‘Uncommitted’ Leaders Voting for Harris
Abbas Alawieh, Lexi Zeidan, and Layla Elabed, Palestinian leaders of the Uncommitted Movement against the war in Gaza, have stated publicly that they are voting for Harris to block Trump. Uncommitted National Movement has released a video statement urging supporters to vote against Trump (video below).
UPDATE: Arab-American Leaders in Dearborn, Michigan publicly and collectively endorse Kamala Harris for President.
Uncommitted National Movement has released a video statement urging supporters to vote against Trump.
Aymann IsmailOct 16, 20245:40 AM Originally published in SLATE.com
Last week, the movement of “uncommitted” protest voters who withheld support from President Joe Biden over his administration’s continued support for Israel’s war in Gaza gave its firmest anti-Trump statement yet, leading many to wonder if the group had softened its stance toward Kamala Harris—or might even endorse Democrats. Harsh criticism followed from all directions: What did the group really believe now?
[Abbas] Alawieh said that he plans to vote for Harris so that he can continue with his anti-war efforts, despite her lack of alignment with his values on the issue. “But I am concerned with Donald Trump’s very specific plans to suppress pro Palestinian human rights organizing,” he said.
Guardian UK, Sept. 19, 2024
“At this time, our movement opposes a Donald Trump presidency whose agenda includes plans to accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of anti-war organizing,” said Alawieh. “And our movement is not recommending a third-party vote in the presidential election, especially as third-party votes in key swing states could help inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency, given our country’s broken electoral college system.”
Uncommitted, the national group of Arab Americans, Muslim Americans and Palestinian rights activists that emerged from primary-season voters protesting President Biden’s Middle East policy, took a big step Tuesday toward encouraging supporters to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
NY Times, Oct. 8 2024
In a video detailing the plans and suggestions of Trump advisers to expel or displace Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, Lexi Zeidan, a Dearborn, Mich., resident and co-founder of the group, stopped short of endorsing Ms. Harris. But she concluded, “We have to orient less toward who is the better candidate and more toward what is the better antiwar approach in building our collective power.”
Layla Elabed, a leader and founder of the movement, told me days later on the phone what happened. Elabed played a key role in diverting some 100,000 votes away from Biden during the Democratic primary. After several failed attempts to push Harris’ campaign toward meaningful policy changes on U.S. support for Israel’s military actions in Gaza and Lebanon, the group issued a pointed nonendorsement of the Democratic candidate. Now, as Elabed weighs the dangers of another Trump presidency—alongside hesitance to support Harris amid ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli actions in Gaza, Lebanon, and beyond—she still questions whether there is any “right” way to vote. Elabed explained to me this thinking and candidly addressed the internal decisions of the movement. Our interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Aymann Ismail: Can you tell me what’s happened in the lead-up to the election, after all the activity at the Democratic National Convention?
Layla Elabed: Things have been really hard ever since we came out with our nonendorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, while also urging voters to block Trump. Abbas [Alawieh, a fellow leader of the movement] came out publicly in the Washington Post saying that if it was a binary choice between Harris or Donald Trump, he would vote for Harris. And then Lexi [Zeidan, another leader] with her anti-Trump video. They are being skinned alive by the community, who are frustrated, feeling like we’ve betrayed the grassroots movement and are offering a soft endorsement of Vice President Harris by saying how bad Trump is. Folks are taking that as “Oh, so you want us to vote for Kamala Harris?”
That isn’t what you’re doing?
We are signaling that to have the most fertile political landscape to continue what we do, we need to block Trump. And in a battleground state like Michigan, voting for Jill Stein could essentially help Donald Trump. There is a percent of uncommitted voters whose hard line is “Without a policy change, there is no way in hell I could ever vote for anybody in this administration, or vote for any candidate that hasn’t promised that they will protect innocent people.” I get that. I am one of those people and intend on skipping the top of the ticket. But there are a significant number of uncommitted voters who cast their vote between February and June as a way to send a message, who are now coming to this realization and the reality that it’s going to be either Vice President Harris or Donald Trump that is going to be president.
This movement is multiracial, multigenerational, multicultural, multireligious. We know that Vice President Harris is not going to be the hero on this issue. Some of our delegates will be voting for her and are really not happy about it. They’re not going to the polls joyous—it’s a very depressing vote and a very depressing election. But when you have someone like Donald Trump, it’s not just a Donald Trump presidency, or even a Republican Party. It’s a MAGA party that wants to defund the Department of Education, to strip away civil liberties, to see an aggressive mass deportation of our immigrant communities, and to criminalize Palestinian advocacy.
Until now, we’ve gone up against the status quo, and we’ve made strides and progress. The best conditions after this election where we can keep building the way that we’ve been building—not just for us, but for everybody that is doing Palestinian advocacy and liberation work, unfortunately—could be under Kamala Harris’ presidency.
How have conversations about this internally played out?
The political landscape in Dearborn is unique. People don’t necessarily want to hear about political strategy. And I don’t blame them. We are saying, “Let’s try to be politically strategic right now and empower ourselves by empowering the Democrats who are with us,” at a time when the level of dehumanization we are experiencing is at an all-time high. Their hard line is punishing this administration for complicity in genocide—which, yes, we all want them punished. Harris is not a hero on this issue, and she’s not very different from Trump on Israel. Blind unconditional support for Israel’s apartheid, occupation, siege, and violence against Palestinians is U.S. policy, not a Trump or Harris or Biden policy. It is a policy of this country to unconditionally support. This is not new. The genocide has only woken everybody up. And for me personally, I don’t think punishing Vice President Kamala Harris at this time is strategically the best thing for us to continue growing the broader Palestinian liberation movement.
Have you succeeded in changing anyone’s mind?
There is a silent group in the community that are holding their nose and voting for Harris because of the threat of a Trump presidency. This is not a narrative that resonates with everyone in our community. If the presidential primary is any indication for how this November election will look, the majority of registered voters in Dearborn will not go out and vote.
I appreciate how difficult it must be to continue to talk about political engagement. Kamel Ahmad Jawad, a resident of Dearborn, was just killed by U.S.-provided munitions in an Israeli strike in Lebanon.
It fucking sucks. Walahi. It’s not just Kamel—so many people in our community are losing family members: aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, grandparents, extended family members. Their family members in Lebanon and Gaza are literally picking up the body parts of their loved ones off the ground. And here I am, trying to be: How can I come to our community members and talk through our thought process as they grapple with what’s happening in their home countries?
People push back and say, “No, if we punish the Democrats now, they’ll come back to us in four years.” Or: “If Donald Trump is in office, Democrats will work harder against Donald Trump’s policies.” Honestly, I say, “Ya Rab,” I hope they’re right and we will see the turnaround that people are very hopeful for. I just don’t see that happening. And I actually think that every time, especially under Trump, it actually pushes our government to move more right. Even after four years, if we come back to a Democratic president, they do very little to shift Trump policies.
What do you think has been most effective in trying to get people to reconsider not voting?
I don’t know if people remember what it was like under Donald Trump. I remember. I’m a community organizer, and it was, like, every week of rapid response. It was protecting mass deportation of our community members. It was going from Black Lives Matter protests to a Muslim ban rally. And if we are all going to be distracted by blocking a MAGA administration that is stripping away our civil liberties, when are we going to be advocating for Palestinian human rights? When are the United Auto Workers going to be advocating for Palestinian human rights? When is the Movement for Black Lives going to be able to do that, when we are all so distracted by Trump’s Day 1 promise of instituting the largest deportation operation in this country’s history? And around Palestinian advocacy specifically, he has already signaled that he will be targeting students and stripping organizations that are doing Palestinian advocacy work of their 501(c)(3) status. If this work becomes criminalized under a Trump presidency, I can see our allies that have been supportive becoming hesitant, not because they suddenly won’t care about Palestinian human rights, but because they fear losing their nonprofit status and funding, and because they serve a lot of other communities and want to be able to continue doing that.
So what does the uncommitted movement have planned for October and November?
We don’t have a strategy going into November. We put out statements that we weren’t going to endorse Kamala Harris. Now we’re educating the community about the political assessment behind that. We’ve been meeting with coalition partners like Green New Deal and Sunrise Movement to figure out what’s next. Do we create an organization? Hand this work to existing ones? Dismantle and call it a day? Or keep a campaign structure into the 100 days of the next administration? We’re talking to experts, Capitol Hill folks, and political strategists.
There’s a number of ways that the uncommitted infrastructure that we built could be leveraged. Right now, we have 90 Democratic leaders who had signed a letter of support for a resolution to condition aid to Israel. We have the support and allyship of a number of organizations and entities that live within the Democratic coalition: UAW, the teachers union, the American Postal Workers, a number of labor unions, climate change folks, those who led the Green New Deal and Sunrise Movement and Working Families Party, Movement for Black Lives, the Black Church PAC, Rabbis for Ceasefire, and more left anti-Zionist Jewish groups. So I want to see this coalition used in a principled way to be able to continue advocating for Palestinian human rights and create the conditions for a liberated Palestine, hopefully in the near future.
That is one of the reasons why we came to the assessment that we did in our nonendorsement of Vice President Harris, but also our recommendation to block Trump. Because if we are going to use this coalition to continue advocating for Palestinian human rights, then we also have a responsibility to all of our allies and coalition partners that we are ensuring that all of our civil liberties are going to be protected.
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