On Sunday, July 28, the National Political Committee (NPC) of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest socialist organization in the United States, passed a heavily amended version of Member-Submitted Resolution 12: Make DSA an Anti-Zionist Organization in Principle and Praxis. This version does not feature language that would make advocating Zionist political positions an “expellable offense,” signaling DSA’s commitment to anti-Zionism in word, but not in deed. The amended resolution denounces Zionist ideology and sets standards for political candidates pursuing a DSA endorsement and rank-and-file DSA members, but it lacks any clause that could enforce these standards on candidates or members.
The decision made last Sunday marks a new chapter in the series of disastrous positions taken by DSA since its failure in 2021 to hold DSA member — and now outgoing US Representative — Jamaal Bowman accountable for providing material support to Israel and meeting with the now former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on a normalization trip sponsored by the liberal Zionist non-profit organization J Street. Last week’s decision comes after the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) — the leading transnational Palestinian political grassroots organization — published a statement calling on DSA to pass a strong and enforceable resolution in defense of Palestinian liberation and rejection of Zionism. Following the NPC’s decision to dissolve the DSA BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group in 2022 over the Working Group’s position on Representative Bowman, PYM organized a boycott of DSA in coalition with several other Palestinian- and Arab-led organizations.
Speaking as a DSA member, a leader within the DSA International Committee, a Muslim, and a co-struggler with the Palestinian people, I am extremely disappointed by the decision made last Sunday. Not only have we failed our comrades in PYM, National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC), and the other leading Palestinian- and Arab-led organizations in this country, but we have also failed ourselves — particularly our Arab and Muslim members — and the socialist cause more broadly. By situating DSA on the side of the multitude of other socialist movements, organizations, and states throughout history that have equivocated on Palestinian liberation, we are condemning ourselves to failure.
As we have witnessed since Oct. 7, Palestinian liberation is not a fringe, marginal, secondary, or “single-issue” cause. As the popular educator Layan Fuleihan writes in the introduction to the 2023 edition of Ghassan Kanafani’s The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine, “When Zionism is understood as an imperialist project in its origin and its agenda, it becomes an enemy of all of humanity, and the Palestinian cause a banner for all of humanity.” The Palestinian cause is a cause that is just as relevant to socialists, workers, and the oppressed in the United States as it is to the masses of the Arab world. This can be observed in the enduring special relationship between the Palestinian people and the Black population in this country and in the Palestinian resistance-inspired Student Intifada, which activated students in the United States in a way that the established organizations of the American Left have failed to for decades. Compromising on Palestinian liberation achieves nothing for our cause, but holding the correct line on Palestinian liberation means everything if we are to be taken seriously about organizing the masses and building socialism in the belly of the beast.
Opportunism with regard to Palestinian liberation has had disastrous consequences for building socialism both within and without Palestine. In the days of the British occupation, the Communist Party of Palestine’s opportunist line on the national question contributed to the defeat of the Great Palestinian Revolt. In 1972, Kanafani described the organization’s position on Zionism as removed from reality and characterized by empty slogans. Despite its efforts, Kanafani wrote that the Communist Party was not able to play an effective role in the class struggle in Palestine and that, as a result, “feudal-religious leaders [ruling class Palestinians] were poised to play the leading role when events escalated toward the eruption of 1936.” Today, DSA continues to make the same errors. If we fail to correct our mistakes as an organization, we risk continuing to distance ourselves from the masses and compromising the class struggle in this country.
Even more consequential was the Soviet Union’s post-World War II betrayal of the Palestinian people. Despite the regime’s anti-imperialist rhetoric, in 1947, the Soviet Union voted in favor of the partition of Palestine and facilitated the sale of $13 million worth of arms to the Haganah — the principal Zionist paramilitary force at the time — through Czechoslovakia in the months leading up to May 15, 1948. Later, in 1968, David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, commented, “They [the Soviet Union] saved the country, I have no doubt of that. The Czech arms deal was the greatest help we then had. It saved us and without it I very much doubt if we could have survived the first month [of the First Arab-Israeli War].” Soviet opportunism directly contributed both to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the Nakba and to the discrediting of socialism in the Arab world. Communist parties in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq witnessed drastic decreases in their membership and faced increased repression from bourgeois Arab regimes. This is not to mention the Soviet Union’s liberal Zionist political line during its post-1956, revisionist period in which it continuously imposed a “political solution” — the two-state framework — on the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).
Ultimately, when it comes to socialists, principled expressions of proletarian internationalism and solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle are not a guarantee. If we, as an organization, wish to be taken seriously and to be viewed as a credible partner in the struggle against capitalism and imperialism, we cannot tolerate the past and present existence of capitulationists and normalizers in our ranks. No amount of language in an empty resolution can paper over our errors as an organization. There is no middle ground between commitment and betrayal, between solidarity and treason. The Zionist project is doomed, and so are those who enable it. Ten months into the American-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and the region, DSA must find the will to be self-critical, to correct course, and to get on the right side of this struggle. Our future as an organization depends on it.
