Shabd Khalsa and Uncommitted: How SMC Members Contributed to the Historic Protest Vote Against Genocide in Gaza
SMC members have been among the DSA members who threw themselves into building “Uncommitted” campaigns across the country. As part of a limited series, we’re interviewing three of our SMC comrades about the roles they played in DSA’s efforts to build a national movement to stop U.S. funding of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
These interviews were conducted over the phone between April and June 2024, and have been edited for clarity. This is the second interview of three in this series.
Shabd Khalsa
Shabd began engaging in earnest with politics during the first Bernie Sanders campaign before working on the second. He has been a DSA member since 2018, a Socialist Majority member since 2022, and actively organizes in anti-Zionist spaces.
How did you get involved in the Uncommitted campaign?
I have a history in political organizing and phonebank infrastructure, which I picked up on the Bernie campaign. I felt deeply committed to this issue and felt personally responsible to support the struggle to stop American support for genocide. I’d previously bird-dogged members of Congress on the Hill about the issue on October 13th and had been arrested in the process. After that, I chose to step away from my job.
That act linked me to core IfNotNow organizers and allies from across the spectrum of left organizations. Newly jobless, I had time to organize. Through WhatsApp and online circles, I collaborated with former Bernie staffers Yong Jung Cho and Waleed Shahid to generate a letter with several hundred former Bernie Sanders campaign staffers calling for a ceasefire.
I was added to a Bernie alumni-Palestine WhatsApp group, where Waleed asked if anyone could run a distributed phone bank campaign in New Hampshire. That was the first state with an Uncommitted style campaign, and people there wanted to run a write-in ceasefire campaign. I raised my hand to join and Waleed put me in touch with the folks on the ground.
We did three phone banks—each about two hours with fifteen callers. We managed to make tens of thousands of calls and have a few hundred conversations. We got some real data on whether a segment of voters would use their primary vote as a protest to pressure Biden to halt support for the genocidal war in Gaza. The Working Families Party helped cut a list of Bernie/Warren youth voters. We found a very high percentage (two-thirds) were pro-ceasefire and half were willing to write in “ceasefire.” Those were indicators about building plans to do Michigan. We used a similar universe there.
I ended up in a Signal group with Waleed and a mish-mash of folks, such as ex-Sunrise Movement activists, Dearborn leaders like Abbas Alawieh and Layla Elabed, IfNotNow, DSA, and others from across the left. I was one of a team that helped build a campaign with a core group of Michiganders. We built a distributed electoral campaign to support our Palestinian leadership to spread the Uncommitted vote. This all came together thanks to Waleed, who wrote a brief on how voting Uncommitted in the primary could make Palestine an important electoral issue, bringing in another front in the struggle against genocide. The people assembled were those who read and agreed with the document and wanted to throw down in Michigan.
What role did you play in the Uncommitted campaign? What was DSA’s role?
While New Hampshire was the test case, Michigan represented the real launch of the Uncommitted campaign, which I worked on through the Wisconsin primary on April 2nd. The campaign has continued through the summer heading into the convention. Throughout each of these, DSA played a massive role. DSA NPC member Renée Paradis was a profoundly important connection. Ali Halal, a local Palestinian-Lebanese DSAer, helped get the Detroit chapter to endorse and was a key organizer.
“After Michigan, DSA becomes a key organizing base that has a bunch of built-in infrastructure to lend a hand.”
Renée and others helped organize the NPC Steering Committee to have DSA endorse the Uncommitted campaign. They did a bunch of important internal rallying and brought many factions together that were not necessarily aligned in other aspects of DSA activity. Aside from Renée being an integral political mind, there were so many pieces of infrastructure that she built. Her legal expertise and general skill as an organizer were invaluable.
After Michigan, DSA becomes a key organizing base that has a bunch of built-in infrastructure to lend a hand. Our access to Scale to Win in Minnesota—that caused a legal scare as we were about to launch, and our service was cut. To get us through the night, because we had fifty people coming to phonebank, DSA’s then-Senior Organizing Tools Administrator Walker Green set us up with one night of phone banking which was all done within compliance rules. That saved our night.
Who did you work with outside of DSA?
We collaborated with individuals from Momentum-style organizations like Justice Democrats, IfNotNow, Sunrise, etc. Each group brought and did something different. And we signed onto Reject AIPAC, which was more aligned with Justice Democrats. Other groups included Arab Americans for Progress. But we also changed as the campaign went on. We formed our own PAC called Listen to Us PAC to host fundraising and pay folks.
How did being in Socialist Majority help or impact your participation?
It was nice to have caucus mates there, and I was able to get to know SMC people better. It was great to see SMC members helping that were whipping votes to pass endorsements at the national level. It is not an overstatement to say SMC’s political impact, relationships, and organizing were part of what helped DSA pretty widely endorse Uncommitted.
How did you feel about the results? What’s next for the movement?
“It is not an overstatement to say SMC’s political impact, relationships, and organizing were part of what helped DSA pretty widely endorse Uncommitted.”
From a sort of short-term tactical view, it was a huge success. It was in the media and effectively pushed the narrative of the war in Gaza, on top of being a moral catastrophe and genocide, did not bode well for Biden’s re-election. That is still part of the narrative. That was part of the whole goal.
But Rafah is being invaded. This shit is still going on. It still feels like peanuts compared to what is going on.
We did mobilize another wing of the public who might not do direct action to voice their opinion about this issue. It was successful in showing strength as anti-war, anti-fascist, and pro-democracy. It wasn’t just Muslims, leftists, and young people, but standard Democrats too. Analysis of this campaign will be important for what future efforts we put forward to engage with the electoral system toward liberatory ends.
There is national widespread awareness of the Uncommitted movement. Among Democrats, there were people who reacted to it in a negative way. There were people who said it was helping Trump. But our counter-narrative put that in the hands of the administration, for tanking their own re-election chances. It has to stop.
But it’s hard to say it is a full success with the war still going on. There is much to learn from it.