Top Democrats such as Vice President Kamala Harris may not be speaking out about the pro-Palestinian protests spreading across American college campuses. But Georgia’s state Rep. Ruwa Romman is.
The 30-year-old lawmaker is the first and only Palestinian American elected to the Georgia General Assembly and one of only a handful elected as lawmakers anywhere in the country. The Duluth Democrat still has family in the West Bank and is increasingly being looked to as a Democratic voice of her generation as the Israeli-Hamas war rages on.
During a lengthy interview Tuesday, Romman defended the actions of pro-Palestinian protesters at Emory University and elsewhere. She also detailed young voters’ frustrations with President Joe Biden and warned that without a significant change of course in the Middle East, her party will not only lose in 2024, but will damage the Democratic Party for a generation.
“A lot of people are dismissing these students as ignorant, like they don’t understand this is a complicated world issue. But I’m an elected official, and I frankly don’t see it as that complicated,” she said. “There are a group of innocent people (in Gaza) that are being targeted. And no matter what we have done, it hasn’t changed.”
Romman is also the first Muslim woman in the General Assembly and the first lawmaker to wear a hijab on the House floor. With that high profile have come high expectations from her religious community and fellow liberals to represent them all simultaneously, along with her House district’s needs.
She said she began getting calls and texts last week about law enforcement being called to clear an encampment on the Emory quadrangle set up by pro-Palestinian students and activists. She went to the campus and monitored the events, and she linked arms with Emory faculty in the face of the police presence.
She later wrote a letter to the Emory administration calling the law enforcement response “a dangerous escalation” and a “grave injustice.”
At Columbia University, where students eventually barricaded themselves into Hamilton Hall before police raided the building, Romman told me the university’s administration is to blame for calling police onto campus after protesters were told to dismantle their encampments but refused.
“At Columbia, I truly think it would have just kind of been an encampment getting a little bit disruptive but nothing crazy,” she said. “But then when you saw police show up, it just massively increased.”
Georgia Republicans such as former U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Lt. Gov. Burt Jones have seized on the images of campus demonstrations, calling protesters “pro-terrorist radicals.” But Romman said she thinks the protests have been largely successful in refocusing attention on the war in Gaza.
“I think it has reignited the conversation, although from a different lens,” she said.
Although many Jewish students and families have been deeply upset by the protests at Emory and elsewhere, including multiple examples of antisemitic rhetoric on some campuses, Romman said the encampments are the result of intense anger among young people over the United States’ ongoing support for Israel and its war in Gaza, including plenty of young Jewish liberals.
It’s not clear how widespread the protesters’ views are among young people overall, but polls showing that young, liberal voters are straying from Biden just months ahead of the 2024 elections tell Romman she’s not off base. And it’s all combining to threaten the president’s chances of reelection to a second term.
“I think Democrats are banking on getting support from more moderate voters so they can make up for the progressives that they lose,” she said. “But what I like to remind people is that it’s progressives that come out and work these jobs, canvass for us and volunteer for us. They are our base.”
Even Romman has not said how she’ll vote in November. She supported the “Leave it Blank” protest vote against Biden during Georgia’s presidential primary to push him to support a cease-fire, but she has also said she’s trying to prevent a second Donald Trump presidency.
She said Tuesday that she won’t announce whether she’ll support Biden until after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. That’s where liberals plan to push for a change to the Democratic platform to formally include a call for a cease-fire in Gaza and an additional increase in American aid in Gaza.
“I am hoping and praying that we will see a serious policy shift in our DNC platform because then at least I can go back to voters and say, ‘Look, he’s representative of an entire platform that we have now agreed on as a party as it relates to this issue,’ ” she said.
With Democrats already on edge about possible demonstrations against Biden there, Romman said Illinois’ high concentration of Palestinian Americans all but guarantees there will be protests, which she warned could turn violent if demonstrators are not allowed near the convention hall.
“It could be Biden’s LBJ movement,” she said, referring to President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to forgo reelection during the height of the Vietnam War protests.
Whether she and other high-profile young leaders come around to support Biden in the fall is a crucial question and one that could determine whether he wins or loses to Trump. Robert Kennedy Jr., she said, is not a viable option.
“So it really is this looming, awful shadow of Trump and knowing that this election should have been ours,” she said. “It shouldn’t have been hard, and seeing how this is fracturing us is really difficult.”
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