It was late in the evening when Ruby Chen, whose son Itay was kidnapped by Hamas on 7 October and later killed, approached and kneeled down next to Abbas Alawieh, a delegate from the “Uncommitted” pro-Palestinian movement who was planning to bed down for the night on the cement outside the venue where Kamala Harris this week formally accepted the Democratic presidential nomination.
For the four days of the Democratic National Convention, while many visiting delegates were popping bottles of champagne at parties across Chicago, the two men were busy working the rooms at delegate breakfasts, juggling media interviews and courting high-profile Democrats to try to influence the administration’s policies in Gaza.
Chen, along with other families of the hostages, has been urging the administration to increase pressure on Hamas and Israel to reach a ceasefire deal that would return the more than 100 hostages remaining in Gaza, including the remains of his son.
Abbas, other delegates and activists from the Uncommitted movement, had come to demand an arms embargo to Israel and a permanent ceasefire to end the war in Gaza. Abbas, a delegate from Dearborn, Michigan, the first majority Arab-American city in the US, had also announced a sit-in as a last-ditch effort to get a Palestinian-American to speak from the stage of the convention – one that was ultimately refused.
“We’re not going anywhere before November,” Abbas said outside the arena on Wednesday evening. “You’re not going to get rid of us. We’re going to engage the system.”
Abbas and Chen share a common cause in their calls for a ceasefire and they exchanged numbers during their brief introduction. But the inclusion by the Democratic National Committee of a hostage family but not a representative of the Palestinian community provoked exasperation over the inequities surrounding the programme at the Democratic party’s biggest show.
“Rachel and Jon deserved every second on that stage,” wrote Alana Zeitchik, who had six family members taken hostage by Hamas during the 7 October raid, referring to the parents of hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin. “I also believe a Palestinian-American voice deserves to be heard on that stage.
“I think it’s a shame that there’s a coupling between the hostage topic and the Palestinian issue,” Chen told the Guardian. “I think that they are not mutually exclusive, but you can be pro-hostages and also feel and have empathy for the killing of innocent people.”
Chen said he had spoken to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a darling of the Democratic party with a strong following on the left, at a New York reception on Tuesday. “The congresswoman, you know, she looked at me in the eye and I showed her a picture of my kid and the eight US citizens. And I honestly believe, you know, she felt new thoughts on the topic, and hopefully we could have a nice conversation.”
On Wednesday evening, Alawieh had Ocasio-Cortez on a video call as he urgently held the sit-in designed to secure a speaking slot for a Palestinian-American at the convention. “I want to send a very strong message that we are mobilising on the outside, but that’s coupled with a very strong inside push,” she said over speakerphone.
During the final days of the backroom negotiations, Uncommitted leaders said they had been offered private meetings with members of Congress and high-level aides to Harris, but no speaking slot. They were told that “tonight is going to be vice-president Harris’s biggest speech of her life, and it needs to be about her”, said Layla Elabed, a co-chair of the Uncommitted movement.
“We got all sorts of people telling us that they support us, that they want to hear this,” said Asma Mohammed, an Uncommitted delegate from Minnesota who also slept outside the United Center. “A majority of our party wants to hear this, but the party leadership has not heard this request … I want to win in November, and that means we build a bigger tent.”
When Kamala Harris took the stage on Thursday evening, some of the loudest applause came when she addressed the war in Gaza. But despite speaking forcefully on the issue, it was difficult to say that she had done much more than boldly defend the status quo.
“I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself,” she said, in remarks that indicated she would resist calls for an arms embargo. “I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.
“At the same time what has happened in Gaza in the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”
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She said she would fight so that “Palestinian people can realise their right to dignity, security, freedom and self determination”.
As pro-Palestinian protesters gathered in Chicago’s Union Park on Monday calling for a ceasefire, US secretary of state Antony Blinken in Israel claimed that Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed to support a US-proposed ceasefire with Hamas that would also free the hostages.
A day later, though, Netanyahu reportedly said he would keep troops in the Philadelphi Corridor, a red line for Hamas and Egypt that would probably scuttle any potential ceasefire deal.
“The feeling is that each time we have this buildup, it’s like a rollercoaster, like, you know, you build your hope, your hope’s up, and then suddenly you have that, you know, fall, that you go down, you know, and then you need to try to collect yourself and start this process all over again,” Chen said.
He called the actions of Hamas “psychological terror by … not providing any indication on the fate of the hostages, of our loved ones”.
At the same time, he accused top Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, of “public posturing” about making a deal without being willing to move forward. “You know, don’t pull our leg, not after almost 320 days,” he said. “I think there’s also some dignity to the families that they are entitled to.”
In the US, too, there remains an intentional vagueness in what Harris’s plans for the future are and how she may secure a ceasefire that has eluded the Biden administration.
At a Michigan delegation breakfast at the Chicago Hilton on Thursday, Alawieh was working a room that included some of the Democratic party’s top figures intent on holding the battleground state in the November elections.
“We need vice-president Harris to tell us what her updated approach would be and how she would ensure that US weapons aren’t used to kill civilians, as has been the case so far,” he said. “She hasn’t said that so far.”
Asked if Harris was intentionally avoiding the topic, he stopped for a moment, then said: “I think we have to keep engaging.”