Going into the Democratic National Convention, the Democratic administration had spent the previous ten months providing monetary support and arms to Israel while vetoing U.N. ceasefire resolutions, one after another, allowing Israel to continue its genocide in Gaza. In return, Americans, whose taxes continue to fund the slaughter, received a steady flow of images and videos of how those dollars and weapons were put to use. Hundreds of Palestinians massacred while attempting to receive flour; the shrouded body of Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul, decapitated by an air strike, the knuckle bone of his index finger showing through shorn flesh; corpses being carried out of flattened schools, hospitals, and homes in folded carpets; children reduced to little more than flesh and bone from enforced starvation babies in incubators in neo natal units, short on fuel, who would die when the electricity went out.
This deluge of misery sent people to the streets to protest; students took over their campuses, and one veteran self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy. None of it—not the protests or the images, not the condemnations by the international community or the genocide case in the International Court of Justice, not the threat of regional conflict or the hundreds of thousands of uncommitted voters in state primaries—stopped the Democratic administration’s nearly unconditional support of the slaughter. When Benjamin Netanyahu came to visit Congress, his hourlong speech was punctuated by standing ovations.
This year the DNC took place in Chicago, where, in 1902, the New York Times reported on a Zionist conference where a “plan of colonizing Palestine with Jews” was discussed, and where, in 1968, activists converged to protest the Vietnam War and the nomination of Hubert Humphrey as the Democratic presidential nominee. Leading up to the convention, Kamala Harris, the new nominee, said she did not support an arms embargo on Israel, and the administration approved $20 billion in arms sales to Israel. Over a hundred activist groups formed the Coalition to March on the DNC to protest the genocide. After months spent fighting legal battles to get permission from the city to protest within sight and sound of the United Center, where the convention would be held, the coalition secured that permission only days before the convention began.
“What I feel is a great deal of responsibility,” said Muhammed Sankari, an organizer with the U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) and the spokesperson for the coalition. “What does it mean to exist in the heart of the empire that’s responsible for the genocide of your people? There’s nothing else I could say other than it’s an immense burden and an immense responsibility to take action.” He was uninterested in what was going to happen inside the United Center itself, he told me. It’s “going to be pomp and circumstance of anointing Kamala Harris as the head of the genocidal Democratic party, and everything else is going to be noise.”
Monday morning, ahead of a rally and the first planned march to the United Center, I attended a press conference held by the coalition. Reporters crowded around Hatem Abudayyeh, one of the coalition’s main organizers, and the USPCN’s executive director. A journalist asked Abudayyeh if he feared that, by protesting the DNC, he would help Trump, who would be “harsher” with the Palestinians than the Biden Administration has been. “I don’t know how much more harsh it can get,” Abudayyeh said.
Arabs, old and young; students; communists and socialists of various stripes; Asian American anti-imperialists; white boy thrill seekers; Code Pink members in pink keffiyehs; salty old New Left dogs; Black radicals; and Jewish anti-Zionists started filling into Union Park with their signs, N95 masks, helmets, and snacks. The rally was long and repetitious, all the speeches a variation on the theme: the DNC was a party without an occasion, and the elections were a concentration of power that would leave everyone but the rich, the police, and the military behind.
“What is there to celebrate? Do they fund housing? Did they fund health care? Do they fund education?” Kobi Guillory, an activist with the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, asked the audience.
“No,” the crowd shouted.
“Did they stop the police from killing Black people?”
“No.”
“Have they defended people’s rights from right-wing attacks?”
“No.”
“What they’ve done instead is fund one of the most horrific crimes against humanity that we’ve ever seen.”
The coalition then marched west on Washington Street. One of the chants, “The whole world is watching,” was co-opted from the 1968 protests. The specter of that history—street riots, tear gas, and mayhem—haunted Chicago for the week, but never materialized. Some of the signs read: AMERICAN BOMBS ARE KILLING MY FAMILY AND YOU WANT ME TO VOTE,” “STOP THE KILLING,” and “OUR TAX $$$ PAID FOR BOMBS THAT KILLED THESE BABIES” over a three-foot photo of two newborns, their names, Assem and Ayat, pasted over their swaddling clothes.
The march reached Park 578, where there was supposed to be a rally and then another march back to Union Park. The park was “within sight and sound” of the United Center, but several layers of police officers, fencing, and construction barricades separated the two. While the rest of the march returned to Union Park, a splinter group of protesters attempted to break through the fencing, but they were swiftly kettled, and a number arrested. On my bike ride home, I listened to the speeches inside the convention on the radio. Senator Raphael Warnock said, from the stage, “I need the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza. I need Israelis and Palestinians.” I’m not sure what he meant, but the crowd loved it.
On Tuesday, I headed to the McCormick Center, where “DemPALOOZA,” the convention’s public-facing programming, was taking place. I registered for a “Messaging 101” panel in order to ask someone, who I assumed would treat me like an infant, why Harris didn’t support an arms embargo, a policy that independents and Democrats largely support in recent polling. I took the bus across the Loop, the city’s de facto segregation line, and had to get off far from the convention center due to road closures. (Delegates, I later found out, could take a shuttle door to door.) I shimmied between the fences and barricades that formed the labyrinth ensconcing the McCormick Center, before reaching metal detectors and a K-9 unit. On the way to the panel, I hit another security checkpoint staffed by Secret Service Police. They opened my bag and looked at every single item in it, which delayed me further, and I only caught the last two questions of the panel, one of which was about timber tariffs.
I decided to follow one of the panelists, Brooke Goren, a campaign spokesperson, to her next event to ask her why the campaign doesn’t support an arms embargo. She didn’t answer my question and asked for my card, saying she would write to me with her answer. I still haven’t heard from her. One of my former coworkers was reporting at the same event, interviewing a party surrogate, and I asked her if anyone asked about Gaza before I got there. She said no, and the party surrogate said an arms embargo would never happen, the issue of America’s allyship with Israel is one of “East vs. West.”
I walked out to the floor of the convention center. The bright young delegates, lanyard necklaced and blazered, milled and networked in the vendor booth interstitia. It was confusing what the booths were selling, and to whom. They were advertising things like Unified, a social network for activists; GrowProgress.ai, an AI tool for testing campaign messaging; Quiller, a tool for “AI generated content for campaign and nonprofit causes.” There was a brat green “youth vote hq” where one could buy a sticker that said HOT GIRLS VOTE, and a dad hat that read “demo(b)rat.” It was all perverse beyond parody. I laughed and felt rotten doing it.
I left the convention center in a mood of almost giddy nihilism. I had expected more people at the protest, for them to have an immediate impact. For the better part of the last ten months, scenes of unimaginable brutality at an incomprehensible scale have been recorded and disseminated to the entire world, and the party responsible for enacting them was playing a game of arranging signifiers whose prize was more power. I didn’t, and don’t, understand why what is happening in Gaza will not stop happening, or how people have so calloused their hearts that they can justify it, ignore it, or reduce the annihilation of an entire people into a question of messaging and polling.
That night, I went to the Israeli consulate, where Behind Enemy Lines, an anti-imperialist action group, were holding a “Make It Great Like ’68” protest. I showed up about two hours early and saw Mike Lindell, the My Pillow Guy, holding an informal press conference on the sidewalk about election fraud. The feeling that I was falling through a grotesque circus was exacerbated by the sight of that clown.
About an hour later, there were clusters of National Lawyers Guild legal observers and more police than I have seen at any protest I’ve ever attended. For a while I milled around, watching broadcasters set up their cameras. I chatted with the anchors’ bodyguards, a security measure that seemed excessive. And then about two hundred people showed up all at once. Many wore face coverings, sunglasses, and helmets to obscure their identities and protect themselves from batons. The police were positioned on rooftops and scaffoldings with telephoto lenses, so it was not just a question of paranoia. Immediately, an older man selling political pins from off an umbrella was arguing with one of the protesters, a gender-nonconforming white person with a cracking voice.
“Which other countries would you like to see not exist?”
“All of them.”
“I wish John Lennon was alive to hear you say that.”
“Not John, Vladimir, you dumbass.”
The protesters all moved at once, coalescing into a tight blob in the center of the street, facing the sidewalk in front of the consulate. There, a few speakers talked a lot about the “capitalist pigs” and said that the people of America needed to follow the lead of resistance groups fighting imperialism in the Middle East, using everything from the “rock to the rocket.” I got away from the crush of the press, with their cameras and bodyguards, against the protesters to talk to an older Arab-looking man who was clearly not a member of Behind Enemy Lines. He was wearing a brown polo shirt and had a glucose monitor on his upper arm and a cast on his hand. I asked why he was at the protest. “To stop the genocide,” he said. He answered a lot of my questions evasively at first, until I asked them in Arabic. He told me he came to Chicago from Yaffa fifty-seven years ago, after the Six-Day War. “Palestine is in our heart. It is our daily bread. Our salt.” He told me that he had come to every protest he could since November. Our conversation was cut short by the protesters running right into the police line, seemingly to spark a confrontation that never quite caught, though they did break through the line eventually.
For two hours, the police and the protesters squiggled around the blocks of downtown Chicago, with kettles at various intersections where some protesters got arrested. The whole thing had the feeling of a game of cat and mouse, and I couldn’t really understand how it was meant to decelerate the flow of U.S. arms to Israel. Sixty arrests were made, with Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling implementing the CPD’s new mass arrest policy.
Again I biked home and listened to the proceedings from the United Center on the radio. Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband, said “Kamala is a joyful warrior … and here is the thing about joyful warriors: they are still warriors.” I remembered the video I saw of a twelve-year-old girl in Gaza whose jaw was blown off. She survived but may never be able to smile again.
While people were outside on the street protesting, thirty delegates from the Uncommitted campaign were inside the United Center, trying to extract a concession from the Harris campaign in exchange for their endorsement. The week began with them asking for an arms embargo, and a permanent and lasting ceasefire. There had been chatter from their delegates about Harris’s greater “empathy” for the Palestinian people and their suffering compared with Joe Biden. By Wednesday, their ask for the convention had been whittled down to five minutes of stage time for a Palestinian speaker. They were denied this demand, so they staged a sit-in outside the convention. I had cynically thought that the Harris campaign would give some symbolic concession to secure the seven hundred thousand Uncommitted voters—a promise to end two-thousand-pound-bomb shipments to Israel, or conditioning arms transfers on whether Israel allowed aid to enter Gaza—but even that was overly optimistic. It was clear that anyone who voiced their opposition to the obliteration of 5 percent of an already incarcerated population would be treated like a spoilsport, punished for marring what was supposed to be the Democratic Party’s great unity celebration.
The protests, both the March on the DNC and the Behind Enemy Lines action, which were intended to channel popular outrage at the Democratic Party’s ongoing policy of support for genocide, had felt deflated. They did not draw the numbers anticipated and seemed to have no effect whatsoever on the proceedings inside the United Center. The “inside strategy” of the Uncommitted movement seemed to be failing as well; their sit-in was staged outside. I felt paralysis at the knowledge that nothing I was doing, nothing anyone was doing, would slow the stream of Palestinians going from this world to the next.
The coalition’s final march on the DNC was scheduled for Thursday. After Monday, they decided against remaining in Park 578 and would instead march back to Union Park. The Thursday protest drew in many more people than Monday’s, and owing to whatever alchemy of numbers and drums, energy and anger, the entire thing felt much more ebullient and urgent. My cynicism melted at the sight of an Arab woman in an abaya and keffiyeh, cutting up and shouting into her bullhorn amid a circle of young Black Party for Socialism and Liberation drummers.
I saw Abuddayeh marching in the street and asked if he felt the marches had been successful. “On a qualitative level—incredible. Black and immigrant, the reproductive rights movement, and the LGBTQ movement, and the movement against police crimes, and the movement for police accountability, and the movement to demilitarize the border, all of those issues, all of those communities who also have a million bones to pick with the Democrats are here, they’re addressing their issues, we’re doing it together.” Behind him, the march was brought to a halt in the street, to keep the protest from dispersing too quickly.
I asked how the protest would help end the genocide. “Israel is losing diplomatically and politically and in the court of public opinion across the world. When Israel gets exposed the way it is, as a genocidal, racist apartheid state, that’s great for the rest of the world. It’s great for the rest of the world because Israel being defeated means that we strike a blow against the U.S. empire as well. When we were in the South African apartheid movement, there was international consensus at some point that said that South Africa did not have the right to exist as a racist, apartheid, white supremacist, settler-colonialist state. And now I believe we’re moving towards an international consensus that is saying that Israel also does not have the right to exist as a racist, apartheid, white supremacist, settler-colonialist, Zionist state.”
My sense that a protest ought to do something was possibly misguided. The goal of a protest might just be to show opposition, show that there are people united against the status quo. That evening, Kamala Harris accepted the nomination, saying, “I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.” The people on the street said the opposite. When she said, “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” they saw this as a portent of more death, not something to cheer. What happened inside the United Center made clear though, more so than anything in the last ten months, that the people in the halls of power do not care if every Palestinian to the last dies, and they will hasten their extinction without consequence. Perhaps it matters, too, even if it changes nothing, that tens of thousands of people do care.
