The Uncommitted Movement is uncommitted to resistance, committed to the establishment!

Julia Kassem 

Source: Al Mayadeen English

Uncommitted Movement leaders numerous times openly endorsed Harris, whose Zionist and equally genocidal track record and policies are clear and have been throughout her career.    

Employing faux-radical theatrics and performative tactics, the Uncommitted Campaign sprung up prior to last November’s presidential primaries. According to the movement, their core demand and core movement strategy is to pressure the Democratic party candidate to a ceasefire by selecting “uncommitted” on their primary ballot. As the movement’s platform has said, “If we can demonstrate our political power and discontent through thousands of 'Uncommitted' votes in the Michigan Democratic primaries, then Biden would feel more at risk of losing Michigan in the general election, prompting a potential reassessment of his financing and backing of Israel’s war in Gaza.”

The Uncommitted Movement is an electoral NGO and a Democratic Party Marketing project of Walid Shahid, branded by the New Yorker magazine as “the next generation of the progressive elite.” He is seasoned in repackaging grassroots issues into campaign drives and marketing the imperialist establishment Democratic party and its candidates (like AOC and Jamal Bowman, his past projects) to young anti-war, anti-capitalist voters. 

It first spread its tentacles in Michigan, home to the largest Arab and Muslim community in America, before branching out into other cities and 9 other states, mainly with a focus on those with high Muslim and Arab populations, like Wisconsin or Illinois. 

The Uncommitted Movement drew 700,000 nationwide votes - 100,000 from Michigan alone. The movement, during the Presidential primary votes, instructed its voters on Democratic Party ballots to select “uncommitted” to, as it was claimed, pressure the Biden administration into a ceasefire. It gave a good opportunity for the Democratic Party to data harvest and prepare to engineer their winning margin for November 2024 while doing nothing about stopping its unprecedented support of the criminal Zionist entity.

While the results of the March 2024 primaries exposed the contradictions between the party’s supposed voter base and the Democratic establishment, the movement still fence-sat through 10 months of genocide by the very administration, unwilling to put any substantial progress on the bankrollers of the genocide. Biden was easily swept away only to be, in dictatorial fashion, replaced by unelected Kamala Harris, who reaffirmed that the US “will give Israel what it needs to defend itself… against the brutal terrorist organization Hamas, which committed massacres and mass rapes on October 7.”

Yet despite this, Uncommitted Movement leaders numerous times openly endorsed Harris, whose Zionist and equally genocidal track record and policies are clear and have been throughout her career. The commitment of this movement is to “save the Democratic Party” and back it at all costs, rather than bring justice to the millions murdered in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and the Donbass, which this same party is responsible for slaughtering. Put simply, it is part and parcel of a fascistic containment strategy.

Working alongside Soros-funded JVP Action and within the Democratic party’s proverbially pro-Palestinian-branded members, it created a virtual space meant to contain the grievances of Arab Americans while continuing to benefit from their demographic as a key and easy voting base, while adopting, alongside other big-donor-funded Jewish “pro-Palestinian” organizations such as JVP and IfNotNow, the language of “both sides” and that Israelis are also victims of violence.

Since the 2016 election, where actually fascist Hillary Clinton ran as the destructive Democrat, her destructive track record still stinging Libya and Syria, fascism was personified by her campaign’s narrative as embodied by Trump, and this interpretation of “defeating fascism” is still promulgated by Democratic Party liberals. Rather than understanding fascism as a corporate-hegemonic structure, they absolve Democratic party elites of all possibility of being agents of fascism themselves in promulgating a left-wing version of value-based nationalism (instead of one that’s racially or ethnically uniform) to uphold imperialism. There was no greater demonstration of fascism than in and out of the DNC, where spaces were held for the daughter of an anti-Communist daughter of a Nicaraguan Contra, the parents of a Zionist settler who served in the IOF, or the tough-on-crime cops and border patrol agents defending different aspects of American imperialism. Moreover, pro-Palestinian demonstrators reading off the names of martyred children were openly mocked by DNC attendees.

On Wednesday evening, Democratic Party delegates who were representatives of the Uncommitted Movement staged a sit-in to demand Palestinian-American Senator Ruwa Romman speak. 

In both Romman’s statements to Democracy Now and the movement’s public platforms, they articulated their “strong support” for the “Israeli hostage’s families speaking from stage.” Their only demand, however, is that a Palestinian-American representative give a few words alongside the settler’s parents, downgrading their demand from Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a doctor who witnessed the horrors in Gaza firsthand, to the Democratic Party member and lawmaker.

In this theatric, they accomplished three PR points for the Democratic party - moving the rhetorical goalpost away from demanding an end to the genocide, bolstering public support for electoralism by focusing their energy on the Uncommitted Movement – which ultimately backs Harris – instead of the growing scores of Americans and Arab-Americans alike swearing off either corporate party, and inseminating the pro-Palestinian rhetorical sphere with normalization rhetoric.

Waleed Shahid and the Democratic establishment are waging a media spectacle to shift attention away from grassroots demands and pressure to end the genocide toward a baseline symbolic demand to speak (that would, in either way, preserve the Democrat’s image). On the verge of elections months from now, the Democratic Party will then facilitate the pressure on "Israel" to end the current bout of genocide, which then can be claimed as a theatric “win.”

This latest PR move is trying to move and re-engineer Arab youth and their allies. The last 10 months have shown a progression of courage and conscientiousness for the leftist pro-Palestine movement in the US as a whole, as demonstrated by open solidarity and support shown to the Palestinian Resistance and the Axis, the student encampments, and direct material action blocking boats, weapons factories, and airports producing and transporting instruments of genocide. The Resistance has treated the US pro-Palestinian movement with far more respect, issuing statements of support on Telegram channels and in speeches, with Sayyed Khamenei declaring the student encampments another arm of the Axis of Resistance. Contrast this with the utter disrespect, disgusting behavior, and silencing (one of the hundreds of examples - Harris shushing up speech disruptors with an “I’m speaking”) faced by pro-Palestinians if Harris is challenged just a bit.

Just last week, an assembly of groups including BDS Boston shut down an Elbit Systems center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after months of confrontational action and demonstrations against the Israeli weapons facility. Successfully able to overwhelm police and prevent cops from de-escalating and breaking up the demonstrations, these protesters demonstrated that there are options far beyond the electoralism containment that the Arab American petty bourgeoise keeps inclining toward. Ironically, these more militant forms of action - in contrast to the astroturfed electoral charades - are informed by the very Resistance liberals in America either choose to ignore or demonize.

Perhaps it is God’s blessing that the DNC shut the door on allowing the Palestinian-American speaker to take the podium. This was the last message to Arabs still mentally bound to playing into a socially prescribed partisan role that they are every bit as disposable to the American elite as the hundreds of thousands of innocents slaughtered in Gaza.

This moment exposed the contradictions between the Democratic Party and the base it panders to and the utter humiliation and servitude of this base’s blind loyalty. The liberal establishment does not want to see Arabs and their allies, neither in the occupied Middle East nor on American streets, take charge to disrupt, conscientize, and interrupt the flow of genocidal capital, but rather wants to continue to see them perpetually begging, eagerly jumping for the intermittent scraps thrown their way. 

In her most recent interview for RT, the wife of the late President Raisi, Dr. Jamileh Alamolhoda, admitted that there was no shortage of empathy for the people of Gaza, but rather a lack of courage to make sacrifices. The Uncommitted Campaign was designed by and for Arab millennial petit-bourgeois that cling to the illusion of comforts brought by careerism and social capital, where nothing in the way of material, worldly gains (the heavy price being only principles and dignity) is lost or sacrificed, but a career, a platform, and possibly an opportunity to be the next Democratic party token candidate to sign off on an intersectional-imperialist agenda is won.

If Gaza hasn’t taught us all to make sacrifices, defend our baseline principles (thawabet), and dismantle and destroy the mass-murderous structures killing our people (rather than save them), then the slaughter of 200,000 Palestinians is in vain.