Inside Party Crisis
The Democrats’ 2024 “Autopsy” and the Party’s Refusal to Halt Weapons to Israel
When the DNC finally released its 192-page “autopsy” of what went wrong in the disastrous 2024 election that propelled Donald Trump back into the White House, it was a poorly written document full of typos that offered few if any insights. As Michael Arria noted in “It’s the Genocide Stupid,” the report contained “virtually no analysis of the Democratic policies that might have helped propel Trump to another victory. If one were compiling such a list, support for the Gaza genocide would presumably be near the top, but the issue is not mentioned once in the massive report.”
The Biden, then Harris campaigns refused to change their position on Gaza even though the majority of Biden/Harris voters agreed with halting US weapon’s transfers to Israel. In an open letter to Kamala Harris, “Not Another Bomb” coalition pleaded with the candidate saying;
Consider the overwhelming sentiment among your constituents: 86% of Democrats support the proposed ceasefire deal in Gaza. This is the mainstream view of our party’s base, as evidenced by a recent poll that reveals that 52% of Americans and 62% of Biden/Harris voters agree with halting arms sales to Israel. In addition, 70% of democratic voters support withdrawing U.S. military funding to Israel if Israel rejects the proposed ceasefire deal, as Israel has continuously done.
In the midst of a brutal genocide being live-streamed on social media platforms, the refusal of the party to listen to its constituents and halt arms to Israel, or even condition those arms transfers, certainly had a major effect on voting and factored into the reason that many democrats simply refused to participate in the election, as Harris lost millions of votes that Biden won in 2020.
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 10, “Netanyahu’s Congressional Address
as Unchecked Propaganda, and the US Political Establishment,” from the book The Complicit Lens, which details the struggle within the party to hold Israel accountable, and the untold damage done at the Democratic National Convention when the Harris-Waltz ticket wrote the Palestinians out of the party’s platform. It has been lightly edited.
Chicago 2024: The Democratic National Convention
On the morning of 10 August 2024, journalist Prem Thakker was on a bus with Party Delegates on their way to the DNC in Chicago, when he heard some of the delegates cheer as police cleared away pro-Palestinian demonstrators in the way of their bus. Thakker drew a comparison between this incident and the events of 1968, when Democrats also held their National Convention in Chicago. He observed with some disappointment that the genocide in Gaza could have been viewed as “a deep moral crossroads, a modern iteration of 1968 when mass protests against the Vietnam War were met with a brutal police response.” Instead, responding to those demanding justice for Palestinians in 2024 felt more like a “management of inconveniences.”
The party leaders actively supporting genocide were cheered on stage at the convention. This would be the most important event for Democrats before the November election. Although network anchors assured audiences that freedom of expression was tolerated at the DNC, The Intercept reported that three journalists holding camera equipment and wearing press badges were arrested while covering the Chicago convention protests.
The incident on the bus was just one of many political paradoxes that took place at the DNC. Another was the thunderous applause for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly” for a ceasefire. Later, the same crowd gave a fawning welcome to Hillary Clinton—the Secretary of State responsible for pushing then-President Barack Obama into the so-called “humanitarian war” against Libya, which led to more bloody destruction in the region. Clinton had also accused the students protesting the genocide of not knowing “very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or, frankly, about history, in many areas of the world.” Delegates both applauded calls to end the violence and to a speaker who derided that call. It was another moment when convention politics stopped making sense.
A Struggle “to Restore the Soul of the Democratic Party”
At the DNC, thirty uncommitted delegates pledged to Harris represented tens of thousands of anti-genocide constituents calling for a ceasefire. They had marked uncommitted on their ballots in protest of Biden’s role in arming Israel. These delegates came predominantly
from Minnesota, Michigan, and Washington. In the beginning, the Harris-Walz campaign of unity and good feelings was a needed reversal of the hate and anger emanating from Donald Trump, but the central problem raised during the primary remained; how would the party handle Israel’s crimes of war? For months, organizers in solidarity with Palestine fought to open a dialogue about Gaza, including pushing for a Palestinian speaker at the DNC. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor who saw the carnage after the Israeli assault on Gaza while volunteering at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, had hoped to “provide moral witness to the delegates.” But in a devastating blow that stunned organizers and delegates alike,
Democratic party operatives waited until the last day and then refused to let Haj-Hassan speak. Mehdi Hasan used the word erasure when referring to the 740,000 uncommitted voters denied a speaker. In response, organizers held a separate panel discussion with Haj-Hassan and Hala Hijazi, an activist who had lost almost 100 family members in Gaza. It was the first time that an official delegation at the DNC was devoted to defending the rights of Palestinians. Democracy Now! called this a struggle “to restore the soul of the Democratic party.”
But Vice President Harris seemed unaware of the party’s need to grapple with the US support of a genocide being live-streamed and demonstrably unpopular. Her speech at the DNC attempted a more empathetic tone as she described what was “happening” in Gaza
as “devastating,” “desperate,” and “heartbreaking,” a lexicon that Middle East Eye identified as empty words by “pro-war liberal politicians” expressing a “meaningless facsimile of empathy.” Failing to distinguish between the crime of collective punishment and the slaughter of civilians and Israeli self-defense, Harris said, “I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself ” against “the horror of a terrorist organization called Hamas.” The extent of her failure to formulate a new policy vision could be heard in the echoes of Israeli hasbara fabrications, as she referred to the “unspeakable sexual violence” committed by Hamas. Harris repeated that there was “widespread,” “weaponized sexual violence,” committed by Hamas on 7 October 2024, a false claim for which no evidence existed, but was promulgated by The New York Times. As Mehdi Hasan pointed out on MSNBC, Harris went out of her way to condemn Hamas sexual
violence, with no mention of Israel’s documented sexual violence against Palestinians in detention. Had media accurately reported the facts of the genocide or offered any criticism of Netanyahu’s speech before congress a month earlier, the DNC might have been much different. The Harris-Walz ticket failed again and again to address the genocide, preferring to fill political spaces with superficial campaign messaging that went so far as to represent Harris on a Flower Power poster. The Pop-Cult peace and love coded candidate openly contradicted her unequivocal support for a genocide.
DNC media campaigns helped hide one important reality: Harris’s best chance of winning was to represent the will of the American people, and she wouldn’t do it.
The hesitant, muddled, ultimately failed logic of the DNC reflected Biden’s own mixed messaging on Gaza—mildly critical of Netanyahu while funneling more weapons to him. Biden gave lip-service to the thousands outside on the streets at the DNC, “Those protesters
out in the street, they have a point; a lot of innocent people are being killed, both sides,” (Though by August 2024, the deaths tolls were not comparable, as 40,000 Palestinians had been killed since 7 October, amounting to a ratio of 33-1870). Biden repeatedly gaslit the public, assuring them that a ceasefire was imminent. For example, on 10 July, the US State Department said they were at the “10-yard line” for a ceasefire deal, a lie widely repeated in the US press. Though
the ceasefire never materialized, neither The New York Times nor other legacy media held the administration responsible. Meanwhile the US was authorizing $20 billion in weapons sales, and promising 6,500 munitions to Israel, along with $3.5 billion to buy more US weapons, giving Netanyahu little to no incentive to negotiate a ceasefire. As Eugene Robinson warned in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, “Democrats are not going to be given any sort of free pass on Gaza. Many who care passionately about Palestinian suffering believe that ‘Donald Trump would be worse’ sounds like an excuse, not a policy.”
Through surveys, the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) found that a large number of voters were more likely to cast a ballot for Harris if she would halt arms to Israel. But as election expert Nolan Higdon observed, “polling seems not to impact Democratic Party news media.” Indeed, a post-election poll showed that nearly a third of US voters who cast their ballots for Biden in 2020 did not vote for Harris in 2024 because of the party’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. “'Vice President Harris lost votes because of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,' IMEU said in a statement announcing the poll.” Though foreign policy is rarely a major factor in voter turnout, in 2024 the genocide in Gaza was an issue that surpassed the economy, immigration, healthcare, and abortion. One
of the only mainstream outlets to point this out at the time was the UK Guardian, that ran this headline, “Not changing course on Gaza was a colossal mistake by Kamala Harris.” A pseudo ceasefire was achieved only after the Democrats lost to an unhinged convicted felon. What
seemed like a victory for Trump, was handed to him by Biden’s refusal to bring Israel to account.
From Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of the US Congress on 24 July 2024, an honor bestowed only upon highly respected dignitaries—Netanyahu has given four of them, more than any other foreign dignitary—to the floor of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the US political establishment, with the help of its mainstream media megaphone, failed to give voice to US citizens concerned that Palestinians were enduring the most brutal genocidal violence ever perpetrated thanks to weapons supplied by the US government. Though many mid-level government officials tried to sound the alarm and worked to bring the Democratic administration back to its policies promoting human rights and the principles of international law, the US actively supported the actions and followed the propaganda dictates of a rogue settler-colonial state it helped to shape. Commenting on the tone-deaf leaders of the Democratic Party, Rep. Ilhan Omar told Mehdi Hasan, “come November 6, if we are to lose this election, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.”
Conclusion
Criag Mokhiber wrote a scathing condemnation of the “Autopsy” and the Democrat’s refusal to account for their loss in 2024 in any meaningful way, its failure to represent the will of their constituents, and finally do the right thing and stop the genocide. He observed; “Did anyone really expect the Dem Party leadership, which has been directly and enthusiastically complicit in the genocide & apartheid in Palestine, to issue an honest mea culpa on the matter? Time to write an ‘autopsy’ for the Party itself, and throw them, alongside the overtly fascist Republican Party, into the trash bin of history.”
But this assessment may be too harsh, as there seems to be movement toward change in the Democratic Party. Zohran Mamdoni’s mayoral win with a campaign celebrating the diversity of New York City, and his unapologetic voice as a Muslim has opened the media frame as the Israeli narrative continues to crumble. AIPAC has become toxic in politics and Pro-Palestinian progressives have been surging in primary contests. Chris Rabb’s primary win in Pennsylvania’s third district, as Mondowiess pointed out, can be attributed to his consistency on Palestine that resonated with voters. “who have felt betrayed by the Democrats' approach to Israel and foreign policy.” Analilia Mejia won a special election in New Jersey’s eleventh congressional district and is now in Congress. In New Jersey’s twelfth District Dr. Adam Hawamy, a pro-Palestinian army combat veteran who volunteered in Gaza won the primary on Tuesday, and as of 2 days ago, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is pulling ahead in the Michigan Senate race. Gaza and Palestine have changed the political landscape, as democratic voters have become more clear-eyed about the state of Israel, and the politicians who refuse to hold them accountable for genocide.
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