Ruwa Romman, the is a Palestinian American and the first Muslim woman in the Georgia House of Representatives. She had hoped to speak about Palestine at the Democratic National Convention.

“I felt incredibly honored to be considered,” she said Rolling Stone on Thursday.

But on Wednesday night, the Uncommitted Movement learned that the DNC would not give them the opportunity to speak on the main stage. The Uncommitted Movement represents more than 700,000 voters who voted “undecided” during the Democratic presidential primary to support Palestine and call for a ceasefire and an end to U.S. arms sales to Israel. More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Israel declared war on Hamas following attacks on Israel on October 7.

The movement’s voters could be especially decisive in Michigan, where more than 100,000 Democratic voters marked “undecided” in the primary. The DNC has provided the Uncommitted Movement with several non-televised forums this week but refused to send the group a speaker on stage – not even Romman, a Democratic representative in Georgia, a key swing state.

“The reality is that we’re really just asking for the bare minimum,” Romman said. “This was a symbolic gesture. This should be something we can take back and say, ‘Look, the party is listening.'”

Before the Uncommitted Movement learned it would not have an opportunity to speak, its leaders were “encouraged because we saw that families of Israeli hostages were invited to the stage,” Romman said. “So we thought, okay, this is it.”

On Thursday, Mother Jones published a draft of the speech Romman planned to give, in which she spoke about the devastation of being “moral witnesses to the massacres in Gaza.”

“But in that pain,” she writes, “I also witnessed something profound – a wonderful, multifaith, multiethnic, multigenerational coalition that grew out of desperation within our Democratic Party.”

She continues: “For 320 days, we have stood together and demanded that our laws be enforced against friend and foe, to achieve a ceasefire, to stop the killing of Palestinians, to release all Israeli and Palestinian hostages, and to begin the difficult work of forging a path to collective peace and security. That is why we are here – members of this Democratic Party, committed to equal rights and dignity for all. What we are doing here resonates around the world.”

Part of Romman’s frustration was that former Georgia Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan spoke on Wednesday. Duncan, a Republican, is anti-abortion.

“He’s a Republican, an anti-choice Republican, and there was no room for me in that big tent we’ve been setting up all week,” she said.

Romman wanted to support Vice President Kamala Harris in her speech. “Let us commit to each other to elect Vice President Harris and defeat Donald Trump, who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a dirty word,” the draft states.

Referring to President Barack Obama’s most famous slogan, she wanted to say: “To those who doubt us, to the cynics and the naysayers, I say yes, we can – yes, we can be a Democratic Party that prioritizes funding our schools and hospitals, not endless wars. That fights for an America that belongs to all of us – black, brown and white, Jews and Palestinians, all of us, as my grandfather taught me, together.”