At the Democratic National Convention this week in Chicago, Israel’s war on Gaza was the elephant in the room. On this Intercept podcast special, we’re talking about the Democratic Party’s simmering debate about Gaza inside and outside the United Center — culminating in Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech Thursday night. Intercept senior politics reporter Akela Lacy, who is in Chicago reporting on the convention, joins senior editor Ali Gharib to discuss Democrats’ approach to the war and Harris’s speech.
Ahead of the convention, Harris’s ascension raised the possibility of a changed approach to Gaza, and activists organized among delegates in the streets to try to make it happen. Protests raged. The “Uncommitted” movement pushed for Palestinian speaker on the main stage. And Harris’s role in the war got a controversial shoutout from New york Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — sparking some indirect swipes from a fellow member of the progressive Squad.
By Thursday night, the war on Gaza made its way into Harris’s speech. But did her words signal the change in policy that Palestine solidarity advocates were hoping for?
[Theme music]
Ali Gharib: Hello and welcome to the Intercept’s roundup from the Democratic National Convention. I’m Ali Gharib, and I’m a senior editor at The Intercept.
Akela Lacy: And my name is Akela Lacy. I’m a senior politics reporter at The Intercept.
AG: So, we’re recording here on Thursday night and Kamala Harris has just given her speech accepting the Democratic nomination to be the party’s presidential candidate. And she did wind up addressing Gaza as sort of the culmination of what had been one of the biggest issues looming over the convention and, especially, outside, where there have been protests to try and change U.S. policy towards Israel’s war in Gaza.
So, let’s give a listen to what Kamala Harris said about Gaza at tonight’s speech. Roll clip.
Kamala Harris: President Biden and I are working around the clock, because now is the time to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done. And let me be clear, and let me be clear, I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7. Including unspeakable sexual violence, and the massacre of young people at a music festival.
At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety. Over and over again, the scale of suffering is heartbreaking. President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.
AG: Akela has been in Chicago all week covering the convention for us, and she’s been writing a lot about the conversation that’s been happening about Gaza. It’s been sort of an inside/outside game, where there’s been light touches from inside the convention hall and a real effort to get voices on the dais who would be talking about Israel’s war in Gaza, but they had not been very successful. And Akela has been writing about the efforts to do that, and the protests happening outside, and why people are protesting.
So, Akela, maybe you can talk a little bit about some of your bigger takeaways from Harris’s speech and her comments on Gaza.
AL: So, I want to set the stage a little bit for the atmosphere leading up to this convention. It’s been just a little bit over a month since Joe Biden dropped out of the race and Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee for the party, it’s been 10 months since October 7, and there have been tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in Gaza with weapons that the U.S. is continuing to send to Israel.
Just the week before the convention, the U.S. approved another $20 billion weapons sale to Israel. And, ahead of the convention, organizers and protesters were planning demonstrations in Chicago, which is home to the largest Palestinian population in the country. Delegates who pledged to be uncommitted, rather than support Harris and her role in the Biden administration’s arming of Israel, planned to pressure the DNC to let them host events at the convention, but also to have a Palestinian American speaker on the main stage.
AG: You wrote a little bit about some of these protests, both inside and out. And, with regards to the uncommitted movement, there’s the organized campaign for uncommitted delegates who are demanding a change in U.S.-Gaza policy before they would commit to any Democratic candidate. But there are delegates who are committed to support Harris, who also were protesting.
Can you tell us just a little bit about the protests that you covered inside, where a banner was unfurled, and the kind of assumptions that were made about the uncommitted delegate who actually is a devout Harris supporter?
AL: So, I went into the United Center on Monday night, against my better judgment, but it was good. Because I was there to capture the moment when a Florida delegate named Nadia Ahmad unfurled a banner that read “Stop Arming Israel” a few minutes into Biden’s speech that night. Ahmad and several other delegates held the banner together [with] another Michigan superdelegate named Liano Sharon and several other folks. And, almost immediately, I saw other delegates in their section and other people in the section behind them both stand up to use the “We Heart Joe” signs that everyone had that night, to block the sign. And then, to start hitting Nadia and several of the other people who were holding the banner, using the signs to hit the banner itself.
Ahmad is a Harris delegate who has been pushing her for a ceasefire, one of around 200 or so delegates who are pledged to support Harris in November, who are pushing Harris and the Biden administration to secure a permanent ceasefire and an arms embargo.
That demonstration on Monday was notable because Nadia is a Harris delegate, she’s not part of the Uncommitted movement. And the narrative around a lot of the work that Uncommitted has been doing is that they are undermining Democrats’s chances of beating Trump in November by withholding their support for Harris. And that is the primary source of the opposition to the Biden administration’s policy towards Israel. When the reality is that many of these calls are coming from within the party, from folks who are committed to helping Democrats win the White House, and that the position against the current administration’s policy towards Israel is the position of a majority of Democratic voters.
AG: The kind of backdrop for all this is that progressives have really come under attack from groups like AIPAC, you’ve done a ton of reporting about this. AIPAC has become the biggest player in Democratic primaries, and they actually took down a couple of incumbent Democrats, [like] Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman in the House. And it’s this become this real rift within the Democratic Party, which was reflected in kind of the tensions around the convention, the protesters outside. So, it was even part of the rift between members of The Squad, which is the progressive group of members of Congress that Bowman and Bush were both part of.
And your reporting this week touched on that. You contributed some reporting to a story by Aída Chávez, where you recorded Ilhan Omar making a remark about what was, before Kamala Harris’s speech, one of the only mentions of Gaza from the main stage, which was by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but it was very much in the frame of cheerleading Kamala Harris’s role in dealing with the Gaza crisis.
Can you talk a little bit about what AOC said, and what you reported on Ilhan Omar, the progressive representative from Minnesota, saying effectively about her remarks? I mean, it was a little bit veiled, because she was addressing the Biden administration, but she actually quoted AOC directly.
AL: Sure. So, in Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s speech on Monday, she said that Harris had been working, quote, “tirelessly” for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: And she is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza, and bringing hostages home.
AL: During a press conference the next day with Uncommitted folks and Rep. Bush, Rep. Omar spoke about how she has been watching her colleagues in the Biden administration for the last 10 months sweeping aside what the U.S. has been doing to allow Israel to continue executing civilians in Gaza. And she said that working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire doesn’t really mean anything, when we’re continuing to supply weapons to Israel.
Ilhan Omar: It’s been unconscionable for me in the last 10 months to witness my colleagues in this administration refusing to recognize the genocidal war that is taking place in Gaza. To not see the mothers who have lost countless children, the babies whose dead bodies are being dug out, to not understand that working tirelessly for a ceasefire is really not a thing, and they should be ashamed of themselves.
AL: That was the exact phrase that Ocasio-Cortez used on Monday. I don’t know that Omar herself would characterize it as a direct attack on her, but that’s certainly how many observers read it. We reported on that, and this has been part of the analysis of the evolving role in The Squad, both in Congress, and sort of just in Democrat politics writ large.
What, if any, power they have been able to build, given that two of their members have been knocked out, that other progressives have been knocked out by the pro-Israel lobby in previous cycles, and what the strategy will look like as they wrestle with those attacks and those losses. There are people who say that AOC is the example of what progressives should be doing, building power within the administration, creating a space to be on the main stage at the DNC several years after first being elected to Congress as this very much this progressive upstart who was antagonizing, in a positive way, the administration to acknowledge what progressives wanted to see.
And the criticism from folks who don’t necessarily see that strategy as being an effective one is, what is all of that worth if, when you do get that opportunity to be on the main stage, you sort of conceal and hold water for what the administration is allowing to happen in Gaza.
So, that’s how Ilhan Omar’s remarks were read as part of this shift in how the squad is approaching this, rather than standing physically side by side. We saw Ilhan Omar go to the sit-in that ceasefire delegates held after the DNC rejected calls to have a Palestinian speaker last night, and sit with the Uncommitted leaders, and hug them, and show physical support for them.
And AOC, whether she was responding to pressure from folks from the comments earlier that day or not, FaceTimed in. And a lot of people also saw space to criticize that, too. Sort of a little bit on the nose.
AG: Yeah. You know, I think that’s right, that it’s like, these are important questions, and what we have here, the kind of scale of destruction that we’re seeing in Gaza is so vast. And Natasha Lennard wrote a column earlier this week after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks, where she said, like, it was this show of party unity [that] really came at the expense of arguably the most pressing moral issue of our time, which is this ongoing, extremely destructive war in Gaza.
In the end, the uncommitted delegates were unable to get a Palestinian speaker on the main stage. There was at least one speech that was released after the fact that they tried to get approved by the DNC that had an endorsement of Kamala Harris in there. It wasn’t very aggressive language, it just was sort of mentioning and objecting to U.S. policy in a pretty mild-mannered way.
And all that culminated in Kamala Harris’s speech which, I have to say, I was surprised at how much — like, a paragraph-and-a-half, or two paragraphs of the speech — but even, still, just considering how little of that had been allowed on the main stage, it did sort of catch me a little bit off guard. And I think that probably owes in large part to the protests that were happening.
But, also, it just didn’t really say much, did it?
AL: Yeah. I, actually, right before the speech, was talking with some other reporters, and I wrongly said that I did not expect her to even mention Gaza, because of the way that the DNC and the campaign had responded to the requests from uncommitted. Obviously, I was wrong about that.
I was surprised that she spoke about Palestinian self-determination, just given that we approved a weapons sale to Israel last week. When she started talking about Israel, I kind of thought it was going one way, and this is obviously what they wanted. But I think the bar is so low that it’s easy for the campaign to say, OK, let’s put a couple of sentences in there about how terribly we feel about what’s happening in Palestine, and that we hope that they can achieve dignity and security for themselves.
And there’s no world in which she would have acknowledged our role in arming Israel in this speech, but the contradiction in saying those two things back to back, and leaving that sort of hanging out there, like, oh, how did all this destruction happen? Where did all this destruction come from?
I did see some people praising the level of applause that came after she said those things about Palestine. But, again, this is from the convention floor where a delegate who unfurled this protest banner was hit on the head, and nothing happened to any of the people that were involved.
So, these are many of the split-screen contradictions that have been happening all week at this convention. And I think the speech tied that up nicely, if not depressingly.
AG: And the applause really did, it just spoke to the way that Gaza has become an issue in the Democratic Party, where it’s like, the hesitance on the part of the Biden administration for so long to make a forceful intervention in trying to get some kind of ceasefire was remarkable, mainly because Democrats overwhelmingly support a ceasefire. It was remarkable because of the moral issues, of course, but also it was kind of lousy politics. And so, Kamala Harris being a little more full-throated as she debuts, I mean, at this point, she’s more or less continuing the Biden administration’s line, but she’s coming out of the gate a lot more full-throated.
But, yeah, it was exactly as you said; I think you said on Twitter that there was zero acknowledgement of the U.S. role in all of this. And, in fact, the language that she used was so passive voice, you know? At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. It’s like, so many innocent lives lost, there’s just no attribution whatsoever for the way that this war is being prosecuted, as you have very rightly pointed out, enabled by U.S. weapons.
I think that people would be right to still wonder about the question of whether the advent of Kamala Harris’s presidential nomination could signal some kind of shift for U.S. policy in Gaza. And I would say that this speech just really was extremely careful not to come down on either side of that.
Is that the feeling you got from protesters outside, and people inside the convention hall?
AL: I don’t know that I would say that. I mean, she was adamant that we will continue to be Israel’s biggest ally in the region. And what that means for all the other things that she said about Palestine suggests that she will not shift her policy from how the Biden administration has run things.
But, yeah. I mean, they’re being careful. But, again, I said this already, the bar is super low. And if all they have to do is add a couple of lines in there to say that we’re acknowledging what Uncommitted is pushing for, we’re acknowledging what the Heresy’s Fire delegates are pushing for, and they can win the White House, then there’s no other leverage that those groups have to ensure that their demands are actually implemented.
AG: Yeah, good point. And all this came amid this kind of hyped-up discourse about Kamala Harris being, like, the good cop against Donald Trump. And there was some tough talk in her speech. She was aggressive on not only supporting Israel, but other aspects of foreign policy. And she came down hard on securing the border stuff, which is something that the party has been moving on more, and certainly was in the platform a lot, too.
And there [are] worries also about what Harris’s nomination could mean for the Democratic Party’s positions on justice issues and immigration as well. And maybe you could speak a little bit to that stuff, Akela. You’ve been really active talking about this on Twitter, and I just think it’s been a fascinating discussion. And to watch it unfold, and the entrenched sides kind of take exactly the roles you would expect them to take.
AL: So, as soon as Harris became the presumptive nominee, her campaign went back to very much what we saw in 2020, which was drawing this distinction between Kamala Harris as a prosecutor who addressed many of the kinds of crimes and corruption that Trump was convicted of. We saw a ton of this all throughout the convention. Having law and order just sort of posted on the screen behind the convention stage.
But we also heard a lot of talking about Kamala Harris’s support for criminal justice reform. There was a speaker last night who spoke about how she helped get a wrongfully arrested woman out of custody. And so, that created this real dissonance — for me, at least — around how she plans to address the push for reform that gained so much traction since 2020. And, in a lot of ways, it has fallen flat, at least at the federal level, and has been rolled back at the local and state level in a lot of places. And combining that with this aggressive, quote-unquote, “tough on crime” image that she’s trying to paint for herself as a contrast to Trump.
My interest in this is partially because we do a lot of coverage of the backlash to the reform push and the reform push itself, and I’m very interested in how the campaign is thinking about how this might affect voters who have incarcerated family or friends who have been affected by — she talks about this — the broken criminal justice system, and what that means when you’re also touting how aggressive you are towards crime, and not necessarily acknowledging how that attitude contributes to why the system is broken in so many ways.
The stuff about the border: We saw Biden leaning into trying to cut off, I guess, the attacks from Republicans on this. We know that U.S. foreign policy is a big part of why so many people are fleeing Central America and coming to the border. We also know that investments in Homeland Security and CBP and ICE have created astounding civil liberties and human rights violations that the administration has also been criticized for.
And, rather than acknowledging the harm that those policies have created, it seems that Democrats have calculated that it’s more in their interest to adopt the same language that Republicans are using on the border, to show — whether it’s Republican voters or conservative/moderate Democrats who might see this as an issue — that they’re going to be just as tough. So, that language from Harris tonight was interesting to see. Although, you know, not surprising; she’s been pretty consistent on that for a while.
And then, also, the line about having the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world was a little disturbing, given what we’ve been funding the Israeli military to do and, also, how much the party has at least tried to distance themselves from the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, to hear them fall back on these things after we’ve heard so much about how far progressives have come was certainly sobering.
AG: Yeah. The kind of battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, I think, is very much continuing. And Akela, your reporting has consistently been at the forefront of all this stuff, so I appreciate you so much, the work that you’re doing, and also taking the time to chat with me a little bit here tonight on the last night of the Democratic convention.
AL: Thank you. I am very glad it’s over.
AG: Well, we’ll leave it there.
A special thanks to Senior Editor Maryam Saleh and our Editor-in-Chief, Ben Muessig.
Our producer is Laura Flynn. Legal review is done by Shawn Musgrave and David Bralow. Akela Lacy is a Senior Politics Reporter at The Intercept. Thank you again for chatting with me here.
And I’m Ali Gharib. Thanks everyone.
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