Washington, DC – The National Uncommitted Movement, a grassroots effort in the United States seeking to pressure the Democratic Party to change its policy toward Israel amid the Gaza war, says it cannot endorse Kamala Harris for president.
The group said Thursday that Harris’s team had not responded to its request for a meeting with representatives and families of Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip by a Sept. 15 deadline.
The movement has been pushing for Harris, the US vice president and Democratic presidential candidate in 2024, to agree to suspend US arms transfers to Israel during the war, which has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians since early October.
But with less than 50 days until the election, Harris has repeatedly rejected the possibility that she would support conditioning military aid to Israel, extinguishing hopes that she would represent a significant shift from the policies of Democratic President Joe Biden, the group said.
“Our movement cannot support the vice president,” Abbas Alawieh, one of the leaders of the Uncompromising National Movement, said during a virtual press conference on Thursday morning.
“At this moment, our movement opposes a Donald Trump presidency, whose agenda includes plans to accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the repression of the anti-war organization,” Alawieh said.
“And our movement does not recommend third-party voting in presidential elections, especially since third-party votes in key states could inadvertently help deliver Trump’s presidency, given our country’s broken Electoral College system.”
The group’s leaders clarified that they were not asking voters to withdraw from the presidential race entirely.
Still, political analysts say the lack of support could spell trouble for Harris, who needs to mobilize a broad base of Democratic voters in an election expected to be decided by a razor-thin margin.
It also highlights the alienation not only of Arab and Muslim voters in must-win battleground states, but also of progressive activists with a proven ability to get people to the polls.
Layla Elabed, a non-committal leader and sister of Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, said the group will not leverage its vast network to mobilize voters for Harris, even as they continue to advocate for Palestinians and other lesser issues.
“An endorsement is something very specific,” Elabed said during the virtual press conference. “It would mean that we would go out and mobilize thousands of voters.”
Months of incidence
Thursday’s announcement is the latest chapter in a months-long campaign that began in the weeks leading up to Michigan’s Democratic primary in February.
Democratic voters were urged to go to the polls and select “uncommitted” on their ballots to send a message to Biden, then the likely Democratic nominee for 2024, that they opposed his steadfast support for Israel during the Gaza war.
The effort spread to other primaries, including in the important Midwestern states of Minnesota and Wisconsin, with a total of 700,000 voters casting uncommitted ballots during the primary season.
However, it remains impossible to know how many did so in protest against Biden’s policy toward Israel.
The turnout spurred the launch of the National Uncommitted Movement, which eventually sent 30 protest delegates to the Democratic National Convention in August.
Leaders of the movement had expressed cautious optimism about Harris, who took up the party mantle after Biden dropped out of the race in July. Her choice of Tim Walz — the Minnesota governor who had spoken sympathetically about disengaged voters — also fueled that hope.
But the group’s request that the Democratic Party include a Palestinian-American speaker at the convention was not heeded. Outraged, the group staged a sit-in outside the convention center in Chicago, Illinois.
Harris, meanwhile, has repeatedly closed the door on the possibility of stringing aid to Israel together. The United States provides its top Middle East ally with $3.8 billion in military assistance annually, and the Biden administration has green-lighted additional support during the Gaza war.
More recently, during a debate with Trump this month, Harris said she will “always give Israel the ability to defend itself.”
Harris added that she will continue to work for a long-avoided ceasefire in Gaza and for a two-state solution “where we can rebuild Gaza, where Palestinians have security, self-determination and the dignity they so richly deserve.”
‘Totally disappointed’
It remains unclear what effect Thursday’s announcement will have on the November election.
Recent polls have shown that a large percentage of Americans — and Democratic voters in particular — oppose continued arms transfers to Israel amid the Gaza war, which has plunged the Palestinian enclave into a humanitarian crisis.
Polls have also found widespread disenchantment among Arab-American voters, a relatively small but significant demographic in key battleground states.
A report released this month by the Council on American-Islamic Relations found that support for third-party candidate Jill Stein outpaced support for Harris or Trump among Muslims in several battleground states.
Arshad Hasan, a progressive Democratic strategist, said that by not engaging with the National Unengaged Movement, Harris’s campaign had failed on both a human and electoral level.
“This is a group of people who are generally ideologically aligned (with Democrats) and who are energetic, and it costs the Harris campaign nothing to meet with them and the affected families, which is what they were asking for,” he told Al Jazeera.
“I am totally disappointed in the Harris-Walz campaign,” Hassan said. “And I say that as a supporter.”
Sally Howell, director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan in Dearborn, said Democrats were taking a “big hit” among Arab voters.
The lack of support from the Uncommitted Movement could prove especially damaging to voters “who are not in the progressive camp and were already struggling with the (Democrats),” he told Al Jazeera.
“This certainly weakens progressive Arabs in their own community, even though they are appreciated for their courage and openness in this regard,” he said.
‘Court people like Dick Cheney’
During the sometimes emotional virtual press conference, leaders of the Uncompromising National Movement recounted their personal struggles in determining how to cast their votes while watching their own families struggle to survive in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Elabed, a Democrat, told his family in the occupied West Bank: “I cannot make the decision to vote for Vice President Harris as the first candidate.”
“But I would never vote for someone like Donald Trump either,” he said.
Lexis Zeidan, another leader of the movement, said she felt Harris’ campaign was “courting people like Dick Cheney.” while sidelining key segments of the Democratic base.
Cheney, a former Republican vice president under President George W. Bush and a leading architect of America’s “global war on terror” in the 2000s, recently endorsed Harris for president.
Meanwhile, Zeidan said Harris’ campaign is “sidelining these disillusioned anti-war voices, even pressuring them to consider voting third party or not participating in this incredibly important election.”
Alaweih echoed that sentiment, saying Harris’ campaign had put many voters in an impossible position, but stressed that advocacy for the group’s rights would not stop.
“Our organizing around the presidential election was never about supporting a specific candidate,” she said. “It was always about building a movement that saves lives.”
