When Democratic voters began protesting President Joe Biden’s stance on the war in Gaza by voting “uncommitted” in primaries earlier this year, Imran Salha — an imam at the Islamic Center of Detroit — enthusiastically endorsed the campaign.
“President Joe Biden, history will record that we decided to be uncommitted to you because humanity, righteous Jews, Muslims and Christians decided to commit to each other,” he said at a rally just days before Michigan’s Democratic primary, flanked by leaders in the Uncommitted National Movement.
Now, just over two months out from the presidential election, Salha wants nothing to do with Uncommitted National — but not because he’s any fan of Kamala Harris.
Salha believes Uncommitted National has strayed from its original mission. He believes the group is now cozying up to Democrats — Abbas Alawieh, co-founder of Uncommitted National, recently told The Washington Post that he’s voting for Harris — and Salha doesn’t think leaders in the movement are holding Democrats accountable for the policy decisions that have contributed to the war’s death toll of over 40,000 Palestinians.
On Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention, Alawieh led a sit-in protest to pressure DNC organizers to add a pro-Palestinian speaker to their roster, after organizers declined to do so. The pressure campaign didn’t work. And instead of getting a speaker who would nod to their problems, Harris spent a couple minutes in her DNC speech advocating for Israel’s right “to defend itself.”
It was, once again, a disappointing moment for the uncommitted movement.
“They are missing the mark,” Salha said of uncommitted organizers. “They really are getting played. We need to invest in a long-term strategy that breaks away from choosing the lesser of two evils every four years.”
Hudhayfah Ahmad, a spokesperson for the Abandon Harris Campaign, put it more bluntly.
“This is humiliating,” he told NOTUS. “It’s futile. They’re learning what we at Abandon Biden have always known. That’s why we launched Abandon Harris. Every single day, this party vindicates us.”
NOTUS spoke to more than a dozen individuals — members of the uncommitted movement, leaders of national Arab American organizations, community leaders in Dearborn, Michigan, leaders of national progressive movements and Democratic insiders. Some described the uncommitted movement as a necessary voice for continuing the conversation about the war in Gaza. Others felt Uncommitted National, the de facto face of the movement, has an incessant willingness to negotiate with Democrats at the expense of alienating Arab American voters.
But the point is that the uncommitted movement — always more diffuse in opinion than many have presented — is at a crossroads. And the movement seems to be fracturing into even more offshoots.
Leaders in Uncommitted National didn’t address the concerns many in the Arab American community have expressed about the group’s strategy, responding to questions with only a single sentence about Democratic principles.
“All we are asking is for the Democratic Party to live up to its own values of equal rights for all,” said Waleed Shahid, the group’s senior adviser.
To its credit, the general uncommitted movement has had some success, at least in getting the attention of high-ranking Democrats. Almost 700,000 voters across the country cast “uncommitted” protest votes in Democratic primaries, yielding 30 delegates at the DNC.
Harris, at a rally in Detroit mid-August, sympathized with Uncommitted National’s leaders and signaled openness to hearing their plea for an arms embargo on Israel. Harris’ campaign manager later traveled to Michigan to hear uncommitted delegates’ concerns.
The movement also has the support of institutional Democrats and progressives in the House and Senate, as well as national figures like author Ta Nehisi Coates, who penned an essay in defense of the movement. The DNC, in a historic move this week, even debuted its first panel on Palestinian human rights.
“The fact that this issue is actually getting all this attention during this convention, even though it’s an uphill fight just to get to this point by itself, is a big accomplishment,” Hanna Hanania, who sits on the board of the American Federation of Ramallah, Palestine, told NOTUS.
Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of progressive organization Our Revolution, noted that a number of Democrats at the DNC sympathized with the loss of Palestinian lives, and he pointed to that widespread sentiment as a sign of the movement’s efficacy.
“Several keynote speakers — including Sen. Warnock, AOC and Mayor Johnson — spoke up about the plight of the Palestinian community,” he said.
But as things stand, Harris hasn’t staked out a position on the war in Gaza that is that much different from Biden’s. In fact, she’s basically been in lockstep with the White House.
Like Biden, Harris has called for the war to end and has expressed sympathy for the loss of Palestinian lives. Like Biden, she hasn’t called for an arms embargo on Israel — a stance that matters the most to the uncommitted movement. What has changed for the movement, however, is that Harris just isn’t Biden, potentially reshaping the rage that was a looming threat to Democrats in November.
Some Arab American voters back in Michigan fear, to varying degrees, that Uncommitted National is so focused on engaging Democrats that it has lost sight of advocating for its constituents.
Abraham Aiyash, a state representative in Michigan, acknowledged the movement’s role in opening up “further engagement to allow us to continue to push this conversation forward.” But he doesn’t know if that “addresses the concern of the killing of innocent men, women and children.”
“One has to just hope that things will shift,” he said.
Others argue it’s time Uncommitted National washes its hands of the Democratic party. Ahmad of the Abandon Harris Campaign spoke of “rumblings” among voters in Michigan that the leaders of Uncommitted National are “waiting around for crumbs in order to line up behind Harris.”
“Abandon Harris is going to prove to you and show that we can make a dent in your voting numbers and make you lose, which then will help us hold you accountable in the future,” he said. “Sticking around longer and longer and longer, saying, ‘Come on, give us something. Please give us something,’ isn’t really pressuring anybody. You’re not pressuring anybody. Actually, the pressure is actually on you to do something.”
Abed Hammoud, a longtime Democrat who advises Arab American organizing efforts, told NOTUS he saw this moment coming since the movement’s early days, arguing that uncommitted leaders were always Democrats who were unlikely to buck the party line.
“These are Democrats who are protesting the Democratic Party,” Hammoud said. “It means, when the protest is over, ‘I’m still in the Democratic Party.’ These were not defectors. These were not people who left the party, you know, like the Republicans who defect because of Trump.”
But for those like Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, the emerging divisions within the movement aren’t concerning. He argued the movement isn’t a monolith, likening it to the civil rights movement of the 1960s which was marked by ideological splits between the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
“You have folks who protest the system and you have folks who are playing within the system, and both are needed to ultimately move the needle on the issue of Gaza, just as they both were needed to move the issue on civil rights,” he told NOTUS.
Hammoud added that it’s necessary to have a “dialogue with whoever’s in office, because you want to ensure that the voices around the table are voices who look like you and sound like you.”
But he also didn’t knock those unwilling to engage with Democrats, noting that the ultimate goal is what unites everyone in the movement.
“Ultimately, we all need to have a North Star, and the North Star is a just Palestinian state,” he said.
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Tinashe Chingarande is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.