The Uncommitted movement put forward Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman to speak on the horrors in Gaza at the DNC last month. The party refused to let her speak. We talked with her about the refusal and the future of the Democrats and Palestine.
Portrait of Ruwa Romman. (ruwa4georgia.com)
As the Uncommitted delegates pushed for a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) last month, Georgia state representative Ruwa Romman emerged as the top contender. As someone willing to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris while also uplifting the Palestinian cause and telling her personal story, she seemed a diplomatic choice — someone who could please most of the messy coalition that makes up her party, given her track record as a loyal Democrat willing to work within the system.
In the speech that she would have given — a draft of which was leaked to and published by Mother Jones that week — Romman would have told the delegates about her Palestine-born grandfather and the pain of seeing Palestinians massacred and displaced. She also would have described the hope contained in this awful moment, witnessing “something profound: a beautiful, multiracial, multifaith and multigenerational coalition rising from despair within our Democratic Party.” She would not have called for an arms embargo to Israel.
Many at the convention supported Romman and the Uncommitted movement. Delegates wore keffiyehs and waved Palestinian flags in support of an arms embargo and for the inclusion of Romman as a speaker. But that “many” didn’t include the cautious centrists — most importantly Harris herself — or the big donors who make the decisions for the party who have been fine to continue greenlighting Israel’s bloodletting. After extensive organizing, on the last day of the convention, the word on Romman’s speech came back from the party: no.
“We lost our minds. Because we were ‘doing everything right,’” Romman says” — the movement was doing the opposite of declaring war on the Democratic Party. “We were there to push for the agreement for stopping weapons to Israel. That was the main goal. [The speaker’s spot] was supposed to be a symbolic gesture to show [pro-Palestine forces] still had a place in this party. The fact that they said no broke something in all of us.”
What was especially insulting, Romman emphasizes, is that on the same day that the DNC refused her a spot, Georgia Republican Geoff Duncan — a far-right former lieutenant governor and state representative who, along with other horrible characters like Dick Cheney, happens to oppose Donald Trump — spoke. When she learned that Duncan, who is directly responsible for Georgia’s “Heartbeat Bill, which has significantly curbed reproductive rights in that state, and whose last act before leaving office was a hateful ant-trans bill, “That’s when I personally lost my mind.”
“Republicans are not going to vote for us,” Romman emphasizes. “Democrats are basically a coalition government: you’ve got DSA members, you’ve got Working Families party members. The part I didn’t expect was Republicans to be included in that equation and the conversation” — and that Republicans appeared to be valued by the Democratic Party more than elected officials like her.
“The reality is that Republicans are not going to vote for us,” Romman says. “I talk to them all the time in my district. They have told me this to my face. I think it’s genuinely absurd that we prioritize having somebody like Geoff Duncan over a speaker who’s Palestinian.”
Her speech leaked, and the Uncommitted movement gave the DNC until 6 p.m. At 6:30, the organizers asked Romman to deliver it at a protest outside the DNC.
The DNC leadership’s indifference was a devastating experience. “I’m talking about saving lives of people that I know.” Her party leadership didn’t seem to care.
On the other hand, Romman notes, “the base has shifted. The party is eventually going to catch up.” Numerous polls show that average Democratic voters overwhelmingly agree with demands for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. After all the many barbarities Israel has carried out during this war, its esteem among such voters will be extremely low for a very long time.
Romman dates her political involvement to 2020, when she and her friends were organized by young Democrats working to mobilize voters. Once Romman discovered canvassing, she was hooked. “I didn’t know that was something people did. I didn’t know that was a method we could use to connect with people. When you talk to somebody directly, it hits so much deeper than an ad.”
She worked for the Council on American-Islamic Relations Georgia and other nonprofits for a few years and went to graduate school. But as soon as she returned to Georgia in 2020, she dove back into electoral politics, cofounding the Georgia Volunteer Hub, which helped to integrate outside volunteers into the state’s existing voter turnout structure.
“I love organization, I love building infrastructure,” she says.
A friend looked up Romman’s address and found that she lived in a blue district with an open seat. In September 2022, she launched a campaign for Georgia’s House of Representatives for the 97th district. She faced a competitive primary and general, but her campaign knocked on fifteen thousand doors. She received 57 percent of the vote. “That was because we threw the kitchen sink at it and did a ton of work for turnout.”
In 2022, the congressperson for Romman’s district endorsed her Democratic primary opponent. In the general election, she says her Republican opponent claimed she was a Hamas terrorist. “But we had the people, and that’s the part that matters.”
In 2022, Romman became the first Muslim and Palestinian woman elected to the Georgia State House of Representatives. This year, she and her volunteers are working to pull it off again. She will face Republican Michael Corbin in the general election. Hers is a blue district but hardly guaranteed: it has historically been a low turnout district. Hers could be one of those down-ballot opportunities for progressives to hold onto power while turning out voters to defeat the MAGA right in a critical swing state.
So far, Hamas isn’t coming up at the doors. “The things people are focusing on are very different,” she says. “They want to talk about education, they want to talk about their school, they want to talk about their kids, they want to talk about health care, student loans, the rising cost of everything.”
In the wake of the DNC debacle, Romman will continue to approach the Palestinian cause in the same way she runs for reelection. While she is disappointed in the party leadership, she looks at building support for Palestine as a practical matter: building the kind of infrastructure and power that is so robust that they “have no choice but to listen.”