In Maryland’s Democratic primary, 10% of people who went to the polls opted to vote “uncommitted” rather than support President Joe Biden, according to the latest numbers from the State Board of Elections. .
“Although ballots are still being counted, the ‘uncommitted’ vote count in this year’s Democratic presidential primary election is already tens of thousands of votes higher than in the 2020 elections,” the group Listen To Maryland said in a press release sent out Wednesday. In the days and weeks leading up to the May 14 primary, the group organized to get Marylanders to commit to voting “uncommitted.”
People who are part of the “uncommitted” movement want to pressure Biden to end U.S. backing of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Critics argue that Biden’s ongoing military and diplomatic support for Israel’s relentless war is costing him votes from younger Americans that will be crucial to winning the November election.
Biden and former president Donald Trump won their respective primary races in Maryland, Nebraska, and West Virginia, advancing as the likely nominees for the Democratic and Republican parties.
Trump has thus far escaped accountability for seeking to overturn his 2020 election loss and is reportedly preparing for a repeat this year.
This development occurs as new polls show Trump leading Biden in five crucial swing states that may decide the presidential election. Biden is losing ground among young voters — who have mobilized to demand Biden do more to stop the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
A recent poll by the left-leaning research firm Data for Progress found 7 in 10 likely US voters support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
To read more about the “uncommitted” movement, check out the Beat’s previous reporting here.
Hopkins Encampment Ends
Meanwhile, on May 12, Johns Hopkins University students announced they had agreed to end their two-week-long Gaza solidarity encampment.
The deal, confirmed by the university, avoided mass arrests and provided amnesty for students but fell short of their key demands for the school to cut ties with companies profiting from Israel’s war on Gaza.
“In no way are we satisfied with this end to our demonstration. This agreement is only a first step toward our demands in the longer struggle for decolonization,” stated the Hopkins Justice Collective, which helped organize the protest. “Similar agreements that concluded other encampments, such as those at Brown and Northwestern University, achieved shifts in the divestment movement but failed to reach total divestment or demilitarization.”
“We are grateful to the many members of our community—faculty, staff, and students—who helped us navigate this moment. It is my fervent hope that at Hopkins, we can continue our focus on the important work of a university – to engage in dialogue and learning with one another regarding challenging and complex issues such as these,” Hopkins President Ron Daniels said in an email to Baltimore Beat.
The following afternoon, dozens of students, faculty, and community members rallied in support of an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
The encampment was one of hundreds of demonstrations related to the Israel-Palestine conflict in recent weeks, which have been overwhelmingly in support of Palestinians. Student protests in particular have spread in recent weeks on campuses to press their schools to cut ties with companies that sell weapons to Israel. Nearly 3,000 people have been arrested in the past several weeks of student-led protests, NBC reported.
Gaza has faced nearly nonstop Israeli bombardment in the seven months since Hamas’s October 7 attack that killed 1,200 Israelis, many of them civilians. At least 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, the majority of them women and children.
“We need to speak up more because it is in that silence that we see more war crimes being committed,” Montgomery County Delegate Gabriel Acevero, who visited the encampment to express solidarity with the students, told Baltimore Beat. “We see more disregard for the preliminary ruling by the International Court of Justice that said that there is plausible genocide in Gaza.”
In recent days, students have staged demonstrations at graduations across the country, including UC Berkeley, Pomona College and Virginia Commonwealth University. Students at Duke University walked out on the commencement speaker, comedian Jerry Seinfeld, over his support for Israel. Tamara Rasamny, one of the Columbia University students arrested during protests at their school, spoke out in solidarity with Gaza during graduation.
Since October in the West Bank, Israeli soldiers have killed 500 Palestinians and Israeli settlers have carried out nearly 800 attacks. Israel has continued to expand Jewish-only settlements in the occupied territories, which are considered illegal under international law, and a major obstacle to peace, yet continue to receive financial backing from the US.
Aid groups have accused Israel of indiscriminately targeting civilians, medical staff, and civilian infrastructure, all in violation of international humanitarian law. Gaza, one the most densely populated areas in the world, is largely reduced to rubble; the UN estimates it will take 80 years to rebuild the homes destroyed in the war.
Israeli officials say they are minimizing civilian casualties and that they are trying to free hostages who remain in Gaza. Thousands of Israelis, including some families of the hostages, took to the streets in recent days accusing the Israeli government of thwarting negotiations to bring home the hostages in order to prolong the war. Meanwhile, right-wing Israeli activists blocked shipments of aid from reaching Gaza.
On Friday, the Biden administration said it would continue to supply weapons to Israel despite finding the close ally was using U.S. weapons in likely violation of international humanitarian law requirements for protecting civilians.
In contrast, the U.S. immediately halted funding for the United Nations Palestinian Relief Agency (UNRWA) after Israel alleged employees had colluded with Hamas, noted Husam Zomlot, Palestinian ambassador to the United Kingdom.
Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, who sought the probe of Israel’s conduct in the war, said Israel was preventing food from reaching Palestinians. The U.N. says Gazans are experiencing “full-blown famine.”
“That’s why we have hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that have nothing to do with Hamas on the verge of starvation,” Van Hollen told the Associated Press.
The Hopkins Justice Collective remained steadfast in their calls for an end to the Israeli occupation, saying in a statement, “The [Israeli military] continues to bomb the only safe zone left in Palestine. Universities continue to fund the ongoing apartheid genocide and settler-colonial occupation that Palestinians have endured since 1948. Meanwhile, there are no universities left in Gaza. The only true victory is the liberation of Palestine and the end to settler colonialism everywhere.”
The protesters faced increasing pressure to disband ahead of a scheduled counterprotest Monday, which was canceled after the deal was announced. When expressing concerns for student safety, Hopkins evoked another decades-old protest movement:
“[A] student dwelling in a semi-permanent shelter to protest South African Apartheid suffered serious burns when another student set the structure on fire,” Daniels said in an email on May 2. In the 1980s, after students erected a mock shantytown on campus to protest Hopkins’ support for the apartheid government in South Africa, it was firebombed by fraternity members. In May 1986, three Hopkins fraternity brothers were charged with arson and attempted murder for setting a fire that injured one student protester.
That years-long campaign eventually successfully pressured schools like Hopkins to divest from apartheid South Africa. Anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela, who was jailed for decades and went on to serve as president of South Africa, thanked student protesters for helping to bring down that country’s white supremacist regime.
Critics of the current protests reject parallels to the anti-apartheid movement. But Mandela compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with South Africa’s treatment of Black South Africans, and urged Israel to end the occupation in order to secure peace.
“Talk of peace will remain hollow if Israel continues to occupy Arab territories,” Mandela told Israel’s Foreign Ministry during a visit in 1999. “I understand completely well why Israel occupies these lands. There was a war. But if there is going to be peace, there must be complete withdrawal from all of these areas.”
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