Celebrating at the DNC in a Time of Genocide

Joy was everywhere—as long as you didn’t think about Gaza.

Adam Johnson

August 23, 2024

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/dnc-gaza-genocide/

The Democratic National Convention is over. The tens of thousands of Democrats who descended on Chicago this week are now on their way back home. And to judge by the headlines, they had a wonderful time.

The theme of “joy” has dominated the messaging from both the Kamala Harris campaign and the media over the past few days. “Kamala Harris leans on the ‘politics of joy,’” began a headline in the Chicago Sun-Times. USA Today titled a piece, “DNC is bubbling with joy and optimism. Could Trump’s dark view of America be … a lie?”

But a scrappy, underfunded coalition of activists wasn’t ready to vibe their way through what they and countless scholars say is an ongoing genocide in Gaza—one that continues to be carried out using American weapons.

These activists were both inside and outside the DNC. The Coalition to March on the DNC, composed of more than 250 organizations, held two mobilizations at the beginning and end of the convention, and people turned out in the thousands, uniting around the demands to end the genocide and stop all US aid to Israel. (Other groups also took action throughout the week.) And 29 uncommitted delegates, representing roughly 740,000 voters who cast protest votes during the primary to show their opposition to US support for Israel’s military operations, showed up inside the DNC calling for an arms embargo. They staged an overnight sit-in, followed by a mobilization inside the DNC, pushing their far more moderate demand for a Palestinian-American speaker on the main stage (though their primary goal, and that of protesters outside of the perimeter, remained an arms embargo against Israel).

All of this work was ultimately in service of one end: to make sure that gleeful liberals cannot evade the shameful, inconvenient fact that the Biden White House—and the Harris campaign—have not changed their position on Israel’s ongoing, wholesale destruction of Gaza.

Not that Democrats and their allies aren’t striving mightily to convince people otherwise. In her climactic acceptance speech on Thursday night, Harris called the suffering in Gaza “devastating” and “heartbreaking,” though she refused to identify the cause of that suffering. She said she and Biden were “working to secure a ceasefire” so that “the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination”—words that are identical to ones Biden has been using. For this bare minimum, she was hailed by liberal pundits as having broken important new ground.

But the truth is clear. Despite both Biden and Harris’s pointing to so-called “ceasefire talks,” they have each refused to back peace activists’ demand—a demand shared by all major Palestinian organizations, humanitarian groups, and seven major unions representing nearly half of all union members, including the NEA, SEIU, and UAW: a total arms embargo against Israel until it ends its bombing, siege, and occupation of Gaza.

To the average Democrat, all of this can, understandably, be a bit confusing. After all, don’t the White House and Vice President Harris support a ceasefire?

The confusion is the point. Biden and Harris support a ceasefire in name only. The White House co-opted calls for a ceasefire last February and shifted the definition from its common historical usage: using the threat of an arms embargo to force Israel to end its military campaign. That’s how the term was used in previous attacks on Gaza in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021. Now, “ceasefire” refers to a vague truce outline that Israel can choose or not choose to agree to, while still receiving US military aid no matter what.

This is why, beginning in the spring of this year, activists shifted their key demand from a ceasefire to an arms embargo on Israel: Because the White house and many Democrats had turned the word “ceasefire”—like the phrase “two-state solution” before it— into yet another way to buy Israel time as it continued to inflict a daily death toll that is unprecedented in the 21st century.

The week of the DNC, the official death toll, which researchers believe to be a massive undercount, surpassed 40,000. The day Kamala Harris gave her speech, over 40 Palestinians were killed by Israel bombings in Khan Younis, including over a dozen children.

The PR effort by the White House to co-opt and warp the term “ceasefire”—in concert with switching from Biden to Harris—seems to have mostly worked. Youth support has shot back up, and the “vibes” are reportedly good again.

But those actually focused on policy, and the fact of the US support for genocide, aren’t easily fooled by these superficial gestures. They will not be won over by vague shifts in “tone” or “I see you, I hear you” nonprofit speak. So this week in Chicago, the city with the largest Palestinian diaspora population in the United States, they stuck by their plans to pressure both the current President Biden and likely future President Harris to agree to an arms embargo— to condition aid to Israel until it acts in line with US and international law.

Thus far, Harris has refused these requests. Her top foreign policy adviser Phil Gordon told reporters on August 8 that “Harris does not support an arms embargo on Israel.” And her former Senate national security adviser Halie Soifer told a panel at the DNC on August 20, “A Kamala Harris administration will not cut or condition US security assistance to Israel.” Put simply, Harris will continue Biden’s strategy: pretending that a ceasefire will happen by magic, or that Benjamin Netanyahu will have a sudden change of heart, rather than using actual leverage from the most powerful country in human history to end the war.

In an obscure conference room outside the DNC security perimeter, I met a group of courageous doctors who described the most unimaginable horrors, flanked by uncommitted delegates.

They had all volunteered in Gaza, sometimes for months. Now they were in Chicago to try to break through, to appeal to the humanity of the DNC attendees. They spoke of holding the hands of dying children who didn’t have family members alive left to care for them. They described collapsed medical systems where basic supplies like soap and bandages were so scarce they couldn’t even perform as doctors. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon who was in Gaza from March 25 to April 8, told the room:

“I saw children’s heads smashed to pieces by bullets we paid for, not once, not twice, but every single day. I saw the outrageous, systematic destruction of the entire city of Khan Younis. If there is a single room with four walls left in the entire city I couldn’t tell you where it is. I saw mothers mix what little formula they could find with poisoned water to feed to their newborns, since they were so malnourished themselves that they could not breastfeed. I saw children who cried not out of pain, but because they wished they had died along with their families instead of being burdened with the memory of their siblings and parents charred and mutilated beyond recognition. All, of course, by American ordnance.”

Yet the party must go on, and for the vast bulk of Democrats, this fake “ceasefire” PR has given them permission to compartmentalize the horrors of Gaza. But the line between the Biden-Harris administration and Gaza isn’t the least bit circuitous. It’s clear and straight. The Gaza genocide is real and very much the responsibility, in large part, of the current administration.

Needless to say, powerful Democrats are not particularly keen to discuss this reality. When we saw Chuck Schumer on the floor of the DNC, where he was being warmly greeted by his supporters, we asked him if he backed the calls from the UAW and other labor unions for an arms embargo on Israel. The second he heard our question, he walked away. The horrors of Gaza can only ruin the vibes.

A group of 29 uncommitted delegates, meanwhile, did their best to be the most reasonable, loyal, and moderate pro-Palestine voice of the bunch. Despite their praising Kamala Harris, trying to work with her, and trying to use their credentials as established Democratic loyalists and voters, the party rejected their request for a brief speaking slot.

The protesters outside, meanwhile, were mocked and given snarky write-ups belittling their turnout, even as they showed up in the thousands and took to the streets despite a heavy police presence, with at least 74 people arrested since last Sunday.

There is simply no right way to oppose genocide. Whether you’re an exceedingly polite self-described “insider” or a protester in the streets, you’re either ignored, treated like a terrorist, or called a joke.

The whiplash from the beige, off-site conference room in a large, mostly empty convention center talking to doctors pleading for some kind of change in policy to the fever-pitched excitement on the packed convention floor was sobering. The contrast was morally upsetting to anyone who believes in the straight line between the White House and the nonstop images of dead children. But most don’t. And it’s unclear how to make that connection for millions who simply don’t want to see what is obvious.

The easy leftist answer is that those inside are simply misinformed, heavily propagandized. And while that’s no doubt true to a large extent, I’m not totally sure they don’t want to be. Partisanship is a powerful force. Media misinformation is a powerful force. Having parasocial relations with our elected leaders is a powerful force. Fearing Donald Trump and the real dangers of Project 2025 is a powerful force.

This combination results in the widespread decision to push Gaza out of sight. One can’t help but think that if just 5 percent of this support on marked display at the United Center this week was withheld on condition of Harris agreeing to end arms sales to the Gaza genocide, she would agree overnight. If pro–arms embargo elected officials like Representatives Ilhan Omar and Joaquin Castro, and pro–arms embargo unions like SEIU, NEA, and UAW, had withheld their endorsements until after Harris agreed to cut off aid—rather than offering it in a matter of days—it may have worked. But they didn’t. The lone Palestinian American in Congress, Representative Rashida Tlaib, did, but she remains on a limb all alone. Most progressives issued good statements, no doubt, but like the Biden White House, refused to use their actual leverage. Everyone says the right things, and feels bad and sad, but almost no one I spoke to—except the protesters outside, the Gaza healthcare workers, and the uncommitted delegates inside—seemed to be willing to actually risk anything.

And so the bombs continue, and the party goes on. Gaza is removed from our minds and the field of vision of those attending the big celebration. And everyone—or at least those not on the wrong end of American weapons—gets to feel “joy” again.