, Haj-Hassan said, but burned beyond the point that he could recognize her.
“His entire family, parents, and the rest of his siblings were killed in the same attack that boy survived, and the next day, I went to see him,” Haj-Hassan recalled. He’d just received a skin graft — a piece of his shoulder to cover his neck. “He was lying in his bed and mumbling because it was so difficult to talk, and he kept saying… ‘Everybody I love is now in heaven. I don’t want to be here anymore.’”
She told the story of a nurse, detained without explanation for 53 days, where he reported physical, sexual, and psychological torture, before he was released. After he was freed, the nurse returned to the hospital. “He worked constantly because one, he was so dedicated, and two, he suffered from severe insomnia from the trauma of his detention,” Haj-Hassan said. “He was always in the resuscitation of the emergency department, cleaning out sand from the eyes of people who pulled from under the rubble, trying to comfort them.”
“One day, overnight, he fell asleep holding the body of a dead child still with a breathing tube after they had failed to resuscitate the infant. Another day, I asked him to go home because he hadn’t slept in so many hours. So he left the hospital. A couple hours later, I see him in the emergency department trying to resuscitate a man whose both legs and one arm had been blown off,” Haj-Hassan said. “I asked him what he was doing in the hospital. I thought he went home to rest, and he said, ‘This is my sister’s husband. They woke me up to tell me that the aid distribution site had been bombed and my sister’s husband had gone there.’”
Her stories were so harrowing that one of the panelists — Layla Elabed, the co-founder of the Uncommitted Movement — broke down in tears and had to leave the room to collect herself. It was clear how critical it was for the American public — whose tax dollars are funding arms sales to Israel — to hear. And it was also abundantly clear why the Democratic Party would be disinclined to spotlight the devastating outcome of its current policy to the voters who it hopes to inspire to come out to the polls this November.
Hala Hijazi, a Democrat who said that she has lost more than 100 family members during Israel’s campaign in Gaza — including two last week — was also part of the panel, and she spoke about the challenge Harris is navigating as she becomes the party’s standard-bearer under an extraordinarily compressed timeline. “The VP has really been working hard in her campaign, and I’m not just saying this as someone who’s known her since 1997. She’s tried, and we have to hold her accountable, but we also have to give her a chance.”
Former Congressman Andy Levin, a Jewish Democrat and outspoken advocate for Palestine — who was defeated in his 2022 primary after pro-Israel interests spent $4 million boosting his opponent — also spoke to the difficult position Harris finds herself in.
Levin noted that Harris refused to go to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech to a joint session of Congress. “When she met with him, she did speak some truth to power to him and I don’t think that’s that easy,” he said. “I think she’s in a tough position. She’s the Vice President, she’s not the president.”
Under Harris, the Democratic Party made room for a private, intra-party discussion to take place on Monday. At the same time, the party’s tolerance for open dissent in primetime was clear when, hours later, protesters inside the United Center unfurled a banner that read “Stop Arming Israel” during Biden’s retirement convocation. The banner was blocked by delegates hoisting “We <3 Joe” signs, before it was snatched from their hands, as their calls for attention were drowned out by “Thank you Joe” chants. The lights above that section of the arena quickly extinguished, with the audience watching from home never the wiser.
Convention officials put out an anodyne statement papering over the protest: “We are proud of the electric atmosphere in our convention hall and proud that our convention is showcasing the broad and diverse coalition behind the Harris-Walz ticket throughout the week — on and off the stage.”
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