'Uncommitted' group says Trump would be worse for Palestinians

The “Uncommitted” National Movement – a pro-Palestinian political group opposing the Biden administration’s support for Israel – encouraged its followers to back Vice President Harris’s presidential bid over former President Trump’s, less than one month ahead of Election Day.

The group stopped short of issuing a formal endorsement of the Democratic nominee, but in a video posted Tuesday on social media, the group’s co-founder, Lexi Zeidan, outlined the reasons she thinks Trump would be worse for the group’s anti-war agenda than Harris would be.

Zeidan painted the election next month as a binary choice, saying in the video, “Who will be elected in November is clear: It's Trump or it's Harris.”

“And we have to orient less towards who is the better candidate and more towards what is the better anti-war approach in building our collective power,” Zeidan continued. “It's clear [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu will be doing everything in his power to get Trump elected, and we have to do everything in our power to stop him.”

The movement emerged earlier this year during the Democratic presidential primaries, when President Biden was running largely unopposed for his party’s nomination. Democrats, frustrated by the Biden administration’s support for Israel as it continued its campaign against Hamas in Gaza, decided to stage a protest vote against the president by selecting the “uncommitted” option on the Democratic primary ballots in several states.

The group has pressured both Biden and now Harris to take firmer stances against Israel, but those efforts have largely been unsuccessful. The group has pushed the administration to support a weapons embargo and, at the Democratic National Convention this summer, put pressure on Harris to give prominent speaking slots to Palestinian rights advocates.

In the video, the group focused on Project 2025’s Israel-focused policies and highlighted the ways, Zeidan said, “It can get worse” for Palestinians, under a change in American leadership.

“As a Palestinian American,” she said in the video, “the current administration's handling of this genocide has been beyond enraging and demoralizing, but the reality is that it can get worse.”

“Nobody wants a Trump presidency more than Netanyahu because that is his ticket to wiping Palestine off the map,” Zeidan said about the embattled right-wing prime minister in Israel.

Zeidan said Project 2025 proposes cuts to humanitarian aid to the West Bank and Gaza, which she said described as “effectively closing off not just the meager resources getting in, but one of the only points of contact Gaza has with the outside world.”

She also suggested a future Trump presidency could result in the displacement of the Palestinian people from the territories and deliver on “massively expanding settlements.” At home, she said, Project 2025 would crack down on pro-Palestinian protests.