Can U.S. Voters End the Gaza Genocide?

In Chicago at the DNC, many protesters said they will not vote for Harris unless she supports an arms embargo and permanent ceasefire. Can this strategy work?

Since July, Kamala Harris has backed Israel’s war on Gaza on four high-profile occasions. Backing “Israel’s right to defend itself” is a dog whistle for genocide. This new article is based on my reporting from Chicago during the DNC. Protesters vowed no votes for Harris unless she calls for an arms embargo on Israel and a permanent ceasefire. Protesters said right now we have real power. The power to withhold our votes. We will vote for her, they said, if she meets our demands. After the election on Nov. 5, we lose that power.

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In late August, on the third day of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Sheri Maali came to Union Park to send a message. “I would like to see every elected official that is going up on that DNC stage … to stand up and say enough is enough. Cease-fire now, arms embargo, sanctions. I would like to see something where this just ends.”

Maali’s family comes from the occupied West Bank. She says, “My father is older than Palestine,” when it was partitioned by the United Nations in 1948. Wearing a long keffiyeh-patterned dress that skimmed the grass, Maali was joined by several friends waving Palestinian flags and holding up posters denouncing President Joe Biden as “Genocide Joe.” They were among 3,000 demonstrators that drew heavily from Chicago’s “Little Palestine,” the largest Palestinian community in the country.

When asked how the movement for Gaza could pressure Democrats and presidential nominee Kamala Harris to end the Israeli genocide, Maali says, “Hold out our votes.” She asks, “What else do we have besides our votes? That is our only power.” 

Ali Nawaz, a 20-year-old Chicago resident, said he came out to protest for a cease-fire and arms embargo because he had “hope” in “the power of collective action, which should never be underestimated.” Photo by Arun Gupta

Nearby was Satnaam Singh Mago, who wore a T-shirt with a T. rex grasping a Palestinian flag. Like Maali, Mago has voted for Democrats faithfully all his life. Now, however, he rejects the idea of “the lesser of two evils” and “voting based on fear.” But he is also hopeful. “We have the power to change an election. … What we are trying to tell Kamala Harris is you have to earn our vote.” 

I interviewed a couple dozen people the week of the DNC and asked protesters about pressing issues like abortion rights, Project 2025, and the dangers of a second Trump presidency. Almost all protesters told me things like, “Genocide isn’t a single issue, it’s the only issue,” “I can’t vote for genocide,” and “Trump is worse on some things, but there is nothing worse than genocide.”

The protesters reflected my own thoughts. We have real power. The more voters declare, “No arms embargo, no vote,” the more pressure it puts on Harris to capitulate to our demands ahead of the election on November 5. 

Let’s not kid ourselves. Harris supports the genocide of Palestinians. On four high-profile occasions she has declared, “Israel has a right to defend itself”: after meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu in July, during her DNC speech, during her interview on CNN, and during the presidential debate on September 10, when she also reiterated the widely debunked claim that mass rape was committed by Hamas during its attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. American politicians have long invoked Israel’s “right to defend itself.” In the context of Israel wiping out Gaza in the name of “defending” itself from Hamas, that phrase is a dog whistle for genocide.

It’s hard to accept that we are complicit in genocide. It’s easier to say that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to blame, that we are not responsible, that Biden cannot end arms transfers with a phone call, that Harris will end them after she is elected.  It’s also easier to treat genocide as a transactional issue: Gaza is bad, but the threat to abortion rights and democracy and Project 2025 are bigger risks. Or, Trump will enact a worse genocide in Gaza.

We need to hear other perspectives. Outside the DNC I talked to one woman, who didn’t want to give her name, who told me she had lost more than a hundred relatives in Gaza to Israel’s attacks. She said, “Every morning I wake up in anguish. I don’t know who survived last night. Many days I can’t get in touch with anyone. I have cousins whose families have been wiped out. One aunt is in a wheelchair with a heart condition. A cousin has diabetes and can’t get medicine. They’re dying.” She burst out crying while speaking to me.

Can we honestly tell her to vote for the party slaughtering her family? Why is it that we won’t save her from a violent America, but we expect her to save us from a different face of that same violence? If this was happening to you, would you be telling people to vote for the party wiping out everyone who knew and loved?

In Chicago, protesters showed us what solidarity looks like. It means seeing the world through the eyes of the people you are supporting, and to work to achieve their goals. Palestinians are being crushed by the American empire. We benefit from the empire in terms of wealth, power, jobs, and lower-cost goods and resources. Solidarity means putting the needs of oppressed peoples before our own.

The defeat of the American empire by the Vietnamese inspired international solidarity movements of all types. A mass movement of Americans in solidarity with the people of Central America likely stopped Reagan from invading Nicaragua. The anti-apartheid movement helped bring down the brutal Afrikaner regime in South Africa. 

Now we need to be in solidarity with Palestine and say, “End the genocide immediately.” 

Genocide is the worst political act possible: the extermination of an entire people. “Never again” does not mean “never again except for Palestinians.” If we think we can’t stop this, then we are nihilists. We are saying politics is useless.

It starts with hope. Student protesters for Gaza last spring had a rock-solid conviction they could force universities to divest from Israel. While only a few schools have divested so far (it is always a trickle before it is a flood), the protests worked. They triggered an avalanche of divestment and academic, cultural, and scientific boycotts that have made Israel an international pariah. With students returning for the fall, pro-Palestine protests are back in session despite universities imposing new methods to crush free speech and assembly. 

By continuously emphasizing ironclad support for Israel, Harris is revealing that support is actually fragile. This gives us an opening to force her to earn our vote by making it contingent on an arms embargo and an end to the genocide. This is hardball politics. It’s what billionaires do. They cut million-dollar checks to candidates and demand much more in return. Harris recently caved to pressure from billionaires to drop a proposed tax on the ultrawealthy.

We have something more precious than dollars. There are millions of us horrified by the genocide and who want it to end immediately. But many of us are scared to use our power. Right before the DNC, a poll was conducted of nearly 1,500 Democratic and independent voters in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. It found that 34% or more of voters in those states would be likelier to support Harris if there was a permanent cease-fire or an arms embargo on Israel.

In Chicago, a protester named Chris, a member of the Starbucks Workers United union, says, “It’s a genocide happening in real time, and people don’t want to call it that.” Still, he plans to vote for Harris, saying, “I will make sure to hold her accountable the whole time she’s in office.” When asked how he can hold Harris accountable after the election, Chris says, “I don’t know. It’s tough.” 

Wearing a keffiyeh-style dress, Sheri Maali (center) and friends rallied on Aug. 21, 2024, the third day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, to demand an end to U.S. funding and arming of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Maali and thousands of others from Chicago’s "Little Palestine" neighborhood gathered in Union Park before marching toward the DNC, promising to withhold their votes unless Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris commits to a cease-fire and arms embargo against Israel. Photo by Arun Gupta

This is the problem. Instead of using our power over the Democrats before the election, when it is most potent, we surrender to them. It’s because they have perfected a formula to terrorize us. Every four years they hold a gun to our heads and say, “The world will end if you don’t elect us.” The name on the gun changes—Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Bush 1 and 2, McCain, Romney, and Trump—but the threat remains the same.

The Democrats have trapped us. We vote them in. But then not only do we get nothing in return, they do the dirty work of Republicans. And we ignore it.

This strategy was honed during the 1964 campaign with the infamous “Daisy Ad.” The commercial shows a little blonde girl plucking petals off a flower as she counts. She freezes as a loudspeaker at a test site starts counting down. A thermonuclear blast fills the screen, and President Lyndon Johnson intones, “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live. Or to go into the dark. We must either love each other. Or we must die.” 

Subtle, it wasn’t. Johnson was saying a vote for Barry Goldwater was a vote for annihilation, and that he, in contrast, was the candidate of love. Except exactly one month before the ad aired, Congress handed Johnson a blank check for a U.S. war that eventually killed 5 million people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. 

They have been using this trick for 60 years. Democrats have us so terrified of the right that we will sign off on any atrocity as long as Team Blue does it. Bill Clinton fulfilled the Reagan Revolution, Obama supersized the war on terror, and Biden is to blame for the Gaza genocide, not Trump. 

Democrats have sat in the White House for 20 of the past 32 years. They deregulated Wall Street, bailed it out after it blew up the economy, and protected criminal bankers from prosecution. Democrats sabotaged climate change accords and enabled a historic oil and gas boom that has baked in climate catastrophe. They gutted welfare, passed NAFTA, allowed the far right to capture the courts, supercharged mass incarceration, created the “most intrusive surveillance apparatus in the world,” and built a massive immigration prison system.

Harris promises more of the same: more border cruelty, more global warming, more genocide. More of the same threats we hear every election: “This election … is the most important of our lives.” 

Instead we should beware that Gaza is a threat of genocides to come.

I have reported from border cities such as Tijuana and Matamoros that have become killing fields as a result of our policies that have spawned brutal wars, criminal cartels, and climate chaos. By 2050 climate refugees could number 1.2 billion, according to one estimate. Harris’ vow to be “tougher” than Trump on the border means more violence, deaths, and racism. Ratcheting up anti-immigrant policies as their numbers increase could bring genocide to our borders.

We cannot throw 90% of humanity under the bus. If we don’t end the razing of Gaza, we will throw open the gates of hell. Genocide is like COVID-19 and climate change: Borders won’t stop it. 

We can succumb to defeatism and believe Harris will never agree to an arms embargo and permanent cease-fire. 

Or we can remember that every movement that has made the world better—labor, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, LGBTQ rights—had an absolute belief they would win. They refused compromises, half measures, and surrendering. 

There can be no compromise in the fight for Palestine. If not now, when?