DSA's breakaway Zionist org has failed
The group, loudly announced in a 2023 New Republic article, is still just a mailing list.
A sea-change in liberal-left views on Israel and Palestine was underway in 2023, and a lot of folks weren’t happy about it. Sympathy for Israel had been steadily eroding among Democrats since 2014 even as sympathy for Palestine rose; by 2022 most Democrats still backed Israel, but only by a 2 point margin. In 2023, plurality support among Democrats finally swung to Palestine, which garnered more sympathy in Gallup’s polling by an 11 point margin.
And that was before Israel’s genocidal response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks. As Israel began launching missiles at hospitals you could tell in the discourse that something had decisively change; leftists who had spoken out on the issue for decades were suddenly taken seriously, while support for Israel had suddenly lost its standing as the safe, respectable position among Democrats. If you were a Zionist who considered yourself a part of the liberal-left, I imagine this was a moment of profound confusion. Had support for Israel really lost the moral high ground among liberals and Democrats? Was this just a temporary setback? And could anything be done to win it back?
It was in that political moment that a small faction of Zionists in DSA decided something needed to be done. First, DSA veteran Maurice Isserman — who was on the verge of publishing a history of American communism that The Baffler said “reads like a Cold War relic” — loudly announced in The Nation that he was leaving the organization over its opposition to ethnonationalism. And less than a month later, a whole group of allies wrote in The New Republic that they would be leaving, too. At the end, they added:
We are beginning discussions amongst ourselves, to which we will invite other signatories to this letter, on how to keep the true vision of democratic socialism alive and how we can work together to develop an organizational framework that supports our educational and political work. Join us here.
That link led to a website, lettertodsa.org, which mostly just repeated the letter. Given that opinion on the liberal-left had only turned the corner recently, and noting the high-profile media announcements and the website launch, it seems clear that DSA’s Zionist caucus was hoping to build a competing organization and pull popular opinion back in their direction.
Unfortunately for them, that’s not what happened:
Meanwhile, Democratic Zionists of America never got off the ground. Their website now returns a 404 error, and when I asked Isserman in an email if there was an organization, he replied “Wish I could say there was, but at the moment there is only an on-line discussion group.”
In one sense this is just the story of another left splinter group collapsing. In another sense, however, I think there is a lesson to be learned from DZA’s rhetoric. From the outset, this group worked to paint DSA’s advocates for Palestine as a small troublemaking faction of zealots that adults in the room should ignore. Isserman, in his Nation article, complained that DSA had been “captured by sectarian entryists.” Nathan Newman, another signatory of the goodbye letter to DSA, still complains about “the sectarian ‘pro Palestinian’ movement” and its “sectarian grouplets”. This is a staple of reactionary discourse: unable to defend its position on moral or logical grounds, it resorts to ridiculing the left as unpopular, as troublemakers, and as sectarians.
There is some real irony, then, in the overwhelming defeat of DSA’s Zionists: turns out they were the tiny sectarian faction of malcontents all along.
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