The Edge of American Socialism
How Palestine became a door into American socialism.
I went to pro-Palestine rallies in Houston on and off after October 2023. Most of the signs I saw were homemade. Some were not. Stacks of them sat on a folding table near the steps, professionally printed, red and black, the same demand across the top: End all U.S. aid to Israel. Along the bottom edge of some of them ran a line naming the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a communist group I had to look up.
I never took one of those signs. I agreed with the sentence across the top, but I didn’t want the name along the bottom speaking for me. Once I started looking I couldn’t stop seeing which groups were organizing and attending these rallies. The student groups and the Palestinian Youth Movement had the megaphone. Some of the folding tables, sound permits, and printed signs kept turning out to belong to socialists of one kind or another. I spent a long time wondering why the groups championing the Palestinian cause were so often red, and what that was doing to the people in attendance.
What I decided, eventually, is that a political position can recruit at different depths. It can pull one person all the way into a movement and leave another at the edge of it. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) took a side on Palestine, and that choice brought some Muslims into socialism, pushed others toward an anti-establishment politics they had not previously held, and carried a few of us only as far as the same marches and primaries.
This June the door opened onto Congress. In New York, candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and organized by the city’s socialist chapter beat two sitting members of Congress and one of Brooklyn’s most powerful officials, with pro-Israel groups spending millions to stop them and failing. A week later in Denver, the democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeated Diana DeGette — a fifteen-term incumbent.
Then Jonathan Chait argued in The Atlantic that the socialists had been captured. Michael Harrington founded DSA in 1982, Chait wrote, with rules that let it expel anyone taking orders from a communist cell. The Bernie Sanders surge brought those communists in anyway. Palestine supplied the wedge: “Militant anti-Zionism became a wedge that the group’s more radical activists used to drive away critics of authoritarianism on the left.” At its 2025 convention, DSA deleted Harrington’s rule and wrote the Palestinian “right to resistance” into its principles. DSA had been “formed in opposition to the very thing it has become,” Chait wrote — “a tragic irony of history.”
The next day, in Jacobin, Bhaskar Sunkara answered that nothing had been captured. Harrington had wanted to expropriate the capitalist class too; he only differed in wanting to do it democratically. “The thread from Michael Harrington’s DSA to this one is not hard to find,” Sunkara wrote. On Palestine, he put the disagreement directly: “What Chait reads as ideological capture by campus radicals is something simpler: a generational turn … away from the defense of an apartheid state.”
Neither of them explains why Palestine, of all issues, did the recruiting that produced the turn. And neither has much to say about the people Palestine brought into the same political room without making them socialists. I was one of those people.
One of the principal organizers behind DSA’s anti-Zionist resolution was, unlike me, all the way in. For the sake of anonymity, I will call him the architect. He came to his politics in the Arab Spring, watching an uprising crushed, and when he reached the U.S. as an immigrant he tried to start a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter and couldn’t. Then came the Sanders campaign, and in 2017 DSA endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, and that was what brought him in. “I go where there is energy,” he told me.
The endorsement that brought him inside was part of what kept me outside. I grew up watching The West Wing and came of political age during the Obama years. I have read The Economist since I was thirteen and the Financial Times since I was eighteen. My instinct is to picture the serious people arguing inside the room, not to assume the room is rotten. I believe in markets, gradual reform, and institutions that can incrementally improve. Socialism was not a home I had been looking for and finally found by way of Gaza. When the architect says he goes where the energy is, I understand the sentiment the way you understand a language you studied but never spoke. My own habit is to look for the competent insider, not the anti-establishment outsider.
Chait tells the story of new members entering DSA and transforming it. The architect’s story supplies the motive his account leaves out. For him, DSA’s endorsement of BDS made the organization worth joining. Palestine wasn’t only an issue over which DSA changed. It was one way the people who would change it found their way in.
What happened inside DSA once the new members arrived was a campaign — one that lost for years before it won.
A working group formed in 2019 to turn the BDS commitment from paper into practice. Then came the test case. In 2021, Jamaal Bowman, a DSA member of Congress, voted to fund Israel’s Iron Dome and took a trip to Israel paid for by a liberal Jewish group. At least twenty-eight local chapters passed resolutions to censure or expel him. The national leadership refused, and when the working group kept criticizing Bowman in public, the leadership moved against the working group instead. In March 2022, the national committee voted nine to eight to shut the working group down and bar its leaders from national office for a year.
At that point, the organizers Chait casts as ascendant were still losing. The backlash forced a partial reversal within weeks, but they had learned that they didn’t have the numbers yet. So they went out and got them.
They ran a slate for national leadership in 2023. A version of their anti-Zionist resolution failed to reach the convention floor that year; a softened version passed the national committee the next; and in the summer of 2024, the organization pulled its endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over arming Israel. Then they went chapter by chapter. The architect says every local version of the resolution produced the most contentious debate its chapter had ever held. More than fifty chapters passed one. In August 2025, the national convention passed Resolution 22, “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA,” with 56% of the vote. The organizers made themselves a permanent tendency, Springs of Revolution, which names “Palestine as our compass” and now holds a bloc of seats on the committee that once dissolved their working group.
The resolution states its commitments in one long sentence:
Therefore, be it resolved, that DSA shall make organizing in solidarity with the Palestinian cause a priority until Palestine is free, unequivocally affirming our commitment to ‘al-Thawabit,’ the principles originally set by the Palestinian National Council in 1977 and repeatedly reaffirmed since, which are the Palestinian people’s right to resistance, the Palestinian right to self-determination, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland from the river to the sea.
The phrase “right to resistance” is doing a great deal of quiet work. Resistance can mean a march, a boycott, a strike, an attack on soldiers, or the killing of civilians, and a resolution that leaves the word open lets every reader fill it with the meaning they already prefer, including the worst one. I’ve written before about why this is dangerous and why I can’t treat it as solidarity.
Elsewhere, the resolution says that the chapter-level anti-Zionist standards had provided “a necessary, material counter-weight to the Zionist lobby” for progressive candidates. It also makes several things grounds for expulsion, among them saying in public that Israel has a right to defend itself, or staying affiliated with named American groups, including not only AIPAC but also J Street, the liberal Zionist outfit whose trip had started the Bowman fight. The same convention that wrote these rules finally deleted Harrington’s old rule against communists. The clause naming communism as grounds for expulsion came out as the clause identifying Zionism as grounds for expulsion went in.
Chait is right that Palestine changed who belonged in DSA and where the organization drew its boundaries. But Sunkara is closer to the truth about how it happened: not through capture by an outside cell, but through a generation of members who entered openly, organized patiently, lost repeatedly, and finally won.
Palestine had divided socialists long before it divided DSA. The Jewish Labor Bund and political Zionism were both founded in 1897, out of the same crisis of Jewish life in the Russian Empire, but they offered opposite answers to it. The Bund preached doikayt — “hereness” — and argued that Jews should fight for freedom and cultural autonomy in the countries where they already lived. Labor Zionists such as those in Poale Zion believed that Jewish workers could become a nation and a proper proletariat in Palestine. The distinction was not between socialists and nationalists so much as between rival socialisms competing for the same young Jews. Resolution 22 took one side of that old argument and made it a condition of belonging.
I kept asking people the same question. Why this cause? There is always a war for a young left to care about. Why did Gaza do what the others didn’t?
The answers were about trust before they were about theory. A chapter co-chair in Texas described to me the months after October 2023 as the moment they understood that officials they had grown up believing were lying to them, and that they could watch the proof on their phone while officials said otherwise. I understood their conclusion without quite sharing it. I have a habit, when someone tells me every politician is corrupt, of asking them to name one they admire. When the answer is no one, the criticism seems to stop being an observation and become a system where no one can be given credit for acting in good faith.
My own trust had already cracked, and I remember where. It was the story that Hamas had beheaded babies, a claim that traveled from a wartime rumor out through the mouth of our President within days, before anyone could substantiate it. I wrote about that first week elsewhere and will not rehash it. What shook me wasn’t the possibility that Hamas had committed atrocities — I had no difficulty believing that. It was watching people who I thought were careful repeat something before they knew whether it was true.
So when the socialists said the establishment lied, they weren’t wrong, and I knew they weren’t wrong, and that is a large part of how a person like me ends up at their rally. What kept me from their membership was that I didn’t think the error proved the whole system was a fraud. I thought it proved the system was full of people, some of whom were failing and some of whom were fighting, and I wanted to know which was which.
In David Kirkpatrick’s account in The New Yorker of how the Biden Administration handled the war, the establishment was not one thing. Christopher Le Mon, a deputy assistant secretary in the State Department's human-rights bureau, was one of the Administration’s most vocal internal critics of Israel's conduct. Weeks into the war, he sent Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, a classified note pressing him to warn Netanyahu about the American rule that bars weapons transfers when the arms are more likely than not to be used in war crimes. In public, Le Mon wrote, officials should stop “dismissing civilian harm as inevitable.”
When Blinken commissioned a formal review, at least eight State Department bureaus weighed in, and at least five found that Israel had likely used American weapons in violation of the laws of war. After some of those assessments leaked, Blinken moved the draft onto a classified system, and a fight broke out line by line over almost every sentence, with Le Mon spending days in a secure facility trying to force damning evidence into the text.
The problem was what happened to the evidence as it traveled upward. One lawyer involved described the translation: careful hedging about being “very concerned” that Israel might be committing war crimes was heard at the top, the lawyer said, to mean “We're all good!” A senior White House official put the posture above him more simply. “The President wanted to continue unless told ‘You can’t,’ and he wasn't told that.” The report that emerged in May 2024 said it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had used American weapons in ways “inconsistent” with the laws of war, then invoked the government’s limited battlefield knowledge and declined to draw the conclusion its own evidence invited.
The plainest case came near the end. A Leahy Law investigation had settled on Sde Teiman, the military base where released detainees said they had been tortured. One prisoner from the base reached an Israeli hospital with broken ribs and a torn rectum, and leaked video appeared to show soldiers shielding their actions from the cameras as they abused him. The process produced a document for Blinken to sign that would have cut American aid to the base. He didn’t sign it. He had convinced himself, he told the magazine, that they were “on the verge of a ceasefire, which I did not want to jeopardize.” The Israeli ambassador had asked him to wait and promised that an indictment was coming. Blinken left office without signing. This past March, the Israeli military dropped the charges against five soldiers, and Netanyahu denounced the case as a “blood libel.”
Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, eventually named the pattern directly. Biden’s advisers repeatedly discussed withholding weapons, he said, but the President always deferred, because “we kept thinking that we were close to getting a deal” for a hostage release and ceasefire. Looking back, Sullivan called that reasoning a trap and conceded that they “should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach.”
Le Mon is the reason I can’t call the Administration a single wicked thing. Blinken is the reason the distinction doesn’t let it off the hook. Somebody inside spent the war assembling cases that should have forced a decision, and somebody above him kept finding a reason to leave the decision unmade. Incrementalism can be a steady pressure on aid and targeting that saves lives without ever making a headline. It can also be an arrangement where the next negotiation always gives you a reason to postpone a decision that might disturb the status quo.
I sympathize with the insiders more than the socialists I spoke to think is defensible. I don’t think my sympathy is abstract. In my own writing about Islam I’ve mostly chosen argument from within the tradition over denunciation from outside it. I know how slowly things move, how easily inertia is mistaken for malice, and why a person stays on the inside, believing that one more conversation or essay might finally change things. I also know that the same patience can curdle into self-protection, the reformer keeping their hands clean while the institution keeps producing the same result.
My weariness of socialism came partially from inherited memory. Socialism didn’t reach me as a clean word. My family did well under the socialist Nasser regime in Egypt, in the schools and the professions his state threw open to people like my grandfather. I‘ve written about what that opening cost the people it excluded, and about the corrupt authoritarianism that came bundled with my family’s social mobility.
That memory is one reason I never converted, but it didn’t keep me fully loyal to the Democrats either. Gaza broke that loyalty like it broke almost everyone’s I knew. For twenty years American Muslims voted Democratic by lopsided margins; Biden took something like two-thirds of them in 2020. Over the war that collapsed. A CAIR exit poll in November 2024 found Kamala Harris with about a fifth of the Muslim vote, running behind the Green Party's Jill Stein. I have some issues with this poll’s methodology, but directionally it is telling. In Dearborn, the most Muslim city in America, Trump won a plurality. In Michigan’s primary that February, more than a hundred thousand people had already voted “uncommitted” against the war, in a state where that protest vote normally runs around two percent.
I was part of that collapse. I voted independent, knowing that in a close state such a vote would have helped Trump, and telling myself that Texas had already been decided without me. But I haven’t left completely. I will most likely vote mostly Democratic in the midterms.
The post-2024 story is Muslims leaving the mainstream Democrats in every direction at once, toward socialists, independents, Trump, and just staying home. What the socialists have that the others don’t is a replacement — candidates and organizers that win primaries. Mamdani proved their strategy works in NYC, and June showed that it could defeat sitting members of Congress.
The socialists are not ideologically uniform. The chapter co-chair I spoke to described the NYC chapter as more reformist — less revolutionary — than the national organization: more invested in elections, more focused on immediate material gains, and more willing to work through existing institutions. But “reformism” is in the eye of the activist. One New Yorker I spoke to voted for Mamdani because of Palestine and affordability while regarding much of DSA’s platform as too radical and impractical. Yet many of the people around him saw Mamdani from the opposite direction. “They find Zohran to be a sellout,” he told me. “He’s not left enough or isn’t hard-line enough.”
Mamdani is the face of this coalition because he can hold together people who disagree about what his moderation means. He ran on rent and groceries, with Palestine as a conviction he didn’t hide rather than a platform he led with. To some supporters, that made socialism practical. To others, it made him insufficiently socialist. The clearest thing he has said about the coalition is in no resolution. Standing at the Brooklyn Paramount the night he won, listing the disqualifications the political class had hung on him, he said: “I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”
The constituency Palestine made available to the socialists is larger than either their membership or their electorate. The architect thought class helped determine who embraced the whole platform and who shared only its position on Palestine. I resemble his second type without following it into the voting booth. I marched beside socialists, but I didn’t join them or vote for their candidates. I still don’t. Hamtramck offers a warning against treating the Muslim exodus as a leftward migration. Its all-Muslim city council banned Pride flags from public buildings, to conservative applause, a year before nearby Dearborn swung toward Trump.
The Bund’s American history offers a second, different parallel. Refugees from tsarist repression brought their socialism into New York’s garment unions, but American democracy changed the uses to which they put it. Former Bundists Sidney Hillman and David Dubinsky rose to lead two of the country’s most powerful unions. As Molly Crabapple writes:
Victory had a moderating effect. Revolution might have been the only choice when they lived under the hemophiliac Romanov autocracy. In America, they could strike and vote. For the moment, this seemed sufficient. Here where they lived was their country.
The movement I watched was traveling in the opposite direction. America had taught former Bundists that striking and voting might be sufficient. Gaza taught some Muslims formed inside American democracy that marching, voting, and speaking were not. The rhyme is partial, and the Muslim movement is much smaller. But where American institutions once drew immigrant socialists inward, Gaza pushed some Muslim Americans toward the exits.
The architect had traveled far enough in that direction that Palestine and socialism had become inseparable for him. “What's a socialist without a free Palestine?” he asked me. I can’t answer for the socialists. I only know that Palestine had brought me to the edge of their movement — but no further.
