They called their congressional members, met them in person, wrote letters, created petitions, attended protests, pleaded for help — yet the killings continued.
Over many horrifying days, weeks and now five months, 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, more than 70% of whom were women and children, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Now, people speaking up to end the slaughter are trying something new: leveraging their vote.
A recently launched grassroots effort calling for Democratic voters to check “uncommitted delegates” on their primary ballot is rapidly gaining traction here in Washington. The move is meant to send a message to President Biden to end his unceasing support of Israel’s war in Gaza.
The campaign follows a similar effort in Michigan, where “Listen to Michigan” organizers hoped to get 10,000 voters in that powerful swing state to vote “uncommitted” — they got more than 100,000.
The “Uncommitted WA” campaign is calling for a cease-fire, which includes a negotiated end to the violence, the return of the 134 remaining Israelis held hostage in Gaza and the return of hundreds of Palestinians held prisoner in Israel. Israel launched its war in Gaza following a brutal Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and took 240 hostage.
The campaign was endorsed last week by The Stranger newspaper as well as UFCW 3000, the state’s largest labor union that represents 50,000 grocery workers in Washington, Idaho and Oregon.
Washington is one of just seven states that allows voters to choose “uncommitted” or “noncommitted” in the Democratic presidential primary.
Rami Al-Kabra, who describes himself as a lifelong bridge-builder and advocate for human and civil rights, is the first immigrant Muslim American elected to the Bothell City Council and to serve as deputy mayor, and said he is currently the only Palestinian American to hold elected office in our region.
Al-Kabra is one of the members of the Uncommitted WA campaign and recently spoke at the state Capitol to demand a cease-fire.
In an interview last week, he said it would be a mistake to think opposition to U.S. policy in Gaza is simply a Palestinian American or Muslim American issue — it’s a U.S. and Democratic Party issue.
According to survey results published last week by the progressive think tank and polling firm Data for Progress, nearly 80% of Democrats who are likely to vote support the U.S. calling for a permanent cease-fire and de-escalation of violence in Gaza. Among all likely voters, nearly 70% said the same.
“We wanted to follow in Michigan’s footsteps and really take the lead and do our protests with the most precious right that we have as Americans, and that is the right to vote,” Al-Kabra said. “‘Uncommitted delegates’ is a way for us to protest in a way that leverages that most precious tool that we have.”
Some big D Democrats have railed against Michigan’s uncommitted campaign as a 2024 version of “Bernie or Bust” that will hand Trump a victory in November — Al-Kabra said that argument is misplaced.
“Trump is not my friend. If, God forbid, we have a President Donald Trump again, it’s bad for not just the Muslim community, it’s bad for Americans. So we recognize that,” Al-Kabra said. “At the same time, we want the people who we want to support to be responsive to us and not take us for granted.”
Isn’t that what citizens in a democracy should want? That their elected leaders hear and respond to their concerns?
But to listen to many Democrats, the very democracy they are claiming to protect from Trump is undermined by people having and making a choice to vote their values and principles — even in a party primary in a blue state.
The past five months have been “very, very tough,” Al-Kabra said. Sleep has been elusive and he keeps thinking about his own family’s experience in 1948 in what Palestinians call the Nakba or “catastrophe,” when his father and both sets of grandparents were forced to leave their homes at gunpoint along with 700,000 other Palestinians.
Today’s horrors are streamed for the world to see, one of the most recent being last Thursday’s killing of over 100 desperate people who were trying to receive food aid in Gaza City. Witnesses said Israeli troops opened fire on people trying to get all-too-rare aid off of trucks; Israel admitted it fired on the crowd but said many of the dead were killed in a stampede.
With Israel throttling humanitarian aid to Gaza (and some Israeli protesters blocking aid trucks from entering the territory), one quarter of Gaza’s population is one step away from famine, U.N. officials said last week.
And in northern Gaza, one sixth of the children under 2 are suffering from “acute malnutrition and wasting,” a U.N. humanitarian official said. Hungry people have resorted to eating animal feed. Babies have begun to die of starvation.
Al-Kabra is haunted by the stories of his close friends and neighbors who have lost 20, 30, 40 members of their families and seen their relatives’ homes destroyed. He said some families are splitting up so that if they are bombed, their entire family won’t be killed.
In U.S. policy toward Israel, Al-Kabra sees a double standard.
When Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago, “We all, including myself, spoke out against that invasion as wrong. A country occupying another country is wrong,” he said.
“We see our president and our congressional leaders always funding the resistance in Ukraine, while calling Palestinians terrorists. We see our elected officials funding the resistance to Ukraine and condemning Russia for doing what they’re doing, yet ever increasing funding to Israel, bombs and weapons … to kill more and more Palestinians. And very little support for Palestinians.”