Organizer group chats in Chicago had been buzzing in the days leading up to the May 19 Illinois presidential primary with discussions about how to vote. Word spread of an effort urging those eager to protest Joe Biden’s unwavering support for Israel — which included many people in Cook County, home to the largest population of Palestinian Americans in the country — to participate in a write-in campaign, casting a ballot for “Gaza” rather than the incumbent president or any of his challengers. Jimmy Rothschild, an organizer with progressive Jewish groups in Chicago, told me, “The collective was moving towards this feeling of, I’m not ticking the Joe box.” By the end of the day, more than 67,000 Cook County Democratic voters refused to choose between the candidates on offer. (How many wrote in “Gaza” or something else, or had simply left their ballots blank, is impossible to know because Illinois doesn’t count write-ins and blanks.) In Chicago, almost one in four Democratic voters rejected the incumbent, dubbed by the movement for Palestine as “Genocide Joe.”

Chicago-based activists had learned from a similar campaign organized in the state next door, Listen to Michigan, that pushed for “uncommitted” primary votes — a more unambiguous protest vote, since those votes are tallied by local election boards. Democratic primary voters in nearly half of the country can cast a no-confidence vote that is “uncommitted,” “uninstructed,” or a similar designation. The Listen to Michigan coalition tapped progressive networks and mobilized hundreds of volunteers to hand out fliers, call and text voters, and organize rallies at college campuses alongside student activists. The campaign won more than 101,000 votes, about 13 percent of all votes cast in the state’s Democratic primary. To organizers’ surprise, they even won two delegates to the convention.

In Dearborn, the first U.S. city with an Arab American majority, and Hamtramck, the first majority-Muslim U.S. city, “uncommitted” votes outnumbered those cast for Biden. But when polling locations closed in Michigan on Feb. 27, the first numbers to roll in came out of Macomb, Washtenaw, and Oakland, which includes one of the country’s largest Jewish populations. The votes from these counties more than tripled Listen to Michigan’s goal of 10,000 votes. For many Arabs and Muslims, the war was at the forefront, but so too for many progressive Jews, students, people of color, and other core parts of the Democratic base. Rothschild explained, “Between myself and a lot of the people who I organize with, it is very close to the top of the list, if not the top of the list, of driving concerns.” Layla Elabed, Listen to Michigan’s campaign manager, told me she was on the phone with her sister, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, when the numbers started coming in: “It was such an emotional time. I don’t want to cry about it.” She continued, “But we were able to accomplish something that I don’t think anybody expected us to accomplish.”

When I met with Elabed in May, she described her path to the Uncommitted campaign as rooted in her experience as a lifelong Democrat. Elabed’s father was a Palestinian immigrant who worked on the Ford Motors assembly line outside Detroit, a proud member of the United Auto Workers. Through him, Elabed and her siblings learned the importance of voting, of engaging in politics and doing so through the vehicle of the Democratic Party, which her father had taught “provided me and my community a voice at the table.” She has been volunteering and working in local politics since she was 12.

Last year Elabed had been organizing against utility rate hikes and power outages in Detroit. But after Oct. 7, it became hard, she told me, “to have conversations about holding our utility company accountable and not recognize that we need to talk about what’s happening to Palestinians.” In house meetings organized to talk about the energy company, the conversations just kept coming back to Gaza. She said that people were asking, “What do we do in November? How can we vote for somebody like Joe Biden who’s complicit in this genocide, but we can’t vote for Trump?” Many people were feeling deep disillusionment with electoral politics, betrayed by the Democratic Party, and saying that they would not vote come November. In those conversations, Elabed recounted, she would respond, “We cannot do that. We cannot have that be the way we’re going to build any power. This is not the way that we can actually accomplish anything for Palestinians.”

In the weeks that followed, Listen to Michigan gave rise to an Uncommitted National Movement. In nine states, those complaints received over 10 percent of the vote. Nearly a fifth of primary votes in Minnesota went uncommitted, sending 11 more delegates to the DNC. Another 29 percent voted uncommitted in Hawaii, and in Wisconsin a similar “uninstructed” vote totaled more than twice Biden’s margin of victory over Trump in the state in 2020.

Elabed believed that she and other leaders of Uncommitted were doing “the most democratic thing that we could ever do” by making their voices heard in the ballot box. They were not naïve about the ability to shift the Democratic Party’s leadership in the short term, but with hundreds of thousands of votes registered as uncommitted, they felt the wind at their backs — even more so after Biden stepped down as the party’s nominee and Harris initially exhibited a more open posture toward the Palestine movement. Some Democratic Party insiders thought that the current morass might be tied to Biden’s personal commitments and ideology. Tariq Habash — the second Biden administration official to resign over its Gaza policy and a supporter of Uncommitted — told me in August that based on private conversations, he concluded that it seems “like there is a willingness to actually address the failed policies” by the vice president and those around her.

The unexpected win of 30 Democratic delegates positioned Uncommitted organizers to orient the next phase of their movement around Cook County, where the Democratic Convention was scheduled to convene at the end of the summer. Uncommitted activists took their inspiration from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)’s delegation to the 1964 Democratic Convention, which sought to force the Democratic Party to commit to desegregation. The Uncommitted organizers developed two central goals. The first objective was to cut through the “pomp and circumstance” of the convention and to make sure that not a day of the DNC went by where Gaza went unmentioned by the media or inside the United Center. The second was to engage Democratic Party loyalists at the convention and create pathways for them into the movement, building a stronger coalition of forces that could push the party from within to cut aid to Israel.

The Uncommitted delegation and supporters spent every day talking to other delegates, like the MFDP activists who had lobbied delegates day and night to win over sympathizers at the 1964 DNC. Uncommitted succeeded in convincing more than 300 delegates who were pledged to nominate Harris to sign a letter urging the vice president to promise an arms embargo and support a permanent cease-fire. Some Harris delegates took shirts, pins, or “Democrats for Palestinian Rights” keffiyeh-patterned scarfs, and many said encouraging words to the uncommitted delegates. “I didn’t meet any delegates who agreed with what Israel was doing,” Daniel Denvir, the host of The Dig podcast and the alternate Uncommitted delegate from Rhode Island, told me. “Not one, zero.” Instead delegates’ views ranged from those who signed the letter and those who agreed but were unwilling to take a political risk to sign on to those who mistakenly believed that Biden and Harris were already doing as much as they could do to end the war.

The Uncommitted delegation also made a related, lesser ask: for a Palestinian American to be given a two-minute speaking slot. They engaged in weeks of negotiations with the party leadership, which waited until the penultimate night of the convention to answer no — the grim horrors ongoing for nearly a year in Gaza were not meant to ruin the “joy” and “unity” vibes ringing through the convention. Uncommitted responded with a sit-in on the pavement outside the United Center that recalled the MFDP’s convention protests 60 years ago, after the Democratic Party leadership continued to side with the racist, all-white Mississippi delegation, fearing that drifting from the status quo would dampen Dixiecrat turnout in November. Like today’s party leadership who ignored and silenced pro-peace voices, Lyndon B. Johnson characterized the 1964 convention as “a place of happy, surging crowds and thundering cheers” in his memoir. The “display of unity” he described did not include the freedom delegation.

At an Uncommitted press conference the following morning, Rashida Tlaib appeared via FaceTime, saying through tears, “We shouldn’t have to beg our own party to be heard.” Reiterating the importance of telling the stories of Palestinian lives lost, she said, “We are going to learn from those before us, from Emmett Till’s mother, who … made sure that casket was open so that no one could look away.”

When I followed up with Elabed on the phone in the aftermath of the DNC, she expressed a bittersweet sense of pride at what the movement had achieved at the convention. The potency of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism was on full display — and not only through the suppression of Palestinian American voices on the convention’s stage, where the Israeli war facilitated financially, militarily, and politically by the Biden-Harris administration was rarely mentioned. Elabed described the crowd’s response to the heartbreaking speech by the parents of American Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was found dead in Rafah later in August. His parents spoke of the desperate need for a cease-fire deal that would release the hostages and end the suffering in Gaza. “In a competition of pain,” Jon Polin said, “there are no winners.” Yet other Uncommitted delegates told Elabed that when the crowd started chanting, “Bring them home,” some delegates “started to point at our Palestinian American Uncommitted delegate and gesturing that they are somehow guilty or at fault.” The implication was reminiscent of the heights of anti-Arab racism following the Sept. 11 attacks, when anyone who looked Arab was seen as guilty of terrorism and a potential target for hate crimes. It was “incredibly heartbreaking — we’ve been playing the part of good Democrats,” Elabed said, pointing out that they mobilized many unlikely and first-time voters to support the Democratic ticket.

On its surface, the Uncommitted movement failed in its mission to shift the policy positions of the Harris campaign during or after the convention. The vice president’s team declined to meet with leaders of the movement in the weeks following the convention, and Harris has reiterated her “unwavering” commitment to Israel. If anything, Elabed told me, “the more we try to move them left, the more they push right.”

Yet given the difficulty of the task — demanding an arms embargo challenges not only the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the military-industrial complex but also a deep U.S.-Israel alliance that has been at the core of the American imperial project for decades — the movement’s gains were significant. If Uncommitted hadn’t been in Chicago, the genocide in Gaza would have barely been mentioned at the convention center or in news coverage. The delegates remained an irritant to the party leadership and its pep rally vibes. “The pro-war forces do not want us inside the DNC,” Abbas Alawieh, one of the Uncommitted campaign’s co-founders, said at a press conference. “They do not want us in Congress, they don’t want us in the White House, they don’t want us advocating from inside for what we want.” Yet Uncommitted activists continued to organize among party loyalists, coming out of the convention with a deeper coalition among elected officials, labor unions, racial justice organizations, progressive organizations, and Jewish organizations. Their intervention should be understood as a critical piece of a longer-term strategy to force a realignment within the Democratic Party — a goal that could take years to achieve.

This approach is not without its critics, and the refusal of the Democratic Party to feature a Palestinian speaker, much less promise policy change, fueled acrimonious debates about the way forward for the pro-Palestine left, with some arguing for defection to third parties, independent candidates, or abstention. Some Uncommitted delegates interviewed by Mondoweiss expressed frustration that the effort didn’t achieve more, feeling that movement leaders’ loyalty to the Democratic Party ultimately diluted their message and forestalled a more disruptive approach at the DNC. Does working within the Democratic Party lend tacit support to genocidal policies or surrender leverage to force them to the left? Or is continuing to fight for influence within the Democratic Party the most pragmatic way forward?

The initial vision of the Uncommitted campaign was outlined in a memo by progressive Democratic strategist and movement organizer Waleed Shahid. Shahid was a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, helping to recruit and elect members of the congressional Squad: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, and Summer Lee. For Shahid and other co-founders of Uncommitted, the movement is part of a struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party at a moment when the party leadership is increasingly at odds with much of its base on this issue. A June CBS poll found that 77 percent of Democrats oppose sending weapons and supplies to Israel.

As Shahid explained to me, a coalition of progressive and pro-Palestine organizations and movements could eventually occupy a majority within the Democratic Party and push out or at least diminish the influence of AIPAC and the Israel lobby — much as the civil rights movement did in forcing Dixiecrats out of the party. The alliance Shahid envisions would act like an “anchor group” within the party. That term was coined by political scientist Daniel Schlozman in 2015 to describe movements that have organized themselves to exert long-term influence on the establishment parties, such as the Christian right and the labor movement. In exchange, anchor groups offer the parties mobilizing or fundraising capacities to grow the parties’ bases. In the context of our two-party system, an antiquated Electoral College, and first-past-the-post elections, Schlozman argued, policy change takes place largely within the establishment parties. “We have a political system that is stacked against big change,” he explained in a 2021 interview with The Nation. “And in this system, conflict largely takes place inside parties.”

As part of building a progressive and pro-Palestine anchor group, the Uncommitted movement’s overture to the party leadership was therefore an offer to turn out hundreds of thousands of pro-peace votes for the Harris campaign if it would commit to a policy change on Gaza. “Put me in, Coach,” Alawieh said on the podcast Know Your Enemy after the convention. “Let me mobilize a community that you have left behind.” The movement’s tremendous success at turning out uncommitted votes during the Democratic primaries proved its ability to mobilize Democrats while simultaneously highlighting the political risk of not promising a substantive policy shift. An August YouGov/IMEU Policy Project poll of Democrats in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania found that over a third of swing state voters said they would be more likely to vote for a nominee who pledges to stop sending weapons to Israel. But an October Arab American Institute poll had Trump and Harris virtually tied among Arab American voters. The Muslim mayor of Hamtramck, Mich., has since endorsed Trump, and other frustrated Arab voters seem to be going that way.

Ultimately, Harris’s commitment to providing weapons unconditionally to Israel forced the Uncommitted movement to release a statement of non-endorsement on Sept. 19. For some within the Palestine movement, the statement didn’t go far enough; they want a strategy that would punish Harris at the polls. Given the Democratic Party’s maddening intransigence on Gaza, it’s understandable that many people would feel queasy about casting a ballot for Kamala Harris and are looking for alternatives. Her party takes left and antiwar votes for granted while celebrating war criminal Dick Cheney and other anti-Trump Republicans. Hassan Abdel Salam, a co-founder of the Abandon Harris campaign and a supporter of Jill Stein, told a Guardian reporter: “The former president prevented our families, our friends, our colleagues from entering the country. But the vice president killed them.”

But the United States’s two-party, winner-take-all political system makes it very difficult to punish Democrats without aiding Republicans. As Alawieh put it, “I have family that is currently in Lebanon, seeing people around them at grocery stores, walking down the street, blow up right in their faces … so excuse me if my priority is not punishing Harris … I care if our movement is well positioned to save some lives.” Donald Trump has declared himself Israel’s “protector,” claiming that it will cease to exist if he isn’t elected. He has promised to remove “Jew haters” and “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again” and indicated that he’d support Israel going even further. “Biden is trying to hold [Netanyahu] back,” Trump said, “and he probably should be doing the opposite, actually. I’m glad that [Netanyahu] decided to do what he had to do.”

This is the bind antiwar organizers now find themselves in: caught between two genocidal parties. It’s not a new predicament. The two establishment parties have collaborated in erecting near-impossible barriers to entry for third parties at a local, state, and national level. As a result, the U.S. elite has never faced a serious, sustained challenge to the two-party stranglehold over electoral politics on a national level. The Populist and Socialist Parties began to achieve electoral breakthroughs in the 19th century, but even those gains were extremely limited and never approached viability on a national level. The most vibrant third-party campaign in almost a century was that of Ralph Nader in 2000, yet it ended with less than 3 percent of the vote and a George W. Bush victory that many blamed on Nader supporters, arguably setting back the possibility of an alternative to the Democratic Party. Some on the left nevertheless remain committed to the strategy as an ostensibly more dignified path than having to work within a hidebound Democratic Party.

But efforts within the party have netted results, which — unsatisfactory as they may be, given the unrelenting horrors still happening — have the potential to lay the groundwork for more profound shifts. In large part due to the work that Shahid and left-wing insurgents have done within the Democratic Party, the past few years have brought a breakup of the pro-Israel consensus on Capitol Hill. Three years ago, amid Israel’s 2021 assault on Gaza, members of the Squad and other progressives organized a bloc of representatives to break out of the existing parameters of elite conversation about the region, calling out apartheid and ethnic cleansing by name and helping to mainstream a growing movement.

That political trajectory intensified over the course of the past year. In the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, the White House press secretary called the small handful of House  representatives in favor of a cease-fire “repugnant and disgraceful.” But in the months that followed, movement activists used the congressional cease-fire resolution introduced by Rep. Cori Bush as an organizing tool, rallying around the demand to sign on to the resolution as they bird-dogged elected officials around the country. Increasing numbers of Democratic politicians came out for a cease-fire, and city government resolutions popped up around the country calling for the same. In the spring, more than 50 Democratic politicians — Rep. Nancy Pelosi among them — signed a letter that called for conditioning aid. Overt tensions between Biden’s and Netanyahu’s governments emerged, though Biden refused to draw a “red line” no matter the extent of Israeli atrocities.

Bipartisan support for Israel has remained stubbornly resilient for decades. And the strategy to build a progressive bloc within the Democratic Party has suffered some significant defeats, among them the primary losses of Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman after unprecedented spending by AIPAC. The lobby spent nearly $15 million over the course of a few weeks to drown out Bowman’s campaign with attack ads that painted him as an out-of-touch radical. And while members of the Squad become increasingly vocal in calling for an arms embargo, discussion of even conditioning aid have quieted among centrist Democrats.

James Zogby, a longtime Democratic insider, founder of the Arab American Institute, and a supporter of Uncommitted, called the DNC’s rejection of a Palestinian American speaker an “unforced error.” But the callousness of the party leadership at the convention and the Harris campaign’s refusal to meet with Uncommitted organizers since indicate a deliberate posture by Democratic Party leaders. The genocide not only continues unabated but also has expanded. Refusing a Palestinian speaker was part and parcel of normalizing mass violence in Palestine and justifying ongoing U.S. support.

Shahid and supporters of Uncommitted say that any significant policy shift takes time, and the changing demographics and politics of the Democratic Party make the current misalignment on this issue unsustainable. Younger Democratic voters are consistently to the left of the party leadership on Israel and Palestine and a host of other political issues, such as immigration and climate change. “The party is changing from below, and it’s always the top of the party that is last to get onboard,” Shahid told me. Just as President Biden eventually oversaw progressive economic and climate policies, a Harris administration could break from the foreign policy positions of earlier administrations, given sufficient pressure. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), for instance, was driven by a diverse set of actors, Shahid pointed out, “but there were labor unions at the table, environmental organizations at the table,” as well as progressives, youth organizations, and civil rights organizations.

For this coalition to be able to exert influence within the electoral arena, movements on the outside must grow strong enough to make the political price of ignoring them impossible. The scrappy and fragmented antiwar movement needs to build the kind of robust coalition that came together to push for the IRA in order to amass the kind of power necessary to force a pivot on foreign policy. A microcosm of that inside-outside strategy was at play at the DNC as protesters rallied on the streets throughout the week and Uncommitted activists called for a sit-in the night they found out their speaker suggestions had been rejected. But while battles to shift Democratic policies around evictions or climate have proved immensely difficult, the party’s commitment to Israel is even less vulnerable to pressure from below because of the geopolitical interests at stake.

The U.S. ruling class’s ironclad relationship to its Israeli counterparts is not merely a matter of AIPAC having more power within the Democratic Party than do forces that are critical of Israel — it is tethered to a more foundational American imperial project. A powerful Israel, with a superior and nuclear-bearing military, is part of a world order of American hegemony. The U.S. relies on its Israeli partner to silence Palestinian, other Arab, and Islamic resistance movements throughout the Middle East and to prevent the emergence of a regional power. Withdrawing support from its ally, even during a massively unpopular and unwinnable war, would only strengthen the politics of armed struggle and pose a danger to a status quo that benefits the political establishment, according to this view. When that junior partner acts outside the interests of the U.S. — inciting, for instance, a regional conflict or pushing the U.S. into a direct confrontation with Iran — its role within the American imperial project still makes it hard to abandon.

That limits the parallels to apartheid South Africa. U.S. support for South Africa was rooted in a previous Cold War imperial order. At that time, limiting the growth of the African National Congress to build a nonaligned or Soviet-aligned country was not an insignificant goal. Yet South Africa’s position on the periphery of the American order made it a relatively lower-hanging fruit than Israel. And yet U.S. support for the apartheid regime took decades to dislodge.

The objective for the left is not only to challenge the power of AIPAC but more fundamentally to confront U.S. imperialism — an interlinked but necessarily longer-term project. To do so requires an expansion of the progressive coalition that Uncommitted worked to build at the DNC, continuing to win progressive and pro-Palestine down-ballot campaigns while exerting public pressure that renders support for Israel a political liability. Building that power can’t come from a single source, necessitating tying together electoral campaigns with escalating tactics of disruption on campuses and labor actions from unions that have previously made statements and resolutions in support.

Chicago’s Union Park, where protests took place throughout the DNC, is perched on a hill several blocks from the United Center. Eman Abdelhadi, an academic and activist based in Chicago, described a moment during the protests when she looked out across fences and barricades and saw the convention center in the distance. “I just don’t know that there’s a more powerful symbol of American governance right now,” she told me, “than a bunch of people coming together to express their voice and being not even within hearing distance of the governing body that they’re trying to address.” Thousands of people had arrived at the protests, organized by coalitions that ran across progressive, labor, community, climate, and reproductive justice networks; every group had agreed to center Palestinian liberation as a unified demand. But permits to march directly to the convention were denied. “We were treated like children to be babysat by the police,” Abdelhadi said.

Challenging American governance proved to be a dispiriting affair. Outside the convention center, organizers drew strength from the coalitions they had built, but they acknowledged that the turnout was smaller than they needed to make their grievances impossible to ignore. Inside the exuberant convention center, Uncommitted delegates and supporters made significant headway among rank-and-file delegates, but were treated as unwanted, grieving guests.

“I’ve been an advocate of the inside-outside strategy,” Abdelhadi told me, “but I feel like we’ve hit a ceiling, at least with this election, on the amount of influence that could happen on the inside. … Frankly, the election is a distraction at this point.” Shahid, for his part, feels that the uncommitted strategy is “the floor, not the ceiling.” To draw on their organizing momentum, he told me, progressives need to build the “part of the ecosystem’s muscle that hasn’t been developed.” That includes not only electoral infrastructure but also congressional district and financial infrastructure that probably will never match AIPAC’s but could, in his view, at least compete, given how broadly popular the demand for a permanent cease-fire is. A September AP-NORC/Pearson Institute poll found a majority in support of the demand, including 90 percent of Democrats. Among younger Democrats (ages 18 to 44), 65 percent say the U.S. is responsible for the continued fighting.

The left has no certain strategies, and it’s too soon to tell whether Abdelhadi’s or Shahid’s prognosis will prove correct. But at a moment when progressives don’t yet have the power we want or need, we have to pick our battles without guarantees and hope that these experiments will yield some combination of tactics that will eventually succeed. This has always been the case for the left, for whom every win has been the culmination of untold lost battles, setbacks, and disappointments.

Sixty years ago, the Mississippi Freedom delegation failed to get seated at the DNC and did not build a lasting organization. John Lewis would later write of the 1964 convention: “For the first time, we had made our way to the very center of the system. We had played by the rules, done everything we were supposed to do, had played the game exactly as required, had arrived at the doorstep and found the door slammed in our face.” The actions of the MFDP nonetheless provided a pivot point for the civil rights movement. By publicizing the violence of the segregationist South and the complicity of the Democratic Party, its members led the way for the passage of the Voting Rights Act and helped to break open the cracks emerging within the party’s unsustainable coalition. Despite its mistreatment, the MFDP campaigned for Johnson in the aftermath of the convention. The party did ultimately buckle and realign. If or when it will do so again remains unclear, but the realigners have both the numbers and historical precedent on their side.

The Uncommitted movement deserves credit for approaching the long-standing two-party dilemma in a novel way, and it has arguably helped strengthen the movement for a free Palestine. A small, ragtag group of organizers may not have exacted an immediate victory from the representatives of American militarism, but they have succeeded in building a more robust movement. So long as the power to stop the genocide lies in Washington, D.C., and in the hands of the establishment parties, the left cannot afford to abdicate the inside track of the terrain.

Everyone who is battling it out within the party, as well as those who hope for a third party and those who are building the protest movement, acknowledges that the struggle to win substantive change will be uphill and protracted. The debate within the left largely boils down to whether compromises are allowable along the way. Activist and academic Rania Masri recently asked Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman, in a tense exchange about working within or outside of the Democratic Party, “When our people in Palestine are refusing to raise the white flag of surrender, when our people in Palestine are refusing to accept crumbs, why are you?” At one level, the elected left and activists will always be in uneasy tension, given the slow pace of political change. But if every concession is framed as a betrayal of the Palestinian people and every imperfect ally cast as a traitor, we will create not just an ineffective but uninhabitable left, a recipe for burnout and demoralization. The implication that we’ve lost if we haven’t won everything at once, and should be castigated for even trying, is immobilizing.

In moments like this, when the way forward is unclear and the stakes are unbearably high, the left tends to turn on itself and make enemies of potential allies, closing ranks instead of growing them. But nothing could be more harmful at a time when the Palestine solidarity movement is still in the minority and previously fringe, right-wing authoritarian elements are on the ascendancy. More than anything, the left needs to align our demands from within and without to demand an arms embargo and make support of Israel a toxic asset for any politician or institution. Over the past year, the Palestine movement has made unprecedented headway in forcing conversations about Gaza into the center of mainstream discussion, disrupted business as usual at hundreds of campuses, and changed the perceptions that most people have about the conflict and the role of our own government in stoking it. Victory is not imminent nor guaranteed, but as Shahid told me, “we can’t afford despair and pessimism.”