Uncommitted leaders stand by 2024 strategy after Trump floats Gaza takeover

WASHINGTON — Leaders of the pro-Palestinian movement that rallied opposition to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2024 election are standing by their strategy amid new criticism that they weakened the Democratic ticket after President Donald Trump said he wants to “take over” the Gaza Strip.

Trump’s remarks, which came as a shock to prominent officials in Washington, sparked a new round of recriminations among Democrats over the pressure campaign from advocacy groups against Biden and Harris in the presidential contest over the Israel-Hamas war, even though Trump’s record on the Middle East had been more hostile to the Palestinian cause.

Layla Elabed, a co-chair of the “uncommitted” movement — which declined to endorse Harris, Trump or any candidate in the 2024 election — said she felt “sad, angry, and scared for our communities” after the president’s Tuesday remarks, in which he also said Palestinians have “no alternative” but to live elsewhere.

But she maintained that both sides were to blame.

“Harris left a vacuum by not visiting Michigan families impacted by US-supplied bombs to help create a permission structure for their trust while Trump visited Dearborn and filled a community in despair with lies,” Elabed said in a statement. “Trump’s illegal calls for ethnic cleansing are horrific, but as on so many other issues, Democrats had a chance to persuade voters they were the better alternative and they blew it.”

Her comment didn’t sit well with some Democrats.

“Deeply unserious people who want to shirk their responsibility. Clowns,” a former Harris aide, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said in response.

Other Democrats said the pro-Palestinian activists own the consequences of helping Trump, even if they didn’t endorse him, by mobilizing voters to reject the only viable alternative.

“Leaders of the uncommitted movement want to blame everyone but themselves for their disastrous strategy that helped elect Donald Trump,” said Adam Jentleson, a former Democratic leadership aide and recent chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa. “They told people not to vote for Democrats, and now Trump is threatening to annex Gaza. It was obvious all along that this would be what happened if Trump won, but uncommitted chose to ignore this crystal clear reality and plow ahead with a deeply irresponsible strategy. They should be accountable to the people they misled.”

While it’s impossible to pin down exactly how much the movement affected the outcome of 2024 election, there are signs that it succeeded at turning Democratic-leaning voters away from Harris. The city with the largest Arab American population in the country — Dearborn, Michigan — voted for Trump by around 2,600 votes in November after backing Biden by more than 17,500 votes four years earlier.

Some Biden backers sounded the alarm in March 2024, when about 100,000 Michiganders voted “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary, delivering a rebuke to the then-president as they demanded that his administration end U.S. assistance to Israel as it bombarded Gaza. But Biden and Harris, while acknowledging the concerns about the soaring death toll in Gaza, were unwilling to upend decades of U.S. policy.

The uncommitted movement declined to endorse Biden or Harris when she took over as the Democratic presidential nominee. It did not endorse Trump or another candidate, either, but implied in its enduring criticism was that voters could send a message by voting for a third-party option or even staying home.

A constellation of like-minded groups similarly opposed Harris in the 2024 election, seeing her position on Gaza as a red line.

Hudhayfah Ahmad, an Arizona-based pro-Palestinian activist and spokesperson for the group Abandon Harris, said after Trump’s comment that Palestinians will protect themselves against him as they did against Biden and Harris.

“Over the past 16 months, the Biden-Harris administration’s full, unobstructed support for Israel’s campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing has failed to remove the Palestinians of Gaza from their land,” Ahmad said. “It is not Trump — just as it was not Biden or Harris — who decides what the Palestinians can or cannot do; that decision belongs solely to the people of Palestine.”

Maamoun Slayhi of Minnesota, who’s part of another group called Uncommitted Grassroots, called Trump’s proposal for the U.S. to take control of Gaza “infuriating” because the U.S. government has “zero right to be anywhere near that situation.”

But when asked if he regretted not endorsing Harris over Trump, Slayhi said he didn’t because he believes Trump and Harris were “two faces of the same coin.” He said that the American political system is “broken” and that neither Republicans nor Democrats looked out for Palestinians. 

“The reality is we don’t know what would have happened, but it would not have been better under the Harris administration,” Slayhi said. “Harris was not a friend of the Palestinians. She was part of an administration that for 15 months did nothing to prevent further decimation.”

That position continues to be agonizing for Biden and Harris aides, who sought to persuade “uncommitted” and similar groups soon after Israel’s aggressive response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack that Trump would be much worse for their cause. Unlike Biden, for instance, Trump has not committed to backing a two-state solution.

“Even if Trump was hostile to Palestinians, they needed to ‘punish’ Biden and Harris,” said a former Biden official who spoke to pro-Palestinian movement figures. “I warned them that the only people they’d be punishing by helping elect someone who wants to turn Gaza into a parking lot are the people they claim to be helping.”

The warnings didn’t work. “It was striking was that there just wasn’t recognition of the real life and death stakes,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Everyone respected that there was grief and pain. But how do you ignore being told countless times, ‘Here is a direct quote of Trump saying he wants Gaza leveled’?”

Even inside the Harris campaign, there was dissent about whether she needed to take a more aggressive stance for Gaza.

A Harris organizer who worked on youth turnout said that senior campaign officials gave them an order: When they sent out mass volunteer or fundraising emails and people replied by asking about Gaza, they were told to mark it as “no response.” The result? They seldom ended up engaging with voters on that issue.

“We also didn’t create a new category for Gaza responses out of fear that category would be leaked. Instead we were told to mark them as ‘no response,’” the organizer said, faulting top Harris campaign leaders for failing to address the issue. “The only ‘clowns’ out there are those who were in senior leadership and decided to abdicate on this issue, who silenced a Palestinian speaker at the DNC, and who told us to ignore it every time a voter asked us about Gaza.”

Salima Suswell, the CEO of Black Muslim Leadership Council, which was on the sidelines when Biden was the nominee but eventually endorsed Harris, said Trump’s remarks were “sadly unsurprising for many of us who campaigned against Trump who saw him as the international threat that he is.”

“Trump should have been honest with Muslim and Arab leaders, namely in Michigan, when he promised to be anti-war and that he would end the genocide,” Suswell said. “We see through what he is saying. He has no interest in protecting Palestinian lives and he never has.”