Pro-Palestinian Activists Gave Trump a Boost. They Have No Regrets.
Groups that rallied against Biden and Harris say they’d do it all over again.
They can’t stand Trump. But they fought against Biden and Harris over Gaza.
SINCE RETURNING TO OFFICE, Donald Trump has said he wants to “clean out” the Gaza Strip, send Palestinians to Egypt or Jordan, and construct a Mar-a-Gaza on the Mediterranean. He’s lifted Biden-era restraints on Israel, including a hold on the supply of 2,000-pound bombs. And while he has secured the releases of hostages, he has not brought an end to the war, despite promising to do so.
In fact, the humanitarian situation in Gaza has grown only more dire on his watch. Israel has expanded its attacks and aid to Palestinian civilians has been blocked for nearly two months. Food that was stockpiled during the ceasefire at the start of the year is running out, with international health officials warning of worsening malnutrition among children.
The record, in the aggregate, has been one of more conflict and suffering. And it raises the obvious question of whether pro-Palestine voters and groups who called for opposing or abstained from supporting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris over their handling of the war feel even a tinge of regret.
For the most part, the answer is a clear “no.”
“It was worth it because we got to continue centering what was happening in Gaza,” said Layla Elabed, the cofounder of Uncommitted, which declined to endorse Harris and encouraged people to vote their conscience. Asked if she feels any guilt about Trump’s win, Elabed said that what frustrates her is that their months of activism ultimately “wasn’t enough to save lives.”
“We spent a year as Democrats warning [the party] that our communities like Dearborn were grieving and attending funeral after funeral,” Elabed continued. “Our party leaders offered spin instead of change.”
As Democrats across the spectrum diagnose what went wrong in 2024, the pro-Palestine activists that had traditionally resided within the party’s ideological ranks don’t seem particularly interested in reassessing the choices they made. Activists like Elabed argue that it’s easier for the party to point fingers than to deal with the thornier questions of U.S. policy toward Israel.
It’s hard to determine just how much of an impact efforts like Uncommitted or Abandon Harris had in the election results. After all, exit polls showed that voters were motivated more by the economy than by foreign policy. But in battleground states with large Arab-American populations, like Michigan, data suggests that the Israel-Hamas conflict turned people away from Harris. In Dearborn, the country’s largest Arab-majority city, election data showed that Trump won 42 percent of the vote while Harris received 36 percent—significantly less than the 69 percent that Biden earned in 2020.
But the activists note that it wasn’t just Dearborn and other Muslim-American enclaves that moved toward Republicans in 2024—nearly every district in the country moved to the right as well.
“We have zero regrets about everything we did throughout 2024. I want that noted, underlined, bolded, as clear as possible,” said Hudhayfah Ahmad, a spokesperson for the Abandon Harris movement. “Our loyalty is to our morals, our principles, our values.”
Not everyone has been won over by this worldview. Indeed, elsewhere in the party, frustration has been on a slow simmer over the absence of contrition or introspection from the pro-Palestinian groups. For them, the idea that those activists could look at the current situation in Gaza and feel vindicated about their election-season decisions doesn’t just defy logic—it lacks morality.
“People are just trying to justify their bad choices. I don’t think it’s a defensible position to say that there’s no difference. It’s absurd to think that Harris would not be approaching this issue differently than Trump. We’re talking about, you know, paving Gaza. It’s just not a credible position to say there’s no difference,” said Adam Jentleson, former chief of staff to Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman. “Activists need to think harder about what outcome they’re trying to produce.”
THAT THE FISSURE over the Israel-Hamas war has not been resolved 100-plus days into Trump’s presidency should not come as a surprise. It may be the most fraught geopolitical issue of our time—and, beyond that, we’re talking about a faction of people (Democrats) preternaturally prone to emotional disagreements.
But it does foreshadow potential problems for the party in the midterm elections, particularly in states with competitive primaries. Activists with Abandon Harris, which urged supporters to back Jill Stein in 2024, told The Bulwark that they are restructuring their organization and will relaunch in a few weeks under a new name. They plan to be particularly active in Senate primaries, including the Michigan race to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters. Abdul El-Sayed—a former public health official who was an early supporter of the Uncommitted movement but still supported Harris in the general election—recently entered the crowded primary.
Ahead of the election for chair of the Democratic National Committee earlier this year, pro-Palestinian adovacy groups met with candidates to encourage them to rethink how the party approaches the Israel-Hamas conflict. They presented the then-candidates with polling that showed Democratic and independent voters in swing states would have been more likely to support Harris if she broke from Biden’s steadfast support for Israel. A spokesperson from the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding Policy Project, a pro-Palestine advocacy group that does not endorse candidates in elections, said that the Harris campaign largely ignored the polling data when their organization approached them about it in the weeks before the election.
In March, IMEU Policy Project, jointly with three other progressive advocacy groups, sent a letter to the DNC asking it to analyze the Harris campaign’s actions on the Israel-Gaza issue as part of their post-election analysis. DNC chair Ken Martin has said he will release an analysis publicly though it is unclear if it will address Israel-Gaza policy.
To Democratic leaders, the fact that these activists continue to push the party even after they helped (to some degree) facilitate its loss of power has been a source of immense irritation. While Biden could hardly step outside the White House during his last year in office without being confronted by pro-Palestine activists—and Harris was frequently interrupted by protesters on the campaign trail—it has not gone unnoticed that Trump rarely, if ever, faces a heckle. No demands are being made for him to call for a ceasefire. No threats are being made to ensure that the Arab and Muslim voters who supported his campaign stay home or switch back in 2028.
Activists say the reason for this is that they do not have the same juice within the Republican party as they do among Democrats, and have little ability to influence Trump’s policy approach. So they continue to focus on the party where their influence remains. And they feel vindicated by news developments and stray comments, like when Michael Herzog, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., said in an interview this week with an Israeli news program that the Biden administration “never” demanded a ceasefire.
“Biden-Harris set the stage for this in terms of Gaza,” said Amed Khan, a Democratic donor who quit the Biden Victory Fund national finance committee over Biden’s handling of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Khan told The Bulwark he didn’t have any reservations about speaking out against the Democratic ticket in 2024. “They made it okay that you can blow up an apartment building. . . . They made it okay to kill civilians. The Israelis are just continuing what they did under Biden. It’s not worse, it’s not better.”
🫏 Donkey Business:
— There was no shortage of 2028 Democratic presidential primary tea leaves to read this past week. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced he would travel to Iowa this month for his first in-person event since Trump returned to office. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore announced he will headline the South Carolina Democratic Party’s upcoming Blue Palmetto Dinner. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear told a local interviewer that he would “consider” running for president, too.
— Jonathan Cohn, our resident Michigan expert at The Bulwark, has covered Gretchen Whitmer and Elissa Slotkin for years and writes about how the two leaders are taking different approaches to Trump. Cohn writes that Whitmer has been in the national spotlight in recent days for her friendlier approach to Trump—raising questions about “what you think an elected official should do when the well-being of their constituents is at the mercy of an ill-informed, vindictive, and unpredictable president.” Meanwhile, Slotkin has been traveling the state advocating for a more aggressive approach to Trump, particularly on the issue of tariffs.
“The level of uncertainty for our small business owners, for anyone who works in manufacturing and anyone who works [in] farming, it’s the same level of uncertainty we had in COVID—except this time, it’s completely manufactured. It’s created by Trump,” Slotkin told Jonathan.
My open tabs:
— Adam Jentleson, the former staffer for Sen. John Fetterman whom I quoted above, was in the news last week because of his role in this New York magazine piece about the Pennsylvania senator. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, you should. It’s a difficult (but perhaps necessary) read.
— An Anthony Weiner comeback story?
— How little old Vanderbilt is starting to thrive in the big, bad SEC.
I have nothing but pure contempt for these extremists, and that's what they are - extremists. My wife and I went to the culminating Kamala Harris rally in DC just a few days before the November election. We were unable to get seats inside the event, so we went to the overflow area near the Washington Monument on the mall. The Harris Campaign set up a big jumbo-tron screen for the overflow to watch the event, and we couldn't hear a damn thing because there were about 100-150 Pro-Palestinian protestors raising hell in front of the big screen. They were vulgar, hateful, and absolutely disrespectful of the audience trying to watch the event. Any last drop of sentiment I may have had for their cause completely evaporated. The entire movement can kiss my *ss and I hope they get everything they work for, which is absolutely nothing. If they want to fight like extremists, they can always join the movement in Gaza.
They are idiots. Hamas is the destroyer of their own people & they still support them!!