Ask most Americans what DSA stands for and they are unlikely to know the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest leftist organization, with about 92,000 members. But ask about AOC and they are likely to be familiar with DSA’s most famous member: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Bronx-born socialist firebrand known for her fierce advocacy of trade unions, universal medical care, tuition-free university, migrant rights, and pro-environmental policies. So why did DSA’s national leadership recently decide to withdraw its conditional endorsement of her?
For any sane organization, the 34-year-old lawmaker would be a treasured asset. She is principled, politically talented, and able to make national headlines on a regular basis. Her victory in 2018 led to the most significant single-day membership increase in DSA’s history. She has a grassroots background and knows how to talk to ordinary people, but she is also an agile political operator. In the space of a few short years, she rose to the vice ranking position of the House Oversight Committee and made herself a unique place in the Democratic Party.
But Ocasio-Cortez has one important failing in the eyes of DSA’s leaders: She is not sufficiently anti-Israel. As the organization declared its non-endorsement of her, the only rationale it cited was disapproval of her position on Israel.
Never mind that Ocasio-Cortez was one of the first elected politicians in the United States to advocate for a cease-fire in the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, or that since March, she has called the Israeli operation in Gaza a “genocide.” Never mind that she is estimated to be the fifth-most-pro-Palestinian member of the House. None of this is enough for DSA’s leadership, which includes a faction openly supportive of Hamas. Ocasio-Cortez has been faulted for endorsing a resolution that affirmed Israel’s right to exist; for being open to funding the purely defensive Iron Dome, which has saved thousands of innocent Israeli and Palestinian lives; and for not backing the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign, which is so extreme in its opposition to “normalization” that it opposes left-wing Israeli writers as well as the Palestinian Israeli pro-peace and anti-occupation movement Standing Together.
In fact, some in DSA have condemned Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders for speaking at Standing Together’s national convention. DSA further faulted Ocasio-Cortez for holding a public panel on anti-Semitism last month with the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. There, she engaged Jewish advocates in an admirably nuanced and empathetic conversation that might have appealed to a wide audience. But those in DSA who have asked her to stop “platforming Zionists” were not impressed.
For one of America’s best-known democratic socialists to be dropped by its largest leftist organization is parodical enough to be worthy of a Monty Python skit. It has embarrassed many of the more mainstream factions in the organization, which are eager to point out that Ocasio-Cortez maintains the endorsement of DSA’s New York City branch, the largest one in the country. These segments of DSA are attempting to control the damage by downplaying the non-endorsement.
But this isn’t a PR gaffe or a misstep. Rather, some DSA leaders have been making the case consistently, for some time, that Ocasio-Cortez has broken the orthodoxy they expect on Israel. An enormous political gap separates Ocasio-Cortez’s democratic socialism, which did not prevent her from harshly condemning Hamas’s attacks on October 7, from the anti-Israel maximalism common in segments of the left, including factions currently controlling DSA’s leadership. For the latter, any recognition of Israel’s existence is tantamount to betrayal.
No other issue comes anywhere close to drawing this much irrational passion on the left. Of all the contentious matters involving the congresswoman—including her 2022 vote on a rail strike and her endorsement of President Joe Biden—only Israel led to this drastic action, which is telling. And hers isn’t the only case. Sanders is almost single-handedly responsible for the resurgence of democratic socialism in America, and he is by far the most pro-Palestinian member of the Senate—yet many leftists, including those in DSA, attack him constantly for his opposition to Hamas’s terrorism. Representative Jamaal Bowman, a DSA member, recently lost a primary race to a pro-Israel rival. But his vote for the Iron Dome and his visit to Israel had previously led DSA to clash with him too.
The obsessive anti-Israel maximalism of this section of the American left is bewildering. Domestic concerns long ago superseded internationalism for this group, and it’s hard to imagine the same people caring this much about any other foreign-policy issue. What accounts for this?
Some leftists will argue that billions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Israel make the issue particularly pertinent. But the United States has recently given billions more to Ukraine and regularly provides substantial military assistance to Jordan, Egypt, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya, all of which are involved in controversial conflicts. The left didn’t abandon Ocasio-Cortez for her positions on aid to Ukraine (she has reliably voted for extending it) or NATO expansion (she’s for it), both of which run against the DSA line. And the average American leftist has little to say about the territorial disputes between Somalia and its neighbors, or about Sudan’s civil war, despite the considerable role the United States plays in these conflicts.
This asymmetry doesn’t apply only to the left. American supporters of Israel and Palestine across the political spectrum care enough to scrutinize candidates’ positions on this foreign-policy issue more than most others. But on the left, the obsession with Israel is accompanied by extremist positions, such as support for Hamas, that many American Jews understandably view as evidence of anti-Semitism.
For this reason and others, the maximalist litmus test used for Ocasio-Cortez is as ethically bankrupt as it is politically impractical. The left can expect to win significant support for positions such as calling for a cease-fire, conditioning military aid to Israel, sanctioning settlers in the West Bank, and recognizing a Palestinian state. These policies are reasonable, could make a meaningful difference to Palestinians, and even have a chance of appealing to an actual majority. But by censuring the likes of Sanders, Bowman, and Ocasio-Cortez, the maximalists prove that such positions don’t satisfy them: They want nothing less than the denial of Israel’s right to exist, a nonstarter for most.
That Israel should be the cause of a major rift among American leftists at this time is striking. The world’s richest country badly needs a socialist force that can stand against growing inequality and advocate persuasively for social and environmental justice. Taking loony, extremist positions on this issue is a sure means of self-marginalization.
Plenty of other roads are available to socialists. When the left-wing New Popular Front topped the votes in French parliamentary elections on July 7, many on the American left cheered. But few seemed to realize that the incredibly broad coalition the French put together last month encompassed parties with starkly divergent positions on Israel-Palestine: The far-left France Unbowed of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, which has embraced an often noxious anti-Zionism, agreed to band together with a wide range of parties, including a socialist party headed by Raphaël Glucksmann, who was previously booed out of a May Day march for his more balanced position on Israel. In the second round of the elections, France’s united left was able to win only by getting help from President Emmanuel Macron’s centrists, which meant widening the tent even more. The coalition was possible in part because the front’s political platform embraced compromise: It calls on France to recognize the State of Palestine and enforce an arms embargo against Israel, but it also loudly denounces Hamas’s October 7 attacks as terrorist massacres.
A few months ago, Ocasio-Cortez’s team boasted that her goal was to build “a new Democratic coalition that can consistently draw a majority of American support.” American socialists must decide whether this is what they want: They can choose to be the party of AOC, and others like her, who wish to build a broad popular front, with an actual chance of coming to power and changing lives both at home and overseas. Or they can opt forever to be a bumper-sticker crowd, uninterested in dealing in the art of the possible. What they can’t be is both.