The Democratic National Convention wrapped up its fourth and final night on Thursday in Chicago, as Vice President Kamala Harris accepted her nomination as the party’s 2024 presidential candidate before an exuberant crowd.
After ten fraught months of deep-seated divisions surrounding Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, the speeches given over the past four days would have one think that the Democratic Party is finally unified, reenergized by the prospect of a Harris presidency.
But tensions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continued to simmer on the event’s margins.
In her acceptance speech on the convention’s final night, Harris echoed the boilerplate Democratic line, telling the crowd about her and President Joe Biden’s efforts to end the ongoing war and free the remaining 105 hostages in Hamas captivity while reaffirming US military support for Israel.
“I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and will always ensure that Israel has the ability to defend itself,” she said decisively to the crowd. “At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives, hungry people fleeing to safety over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”
The presidential hopeful was greeted with raucous applause from the audience when she invoked the rights of the Palestinian people to “dignity, security, freedom and self-determination” — effectively calling for a two-state solution.
Aside from the heartrending speech given by the parents of American-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, speakers onstage discussed the ongoing war only a handful of times, mostly in reference to the need for a ceasefire and hostage deal.
While the convention hall may have seemed unified around Harris’s vision for the Middle East, events on the DNC sidelines painted a more complex picture of the party, compounded by protests outside the Union Center venue and throughout the city.
On Wednesday, a bloc of “uncommitted” delegates staged a sit-in outside the DNC, demanding that a Palestinian-American be granted a speaking slot, while thousands of pro-Palestine protesters unaffiliated with the DNC marched through the streets of Chicago, calling for an end to the war.
Biden’s lip service
For some people in the pro-Israel crowd, the most controversial remark uttered over the past four days came from the president himself, who told the crowd on Tuesday that “those protesters out in the street have a point, a lot of innocent people are being killed, on both sides.”
Biden’s opponents seized onto the remark as rhetorical proof that Democratic politicians are being held to the flame by anti-Israel activists. Though brief and insignificant to the Biden Administration’s actual policy towards Israel, his comment indeed came off as lip service to a growing number of Democrats more trenchant in their criticism of the Jewish state.
This trend is more prominent among younger Democrats, who now sympathize much more with Palestinians than with Israelis, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted this past February.
Polling by AP indicated that Democrats’ perception of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza — a response to Hamas’s October 7 massacre — had already soured by the start of this year, with 63% of respondents holding the opinion that Israel had “gone too far” in retaliating.
But sympathy for Palestinians hasn’t diminished the urgency of the hostages issue for Democratic voters, the vast majority of whom consider freeing the remaining Hamas captives to be a top priority for American leadership.
A humanitarian issue at a political convention
In perhaps the most somber moment of the four-day convention, the parents of American-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin took the stage for a brief speech on Wednesday night.
Jon Polin, Hersh’s father, pinned a yellow ribbon to his shirt, symbolic of the hostages’ plight. Both parents wore a strip of tape with the number 320 written on it, the number of days passed since October 7.
When they ascended to the podium, an emotional crowd embraced the Goldberg-Polins with a chants of “Bring them home.” Rachel, who was poised to speak first, broke down into tears before the crowd and took a minute to recuperate.
“At this moment in time, 109 treasured human beings are being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza,” she told the crowd in a shaky voice.
The Goldberg-Polin parents, who reside in Jerusalem, are typically hesitant to appear at partisan protests in Israel and opt instead to show their faces at the purportedly apolitical rallies of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum. This didn’t stop them from speaking to the crowd of Democratic stalwarts in their hometown of Chicago.
“This is a political convention, but needing our only son and all of the cherished hostages home is not a political issue, it is a humanitarian issue,” said Jon Goldberg-Polin. “There is a surplus of agony on all sides of the tragic conflict in the Middle East. In a competition of pain, there are no winners.”
The parents had met with Biden and Harris “numerous times” and told the crowd that the administration is “working tirelessly for a hostage and ceasefire deal” that will bring the hostages home and “stop the despair in Gaza.”
“Hersh, if you can hear us, we love you, stay strong, survive,” said Rachel just before the couple left the stage.
Although the DNC held off on announcing the parents’ speech until the day of, Democratic lawmakers say that party officials had decided over a week ago to grant them a speaking slot.
The decision was partially a response to the Republican National Convention’s choice to platform the parents of another American-Israeli Hamas captive, Omer Neutra, last month in Milwaukee.
‘We’re being very reasonable’
As the Goldberg-Polin parents spoke, a group of 30 or so delegates with the Uncommitted movement held a sit-in to pressure DNC officials into granting speaking time to a Palestinian-American, or a doctor who volunteered in Gaza.
These delegates represented some 700,000 Democratic voters who refused to commit to Biden in the primaries over his military support for Israel. While stressing wholesale support for the Goldberg-Polin family, the delegates wanted a similar speaking slot for someone with connections to Palestinians in the war-torn Gaza Strip.
“We sent them plenty of names, we sent them names of Palestinian-American elected officials, we said: ‘Have your pick and if these aren’t good enough, tell us if you need more names, we’ll send you more names,” said Abbas Alawieh, one of the delegates, at the sit-in on Thursday night. “We’re being very reasonable.”
Unlike many of the protesters out on the street that week, the uncommitted delegates are staunch Democrats who had hoped to change the party from the inside. Under the slogan “not another bomb,” the movement calls for an “immediate embargo on US arms to Israel” as a “material step towards a permanent ceasefire.”
However it appears these delegates’ hopes are momentarily quashed after being denied a speaking slot and having their main stipulation shot down by Harris in her speech. Though sidestepped by the Democratic establishment, the delegates found support from swaths of journalists, progressive Jewish leaders and members of the “Squad.”
Hadar Susskind, the director of the progressive Jewish group Americans for Peace Now, expressed his support for the idea of platforming a Palestinian-American in a video with Jewish movie star Mandy Patinkin.
“Palestinians, who are suffering their own grief and dealing with their own traumas, need to have their humanity recognized,” Susskind said.
Representatives Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all either visited or FaceTime called the sit-in organizers to show their support, however it appears that the long-time political allies have lately been diverging in their rhetoric towards the Harris-Walz team — especially when it comes to Gaza.
Ocasio-Cortez has been working to integrate herself into the party mainstream for a few years now. So her seven-minute speech on the convention’s first day marked a significant milestone in her career.
Judging by the more moderate tone taken by Ocasio-Cortez this election season, it looks like establishment Democrats’ embrace came with strings attached. Her shift towards the party line was clear as day in her address, where she praised Harris for “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing the hostages home.”
Ruby Chen, the father of a slain hostage, Itay Chen, also met with Ocasio-Cortez later that day and told reporters that she was “receptive,” adding that they are both New Yorkers.
Ocasio Cortez’s remark prompted veiled criticism from Ilhan Omar outside the convention building, where she lamented her “colleagues’” refusal to “recognize the genocidal war that is taking place in Gaza.”
“Working tirelessly for a ceasefire is really not a thing and they should be ashamed of themselves,” she continued.
Standing up to antisemitism, skirting Israel
On the second night, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff proudly spoke about their Jewish identities onstage, condemning antisemitism, but sidestepping any talk of Israel.
Schumer ascended to the podium wearing a blue square pinned to his suit jacket “to stand up to antisemitism,” as he noted at the end of his speech. The veteran Democrat warned that another Trump presidency would only bolster the spread of antisemitism in America.
“As the highest ranking Jewish elected official in American history, I want my grandkids, and all grandkids, to never face discrimination because of who they are. But Donald Trump? This is a guy who peddles antisemitic stereotypes,” he said to applause.
Later that night, Emhoff recounted his “typical Jersey suburban childhood” in an upbeat speech riddled with nostalgic details that together formed a romantic depiction of middle-class American Jewish life in the 1970s.
“I biked around the neighborhood, I took the bus to Hebrew school and I rode to Little League practice in the way back of my coach’s wood panel station wagon,” he said with a smile.
He went on to talk about his marriage with Harris, a Christian, and how they navigate life in a “blended family.”
“Over the past decade, Kamala has connected me more deeply to my faith, even though it’s not the same as hers. She comes to synagogue with me for High Holidays services, and I go to church with her for Easter,” he said.
“She makes a mean brisket for Passover,” he continued. “It brings me back to my grandmother’s apartment in Brooklyn, you know, the one with the plastic-covered couches.”
Emhoff briefly alluded to his work as Second Gentleman to combat antisemitism and promote Holocaust remembrance, which bore fruit last summer when the Biden Administration unveiled its “national strategy” to counter antisemitism.
“Kamala has fought against antisemitism and all forms of hate her whole career. She was the one who encouraged me, as Second Gentleman, to take up that fight, which is so personal to me,” he said.
Prominent Jewish politicians such as JB Pritzker, Bernie Sanders and Josh Shapiro also spoke that night, however Jewish gatherings hosted on the convention sidelines — by organizations like the Jewish Democratic Council of America, the Democratic Majority for Israel and JStreet — were kept out of the limelight.
Organizers of Jewish and Israel-related gatherings reportedly refused to disclose their locations to the general public, presumably out of fear of backlash from anti-Israel protesters. This fear proved legitimate when one such event, organized by the Orthodox group Agudath Israel of America, was interrupted by a handful of masked activists chanting “shame on you!”
“Brick by brick, wall by wall, Zionism has got to fall,” the protesters heckled, apparently unaware that the gathering had little to do with Israel or Zionism, and was focused mainly on combating domestic antisemitism.
