Since she took over as the de facto and now the official Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign have been almost completely silent about Gaza, outside of a brief reference to Palestinian rights, dignity, and self-determination in her acceptance speech Thursday night. On the one hand, this makes a kind of cold political sense. Harris clearly does not want the election to be about Israel’s war in Gaza, and speaking about the conflict, let alone offering a clear policy vision, is a minefield that even lifelong regional experts sometimes have difficulty navigating. Over the past year, two prominent Democratic critics of U.S. policy in Gaza have been taken out in intraparty primaries. Given that Harris appears to be winning this election, albeit narrowly, it is understandable why her campaign might not want to fix what isn’t broken. But the decision to exclude a Palestinian speaker from last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago was not just morally indefensible—it was also a sign that senior Democrats are almost completely unaware of how much their own voters have changed over the course of this century.
The public-opinion transformation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict inside the Democratic Party is a huge and almost entirely unheralded victory for the activist left. Twenty years ago, at the height of the Second Intifada, Gallup found that only 16 percent of self-identified Democrats sympathized more with Palestinians than Israelis in the conflict. As recently as 2016, that number was at just 23 percent. But it has subsequently more than doubled, and now a plurality of Democrats—49 percent—say they sympathize more with the Palestinians, versus 38 percent for Israelis. And yet this tectonic shift has seemed to barely register with the party’s senior leadership.
It’s not just the Gallup polling about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but also surveys that ask about what’s going on in Gaza today showing this sea change. In a May Data for Progress survey, 83 percent of Democrats supported a “permanent cease-fire and de-escalation of violence” in Gaza. A March Gallup poll found that a clear majority of all respondents, as well as 75 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of independents, now oppose Israeli military action in Gaza, although those numbers were a little bit lower in the most recent survey. Gallup polling also found that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s net favorability among all respondents in July was down 10 points, with just 12 percent of Democrats saying they support him. And in a March Pew study, 44 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents opposed U.S. military aid for Israel, with just 25 percent in favor.
So there is a fairly strong public opinion consensus about this issue inside the Democratic Party—it’s just not what the Harris campaign seems to think it is. Opposition to both Israeli policy and America’s support for it is actually growing among elected Democrats just as it is among the rank-and-file, as evidenced by the fact that about half of all Democrats decided to skip Netanyahu’s July address to a joint session of Congress. Harris herself didn’t preside over the speech, as has been customary, because of a “scheduling conflict.”
We don’t have to pretend that this is a slam-dunk issue for Democrats to see that there is room to embrace supporters of Palestinian rights. After all, among all Americans, a majority still sympathize more with Israel, although support for Palestinians is at an all-time high of 31 percent, according to Gallup. Pew’s research found that among all Americans, just 22 percent think that Hamas’ reasons for fighting are completely or even somewhat valid, as opposed to 58 percent for Israel’s. Only 2 percent of Americans support a solution to the conflict in the form of a single state governed by Palestinians—which sometimes seems like what many of the most vocal campus protesters are calling for. On the contrary, a plurality of all Americans (40 percent) as well as 48 percent of Democrats support the very much not-in-vogue two-state solution to the conflict. There are good reasons, in other words, why you are not going to hear leading Democrats embrace some of the more fringe positions of the pro-Palestinian left anytime soon.
But there is also an easily discernible normie-Democratic position here, one that could have been showcased at the convention and packaged for persuadable independents: Netanyahu is an obstacle to peace. A cease-fire, even one that means elements of Hamas survive the conflict, is preferable to the mass slaughter of innocent Palestinian civilians. Democrats should no longer support selling billions of dollars in military hardware to Israel if this is how those terrible instruments are going to be used. It’s not clear how the Uncommitted movement would react to such a policy shift, but these do appear to be their main asks, and they happen to be defensible in the realm of public opinion. And regardless of whether it immediately repairs fissures inside the party, a shift would be better, from both a strategic and moral perspective, than pretending that Israel is not in fact using American weapons and largesse to brutalize the Palestinian people for the crimes of Hamas in clear violation of the laws of war and basic human decency.
Yes, Gaza is a low-salience issue even for most young voters and was not entirely responsible for Biden’s troubles with young voters before he dropped out. And there aren’t that many potential Harris voters who are going to sit out the election if she doesn’t support, for example, an arms embargo against Israel, though a nonzero number will. But the lesson of all this public opinion research is that it is possible, in theory, to get a certain number of those voters back by supporting broadly popular policy positions, and to do so without either alienating independents or embracing ideas that are too far to the left on the issue for the broad center of the American people.
Inviting a Palestinian to speak at the convention should have been an even easier lift than executing a policy pivot. Wednesday’s moving speech by the parents of Israeli American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin included a pointed call to end the suffering of innocent Palestinian civilians. Both Jon Polin and Sarah Goldberg-Polin have been vocal supporters of a cease-fire agreement that would bring the remaining hostages, including their son, out of captivity alive. There is no reason that the DNC could not have offered space to a Palestinian speaker with a similar message—one that calls for the release of hostages, an end to the suffering of civilians in Gaza, and movement toward a negotiated solution to the broader conflict. The Uncommitted National Movement, after all, explicitly supported the DNC’s decision to give a speaking slot to the family members of hostages.
That is exactly what the speech by Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman would have done. A draft published in Mother Jones talked about her Palestinian family’s suffering as part of the conflict between Israel and Palestine without using language that might upend the DNC’s carefully stage-managed positioning on the issue. It referred to “massacres” without wading into the genocide debate. It called for the safe return of the hostages. And it positioned the pro-Palestinian coalition as firmly within the tradition of the Democratic Party. It would have been a great speech, and as Slate’s Aymann Ismail reported from the convention, such a low-cost compromise could have gone a long way toward mollifying uncommitted delegates and other attendees who are mystified by the Harris campaign’s refusal to engage with them.
Instead, the DNC chose to adopt a posture that would have made more political sense in the early 2000s: assuming that even talking about Palestinians as human beings deserving of the same respect, dignity, and security as Israelis is political poison, and that American voters are incapable of feeling the same sympathy for Palestinian civilians that they do for Israeli hostages.
That failure to respond to the clear shifts in public opinion both inside and outside the Democratic Party would have been understandable when the nominee and party leader was an 81-year-old man who was out of touch with his own supporters. But it is much less understandable now that Democrats have lined up behind a younger candidate who had one of the most liberal voting records during her one term in the U.S. Senate.
Let’s hope that sometime between now and November, the Harris campaign finds a way to do better.
