“The Uncommitted Movement Is the Floor of What’s Possible”

“The Uncommitted Movement Is the Floor of What’s Possible”

An interview with Waleed Shahid.

What can be done to challenge the U.S. government’s unflinching support for Israel’s war in Gaza? That is the question progressive organizers have been asking since the start of Israel’s devastating ground invasion and aerial bombardment of the besieged territory. In the absence of a large antiwar caucus in Congress, and with limited national organizing capacity, it has not been easy to answer. Against the backdrop of this year’s Democratic primaries, and as the death toll in Gaza mounted each day, veteran progressive strategist Waleed Shahid, along with other activists, launched the Uncommitted campaign, urging primary voters to withhold their support for President Joe Biden. The idea was to send a message: not only that the Biden administration was out of step with a large part of his party’s base, but also that Biden’s approach to Gaza risked alienating Muslim and Arab voters in key swing states like Michigan. To continue unconditionally backing Israel’s war, the Uncommitted campaign argued, would be to risk a second Trump victory.

I talked to Shahid in mid-June. This was before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump; before Biden dropped out of the race and Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee; and before two members of the “Squad,” Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, lost primary races to opponents heavily backed by hawkish pro-Israel groups. Our conversation dealt not just with the Uncommitted campaign but also with the possibilities for shifting the Democratic Party on Israel/Palestine and the fate of progressive electoral politics more broadly in the shadow of the ongoing war. In many ways, despite the drama of the last several months, the basic political terrain remains largely unchanged. While Harris has adopted different rhetoric from Biden, she has given little indication that her administration would break with its predecessor on Israel/Palestine. The Uncommitted movement is, therefore, bringing its challenge to the DNC, where its leaders are now pushing for the party to support an arms embargo against Israel. —Joshua Leifer

This interview is a preview from the Fall 2024 issue of Dissent (subscribe to receive the print version). It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Joshua Leifer: Let’s go back to 2019, the last time we spoke. It was a different political moment. At the time, the concept of the Squad and the general progressive insurgency within the Democratic Party was new. In that interview you laid out a strategy for thinking about a smaller faction that was pushing the party left at a time when the leaders—Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer—didn’t have a compelling narrative for where the party ought to go. What’s changed in the last five years? There are a few more members of the Squad, but not that many, and they are facing tough challenges.

Waleed Shahid: Joe Biden was a more progressive president than Barack Obama, and I think that is in part due to the strategy of Justice Democrats and a number of others supporting a new generation of elected officials. On climate, for example, the Sunrise Movement created a disruptive and productive presence in the Democratic Party through civil disobedience, mass mobilization, constituency development, and primaries, which helped drive climate change as a priority in the party. Now there are young people in the party for whom this is a major issue, and Sunrise has a large membership that’s hard to ignore. It’s not just the Green New Deal sit-in—they are helping deliver votes. Just days after Ed Markey defeated the 2020 primary challenge from Joe Kennedy, Chuck Schumer signed onto legislation Sunrise had been pushing for. I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams that an organization that had spent much of 2019 and 2020 protesting Biden would be nominated to be part of a climate policy task force. That’s a huge success as well.

There are enormous contradictions. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are still the deciding votes in a system in which it was important for Biden to be a moderate consensus builder between wings of his party. The strategy of building a faction both inside and outside the party is responding to the laws of gravity of our political system, but it’s becoming a lot harder, especially electorally, and especially because of this massive amount of spending from AIPAC, from cryptocurrency, and so on. When your candidate is unknown, elections are often built around how much money you can raise to increase your name recognition and to defend yourself from attacks.

Leifer: With AIPAC, do you mean the long election cycle from Andy Levin’s race in 2022 to Jamaal Bowman’s this year?

Shahid: You could start it with Summer Lee in 2022. We didn’t expect the Democratic Majority for Israel, and the larger network of hawkish Israel organizations, to ramp up their spending so quickly. Pro-Israel donors are really activated right now because of the war; we’re seeing historic levels of spending, and there just isn’t as much of a donor network on the antiwar, pro-Palestinian side.

Leifer: October 7 changed a lot about American politics, especially progressive politics. It seems like, had the Gaza war not happened, there’d be a lot less progressive discontent with the Democratic Party.

Shahid: There’s been a generational shift on Palestinian human rights, with those under the age of thirty largely having sympathies that lie with Palestinians under occupation. You can almost match that one-to-one with where that generation gets its news—from online sources, Instagram, TikTok—whereas those over thirty, whose sympathies tend to lie with the Israelis, get their news from broadcast and print sources. There was polling done in January that showed that half of people who voted for Biden believe that Israel has committed a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. And there is only a handful of Democrats in Congress who share that opinion. Public opinion doesn’t automatically translate into political representation—it has to be forged. And unfortunately, the movement infrastructure isn’t there yet. Justice Democrats had the ability to elect pro-Palestinian candidates indirectly. Palestinian rights wasn’t a major reason for challenging incumbents, but it was a part of our platform. Now a generational tide is shifting, and AIPAC is spending $100 million this year to slow that shift.

Leifer: You were one of the organizers of the Uncommitted vote—to get people to write uncommitted on their ballots in the presidential primary to protest the U.S. government’s backing for Israel’s war. That produced roughly 700,000 primary votes. What did you discover about the task of translating protest to politics?

Shahid: The reason I wanted to do the Uncommitted campaign was based on my theory that most people understand politics through elections, because the media covers politics through elections. So we had to find a way to bring the war in Gaza into a frame that most people would understand, and most journalists would cover. Ideally, it would’ve led to an antiwar primary challenger to Biden, but no one was willing to run, especially that late in the cycle.

For many Muslim and Arab organizers, this wasn’t just a leftist problem; there are many young people, and Arab-American Democrats or Muslim Democrats, who might identify as moderate but couldn’t bring themselves to vote for someone who was financing a genocide in Gaza. When I first tried to organize this effort, some people said, “We have less than two months until the Michigan primary. What if we only get 2 percent, and we look stupid?” Sometimes, though, the most radical thing you can do is put your hypothesis to the test. If you really believe that people care about this, you need to see if you can actually mobilize the votes for your position.

We raised $200,000 for Michigan; that’s nothing for a statewide campaign. And as I mentioned, there really isn’t the electoral or donor infrastructure around Palestinian human rights advocacy. So, to me, the Uncommitted movement is the floor of what’s possible in terms of bringing protest politics into electoral politics. It made me really optimistic about the future, because this was such a grassroots, low-cost effort, and if you invested more time and resources and organizing capacity into it, you could really build something important. There were more Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and Jewish progressives involved in primaries this cycle than there had ever been before.

Leifer: How did you respond to people who were anxious, or are still anxious, that the discontent over the war might translate into defection in swing states?

Shahid: There were polls that came out last November showing that a majority of Arabs and Muslims in Michigan were already done with Biden. For me, this was a way to show that those polls were serious. If you wanted to defeat Trump, you needed to pay attention to these people. I think we did a service to the Democratic Party by revealing this constituency to them. There’s a broad politics of disillusionment, powerlessness, and despair, and we were trying to give a productive place for people to express that.

Some people don’t know that Muslim and Arab voters voted for George W. Bush in 2000. They might defect to the Republican Party out of anger. That’s a real possibility. In the same way you’ve seen a slow realignment of Latinos toward Republicans, I think this election will show a slow realignment of Arabs and Muslims toward Republicans.

Leifer: Do you have a sense of where all this leads?

Shahid: The movement’s leaders and base are going through not only grief about the civilian casualties in Gaza, but also political grief. This happens with most movements. We can respond with disillusionment and cynicism, or (and this is the harder thing to do) we can grapple with the limitations of our power and our infrastructure and dedicate ourselves to building it. The Palestinian rights movement needs to increase its influence and power in the Democratic Party. One way this could happen is if center-left Jewish, pro-Israel organizations begin to shift on this issue in a significant way, which I’m fairly pessimistic about based on the way that J Street and the Jewish Democratic Council of America have aligned with AIPAC or stayed neutral in these primary races. Otherwise, progressive, young, and Arab and Muslim Democrats, have to provide some sort of infrastructure that can match the level of influence that pro-Israel organizations have. The third possibility—and this is the theory that I’m the most skeptical about—is that if the Democrats lose due to a margin that you could say is because of the Gaza war, the party would fundamentally rethink its approach to Israel/Palestine.

Leifer: It seems to me that before October 7, the first possibility was much more imminent than it had been before. The Israeli right’s attempted judicial overhaul had pushed left-of-center Jewish-American organizations into a place of unprecedented criticism of Israel. In the event of any sort of attack on Israel, there was always going to be a rally-around-the-flag effect. One of the things that has been difficult is that there is a really big substantive misalignment between the Palestine solidarity social movements—certainly in their rhetoric and description of their own end goals—and the center-left Jewish organizations. There are parts of both that don’t want cooperation, even though there could actually be grounds for overlap in concrete demands, like putting conditions on U.S. military assistance to Israel. Yet the ideological misalignment is too great.

Shahid: The youth wing of the ceasefire moment is pretty opposed to, or ambivalent about, party politics and electoral politics, and is much more focused on mobilization and disruption in a way that is similar to Occupy Wall Street.

Leifer: Or even Black Lives Matter.

Shahid: Yeah. And there is a significant contingent, with groups like the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the ANSWER Coalition, that have historically supported third-party strategies and are opposed to any involvement in the Democratic Party. To my knowledge, very few of the groups that have been mobilizing for a ceasefire were involved even in the Jamaal Bowman or Cori Bush primaries.

I have heard some people express a theory that you can unite the Rashida Tlaibs and the Rand Pauls of the world to create conditions for ending weapons aid. We don’t have the numbers for that, and you have to create a majority. The same majority that passed the Inflation Reduction Act could either pass legislation or pressure the president to do something through the executive branch. But I don’t see a situation where liberal Zionists wouldn’t play some role in that coalition just based on the math of congressional majorities.

Leifer: It has been striking to see that, for all of the progressive organizing that’s been done on domestic issues, when it came to foreign policy, the vacuum got filled by older sectarian left groups that aren’t interested in electoral politics, or even a counter-hegemonic shifting of public opinion. It seems to me like the foreign policy organizing is where the economic justice movement was pre-Occupy.

Shahid: David Shor is someone who I disagree with a lot, but he rightly said that the center-left and progressive donor establishment has had months to try to organize a more coherent and productive political vehicle, and they haven’t. And part of the reason is because that donor establishment has never engaged in Palestinian human rights. There also hasn’t been much established organizing on the Muslim and Palestinian side of this, where people are starved of resources, criminalized, and pushed into corners.

Leifer: Demographically, there is a space for stronger Muslim political organizing. There are more than 4 million Muslims in the United States, and the strength of the ceasefire movement seems to reflect the growing political organizing capacity of a new generation of Muslim Americans. But the politics here also seem complicated, because it’s not as if Muslim voters are only in the Democratic Party.

Shahid: If you look at the 2016 and 2020 elections, the numbers of Muslim and Jewish Americans supporting the Democratic Party are comparable. And the place where Muslim Americans have leverage is in the states where they have higher numbers of voters, including Michigan and Georgia.

A lot of reporters in the winter were saying to me, “Don’t you think if Biden swings toward Muslims in Michigan, he will lose Jews in suburban Philadelphia?” And my hypothesis is that Muslim partisan loyalty to the Democratic Party is much thinner than it is with Jewish Americans, who are part of the Democratic Party for many reasons that have nothing to do with Israel—liberal and democratic values, social justice values. Over the years, polls have shown that Jewish voters generally do not list Israel among their top five issues. Many Muslims are part of the Democratic Party for its anti-racist values, so when the Gaza war is in contradiction with those values, it’s easy for them to leave.

In October and November, I was honestly skeptical of the Democratic Party and the White House’s appetite to respond to Muslim-American and Arab-American organizing, in large part because I know the pro-Israel constituency in the Democratic Party is well-organized, with voters, donors, and institutions that have been part of the party for decades. I did a lot of work with Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, because I thought we needed a Jewish movement to build an alternative to the J Streets and AIPACs of the world. But I was pleasantly surprised to see that Muslim and Arab organizing in Michigan and other states was able to apply pressure on the party in ways that made me question my own hypothesis. I no longer think only Jewish organizing and Jewish pressure can change the political dynamics of this issue. It’s a factor, but I don’t think it’s the biggest factor.

Leifer: You probably need both to hit a majority.

Shahid: Yeah. In March when Kamala Harris came out in favor of a ceasefire in Selma at an event for Black voters, that gave me a sign that the party was thinking beyond the constituency of pro-Israel Jewish voters.

Leifer: How are you thinking about the possibility of a Trump victory? In some ways, Trump’s last term was a boon to progressive organizing, despite being a disaster for the country. Could that happen again?

Shahid: Part of the reason progressive organizing excelled in the Trump era was because Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016. There was an infrastructure and a constituency created around progressive organizing that wasn’t only about Trump. The fact that there was an alternative provided in the 2016 primary to Hillary Clinton could continue to give people a different vision. Those conditions don’t exist today, so I’m very skeptical that a Trump victory would lead to a boon in progressive organizing. I think a Trump presidency would be horrific for America, for our democracy, for the communities we care about, for the progressive movement, and for Palestinians. And I think it’s very likely that Trump could win. So all the organizing I’ve been doing for the past six months is in the service of convincing the Democrats that there’s a constituency of voters that they can’t afford to lose in this election. That includes people within my own family, who have voted Democrat in every election since they’ve been registered voters, even if they don’t identify as liberals or progressives.

It’s very hard for me to imagine four years of Trump that doesn’t look like a January 6 presidency. Last time there were moderate Republicans within Trump’s cabinet. This time it will be dominated by far-right authoritarians, and my sense is the United States could end up like Hungary or Brazil. The show trials that are happening now with university presidents over Palestine will expand to cover LGBTQ issues, race, and women’s rights. Trump has the judiciary and will likely have the legislature on his side to do whatever he wants.

Joshua Leifer is member of the Dissent editorial board. He is the author of Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Century and the Future of Jewish Life.

Waleed Shahid is the director of the Bloc and the former spokesperson for Justice Democrats.