Meet Layla Elabed, the leader bringing the 'uncommitted' movement to the DNC in Chicago

Layla Elabed is leading a movement that has brought the issue of US accountability for Palestinian human rights to the political forefront in a way that hasn't been seen previously.

As co-chair of the uncommitted movement, which reached more than 101,000 votes in the Democratic primary of her state of Michigan, home to one of the highest concentrations of Arabs and Muslims in the US, she has helped give voice to a community that have for decades largely felt like they were not heard by the political elite.

This week, as she attends the Democratic convention in Chicago, she is navigating the balance of working both from the inside and from the outside of the political system as she seeks support for Palestinian human rights from Democratic delegates.

Learning from history, making history

"For the first time in Democratic National Convention history, there was a panel with Palestinian voices discussing Palestinian human rights," she told The New Arab after another a panel discussion the following day hosted by the Arab American Institute.

"We think that the DNC is listening a little bit more to the demands of our movement, especially in the political moment that we are in, watching a genocide unfold on Palestinians in 2024." 

"All we have is our voices. We don't have a multimillion-dollar super PAC [political action committee] to advocate on our behalf. All we have is our voices and our votes. And some of these votes are in key swing states that could potentially sway the outcome of this presidential election," she said. 

Elabed's background is in community organising, having spent years advocating for better living conditions for disadvantaged communities, often African Americans in the Detroit area. As the daughter of a United Auto Worker union member and as a sister of Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian Muslim woman elected to US Congress, community advocacy runs in the family.

After 7 October, with continuous Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, backed by US military aid, Elabed felt compelled to make her community's voices heard at the ballot box. With the campaign Listen to Michigan, she was able to build national recognition of Arab and Muslim voters, who historically have had some of the lowest voter turnout in the US.

She says the movement is modelled on work from the Black civil rights movement, a nod to groundwork that has paved the way for what is being done today.

"We've been modelling the Mississippi Freedom Party under the leadership of Fannie Lou Hamer [who advocated against Black voter repression in Mississippi], and in the spirit of the civil rights movement," she said.

"This movement really started out of frustration," she said, noting the high population of Arabs and Muslims in her home state. "Out of that grief and frustration, we were thinking about what we could do at this moment. What are we going to do in November?"

Using their swing-state votes as leverage

At that moment, she saw that she and her community were faced with two choices—either vote for Joe Biden, a president who has supported Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's daily bombardment of Gaza, or Donald Trump, who openly supports fascism.

"What can we do? We can't afford to stay at home. We need to have a fighting chance," she said. 

"So, we used the vehicle of Democratic presidential primaries to vote uncommitted, to send a message to the Democratic Party that they needed to shift policy now, a policy that is immoral and unpopular and violates our own laws, our own American international laws," she said, referring to the Leahy Act, which prohibits the US from providing foreign assistance to foreign units that violate human rights with impunity.

"They needed to shift course in order to have a fighting chance against Trump in November and reunite our fractured party," she said.

There are now 30 delegates representing uncommitted voters from various states at the DNC. These delegates are now actively recruiting Harris delegates. 

"The strategy of our movement is to build a broad tent and to grow our movement. And that broad tent has to include Democrats that we know support the Biden-Harris administration that support Harris as the presidential candidate," she said. 

Trying to unite Democratic Party through popular policies

"And with this strategy, we're hoping we can push the party and this administration and Vice President Harris to adopt a policy that voters want, that her own voter base are demanding," she said, noting that there are now more than 200 Harris delegates identifying as ceasefire delegates. She added that they are also seeing Harris delegates that are recruiting other Harris delegates to support a ceasefire.

Multiple polls conducted since October have found that the majority of Americans and the vast majority of Democrats support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and for conditioning US aid to Israel on its human rights record.

"Our delegates are telling us it's some of the easiest organising they've ever had to do," she said. "It's a common sense policy." She emphasised that they're not asking them to change their vote from supporting Harris for president.

Still, she says it's not enough. "We need a policy change in order to have a fighting chance in November, in order to unite our party, and we need a policy change that speaks to our own justice system," she added,