By Molly Burke,Hearst Fellow Updated Aug 11, 2024 (SFChronicle.com)
A protester waves a Palestinian flag outside the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco on Sunday as presidential candidate Kamala Harris holds a fundraiser inside.
While presidential candidate Kamala Harris raised $12 million at a fundraiser in San Francisco on Sunday, hundreds of protesters condemned her support for Israel during the war in Gaza.
Several Bay Area groups joined the “Kamala, Cut Ties with Israel Now” protest in Union Square, one of many pro-Palestinian rallies springing up around the Bay Area in recent months in response to Israel’s retaliation against Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.
“Killer Kamala, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide,” the crowd of about 120 protesters chanted before marching up Powell Street to the Fairmont hotel, site of the fundraiser. The crowd swelled to about 250 people as it merged with other protesters outside the hotel, where they faced police barricades.
Melinda Stahr, an elementary school teacher in Oakland protesting with Code Pink and carrying a “Stop the genocide” sign, said she can’t support Harris just because she’s not Donald Trump, the former president and Republican nominee. Stahr said Harris would have to commit to stop sending arms to Israel to earn her vote.
Stahr said she was happy when President Joe Biden stepped aside from the race because there’s a “little bit of hope.” But she’s planning on a protest vote for neither Harris nor Trump unless Harris goes further.
Stahr said the Israel-Hamas war will be the deciding factor for her during the November presidential election.
“This is the most important thing right now,” she said. “This is the only thing I’ve really been focused on since October.”
One speaker, joining the crowd in chants of “shame,” said voters should not feel obligated to choose Harris over Trump.
Luna Osleger-Montañez, a protester with Answer Coalition wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with an image of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara’s face, said Harris’ fundraiser provided an opportunity to make pro-Palestinian groups’ voices heard.
“She is second in command in an administration that’s currently committing a genocide,” Osleger-Montañez said, adding that she would have to see substantive changes to the war to be persuaded to vote for Harris, who she said has not yet taken any “material movement.”
“At the end of the day, it’s the masses of people, the millions of people in this country being out in the streets and making a mass movement that’s going to really put pressure on them,” she said. “If we see real development, that there’s a cease-fire, that there’s an arms embargo, that the genocide in Gaza ended, that the occupation, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, is over, then of course we would change our tactics. We’d pivot.”
Osleger-Montañez noted that when Harris was San Francisco’s district attorney, she refused to take action against the officers who killed Mario Woods, who was fatally shot when he walked toward police with a knife in the Bayview in 2015.
“When she was attorney general, she put in policies that protected enslaved labor of prison inmates,” Osleger-Montañez said. “She was a big, leading force in the war on drugs — the racist war on drugs — and also in mass incarceration.”
Rami Abdelkarim, a protester with the Palestinian Youth Movement, said there isn’t a benchmark that would win his vote for Harris.
“Last time I checked, politicians are supposed to earn the vote from their constituents,” he said. “It is not our responsibility whether we are picking the lesser of two evils. It’s not our responsibility that if she doesn’t earn her vote, someone else will win.”
Abdelkarim said he sees Harris as a continuation of Biden’s policies and that he is not more optimistic after the change in the nominee. To win his vote, he said, her campaign should call for an arms embargo and cease-fire immediately and take tangible action against the war in Gaza.
“People can say Donald Trump is more pro-Israel than the Biden administration,” he said. “What I’ve seen in the past 10 months is over 100,000 Palestinians murdered in a genocide. You can’t get more pro-Israel than that. You can’t get more pro-Israel than unrestricted funding. There is no policy difference to me.”
Reach Molly Burke: molly.burke@hearst.com
Aug 11, 2024|Updated Aug 11, 2024 1:22 p.m.
HEARST FELLOW
Molly Burke is a Hearst fellow covering politics for the San Francisco Chronicle. In the first half of her fellowship, she reported on state politics for the Times Union in Albany, N.Y. She is from Davis, Calif., and previously covered breaking news for the Sacramento Bee and the Denver Post. She also previously worked as a data reporter for the Bay City News through the Dow Jones News Fund. Molly graduated from Northwestern University in 2023 with a major in journalism. Reach Molly at Molly.Burke@hearst.com.
