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Pro-Palestinian protesters have warned Kamala Harris that US backing for Israel’s war in Gaza will cost her votes, as they try to overshadow her “coronation” as Democratic presidential candidate with a big march through Chicago on Thursday night.
The march is expected to draw tens of thousands of people, say organisers, and will coincide with Harris’s speech to the Democratic National Convention inside a heavily guarded arena nearby.
The Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel in Gaza has caused deep splits among Democrats but has barely featured on the agenda of a DNC designed to project unity as the party fights to retain the White House.
But protesters outside the hall said the issue could still damage Harris’s bid to defeat Donald Trump in November’s presidential election.
Rabbi Brant Rosen, a co-founder of the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council, said Harris’s support for a ceasefire in Gaza — which she has reiterated in recent weeks — was “meaningless” as long as the US government continued to arm Israel.
Democrats have hoped that progressive anti-war protesters would return to support Harris following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race, but that has not happened. One protester’s sign on Wednesday showed a Palestinian flag with the words, “Earn my vote”.
“They are assuming they are entitled to our vote, but they are not,” Rosen said, dismissing Harris’s nomination at the DNC as a “Hollywood-style coronation”.
On Wednesday, DNC delegates from the uncommitted movement, which garnered more than a 100,000 protest votes against Biden in the Michigan Democratic primary this year, staged a sit-in after the DNC refused their request to address the convention.
The United Auto Workers union, which has endorsed Harris, on Thursday called for a Palestinian-American speaker to be allowed to speak at the convention.
“If we want the war in Gaza to end, we can’t put our heads in the sand or ignore the voices of the Palestinian Americans in the Democratic party,” it wrote on X.
Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic candidate a month ago, but has not marked out any major policy differences on Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to its health authorities.
A heavy police presence and wide security cordon with several checkpoints around Chicago’s United Center have so far prevented the protesters from disrupting the convention, easing fears of a repeat of chaotic anti-war protests at the 1968 DNC in the city.
But organisers for the Coalition to March on the DNC, which will take part in the march on Thursday, said its protest on Monday drew 20,000 people. On Tuesday, police arrested dozens of people following clashes at another protest outside Chicago’s Israeli consulate.
Thousands of people also attended a march near the convention venue on Wednesday, with many women wearing head scarves and Palestinian flags fluttering overhead. The metro Chicago area has one of the largest Palestinian populations in the US.
Marchers chanted: “Hey, Democrats, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!”
One suburban Chicago resident, who had immigrated from the Palestinian territories more than four decades ago and who declined to give his name, said he joined Wednesday’s march to “support my people — it’s the least I can do”.
He did not plan to vote for either Harris or Trump in November, but said the candidate who did “something good” could still win him over.
“We just need peace in that part of the world,” he said.
Hatem Abudayyeh, national chair of the US Palestinian Community Network and a spokesman for the Coalition to March on the DNC, said that while protesters were unlikely to support Trump, Harris had done nothing yet to win their support.
“Everybody is saying they cannot in good conscience vote for the Democrats,” he said. “The Democrats have to understand that this issue is going to be the issue that makes or breaks it for them. And if they’re going to allow the Israelis to do whatever they want . . . they’re going to have to reap what they sow.”
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