Under Siege: why socialists must fight for Palestine and BDS
The struggle for Palestinian liberation from Israel’s U.S.-backed settler-colonial regime has become a cornerstone of most radical and progressive political platforms. Especially since Palestinian Civil Society launched the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign (BDS) in 2004, modeled closely on the South African campaign to end Apartheid; the broad U.S. and global Left have made the struggle to end Israel’s occupation part of a wider critique of U.S. imperialism.
Yet recent events have challenged the unity and momentum of both the struggle for Palestinian liberation on the Left, and its primary global weapon, the BDS campaign. One of those challenges has come from the reformist wing of the Left, the Democratic Socialists of America. Another, even more potentially threatening to Palestinian liberation unity, has come from within the ranks of the U.S. Arab political class and its institutions.
Here I will look at each of these challenges independently, as well as discuss how and why they are interrelated. I will conclude with how the revolutionary left should respond to these events and move forward on the question of the Palestinian liberation struggle.
DSA Shifts on Palestine
In 2017, the Democratic Socialists of America, a mass reformist organization based in the U.S., broke with its liberal Zionist roots by voting to endorse the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement. Since then, the DSA has grown to become the largest Socialist organization in the U.S. since the Communist Party, with nearly 100,000 members, and more than 250 chapters around the country.
In 2019, the Democratic Socialists of America launched the Palestine Solidarity Working Group. The appearance of that group indexed the significant number of young Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim comrades who had joined the DSA as part of a substantial upturn in interest in socialist politics and their endorsement of BDS. Despite this favorable convergence, the DSA’s reformist trajectory has brought it into contradictory conflict with its self-proclaimed support for Palestinian liberation. At the heart of this conflict is DSA’s commitment at the top of the organization to the primacy of electoral politics.
DSA’s membership rose astronomically in tandem with Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president in 2016, leading to a large surge of growth as thousands entered the organization directly after working to support his election. Yet, Sanders is himself a liberal Zionist who has consistently voted to fund Israel’s massive defense infrastructure while mouthing general platitudes about a need to respect Palestinian human rights.
Sanders’ successful example helped motivate other progressives to run for office either as members of the Democratic Socialists of America, or with their endorsement. Prominent among these were New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman. Ocasio-Cortez and Bowman were elected to Congress as both Democrats and DSA members with DSA endorsements. After their respective electoral victories, both vowed to advance Palestinian interests; but it hasn’t worked out that way.
Return to the Zionist fold
Ocasio Cortez and Bowman have both sold out the Palestinian cause, caving in to the pressures applied within the pro-imperialist Democratic Party, and appeasing Zionist supporters and constituents upon whose support they depend for election. Ocasio-Cortez changed her vote from “no” to “present” in September when Congress allocated billions of dollars to support Israel’s Iron Dome Aerial Defense bill. Bowman committed an even worse offense: voting for the funding outright.
Bowman then doubled down on his betrayal of Palestinians, traveling in November to Israel on a paid junket sponsored by J Street, an openly Zionist organization which opposes BDS and calls for a “two-state solution” that has long been the political cover for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians and U.S. support for them. Bowman took this trip even after Israel’s wholescale bloody attacks on Gaza just a few months ago. To their credit, dozens of chapters of the Democratic Socialists of American called for Bowman’s expulsion. So too did the Palestine Solidarity Working Group, with the support of outside Palestinian-led groups like National Students for Justice in Palestine and the Palestinian Youth Movement.
The DSA NPC’s statement reflected the inevitable bankruptcy of a reformist electoral vision which subordinates socialist principles and the right of oppressed people to self-determination.
Yet DSA’s National Political Committee gave Bowman a pass, voting not to expel him. The NPC used classic liberal illogic by arguing that expelling Bowman would “split the movement” for Palestinian liberation, as if a candidate who had voted for weapons to murder Palestinians, and personally met with its most vicious leaders, could be considered part of a “movement” on behalf of Palestinians. The DSA NPC’s statement reflected the inevitable bankruptcy of a reformist electoral vision which subordinates socialist principles and the right of oppressed people to self-determination. By backing Bowman, the NPC reinforced the old adage that the Democratic Party itself is the “graveyard of social movements” like BDS.
Cynicism of the National Political Committee
A subplot to the NPC statement constitutes the second, newer threat to unity in the Palestinian liberation struggle for BDS. In its defense of Bowman, the NPC cited another statement released by the Palestinian Boycott National Committee just hours before its own. The BNC speaks from Palestine as the de facto voice of the global BDS Movement. Its statement was clearly intended to comment on the DSA conflict over Bowman without referencing it. The statement said the BNC strongly upholds the “principle of context-sensitivity” for its movement partners in deciding how to apply BDS principles. This includes “holding elected officials accountable in the most ethical, strategic, and context-sensitive way.”
The BNC statement was cynically cited by the National Political Committee as evidence that Palestinians themselves were opposed to Bowman’s expulsion. Yet the statement’s vagueness and timing made it eminently exploitable for just such use. The statement also undercut and undermined a statement the BNC had released one week before, also with indirect reference to Bowman: “Visits by politicians and parliamentarians to Israel that are organized by Israel lobby groups, including AIPAC and J Street in the U.S., cross our nonviolent Palestinian BDS picket line and harm our struggle for freedom, justice and equality.” The statement also called for “meaningful solidarity” with efforts to end the colonial occupation of Palestine.
Yet it was precisely “meaningful solidarity” that was behind the call by DSA chapters and the broad Left everywhere to expel Bowman. The DSA NPC statement against expulsion was also boosted by Arab American liberals like Arab American Institute President James Zogby, who tweeted out, “It ridiculous & so destructive for folks who think they’re pure to try to punish a wonderful progressive Congressman. This is not the way to build a movement. Look at his record. We need Jamaal in Congress.” Also arguing against expulsion was Margaret Zaknoen DeReus, director of the liberal Institute for Middle East Understanding.
The net effects of the DSA vote amounted to a victory for Zionists. As Ali Abunimiah wrote in Electronic Intifada, “Instead of defending Palestinians from the hostile and lethal actions of politicians, the “progressive” cause becomes defending politicians from Palestinians and their supporters. This enables and prolongs the phenomenon of “Progressive Except for Palestine.”
Why principled Palestinian solidarity matters
Why and how does this matter to the revolutionary Left? How should we react to these developments? First, they reinforce the correctness of our commitment to a working-class socialist movement independent of the two bourgeois capitalist parties. Our support for Palestine is a key part of this commitment. Second, the DSA vote signals another crisis for an organization seeking to build a mass socialist party through electoral means. For DSA leadership, if not the rank-and-file, Palestinian liberation and BDS have become sacrificial lambs towards that goal. Third, the coalescence of support for Bowman from the DSA leadership and liberal Arab American organizations represents an effort to divert a mass national self-determination movement from its grassroots into the hands of the business classes and Democratic Party. They stand to become the new compradors in selling out Palestinian direct struggle and mass organizing. The great anticolonial rebel and theorist Frantz Fanon used the term “compradors” to describe colonial elites who aligned themselves with ruling class interests in order to contain and suppress national liberation struggles from below.
In sharp contrast to these currents, the revolutionary Left needs to double-down on its support for Palestinian self-determination and work to broaden its alliance with those who agree with us.
In sharp contrast to these currents, the revolutionary Left needs to double-down on its support for Palestinian self-determination and work to broaden its alliance with those who agree with us. It must stand firm on principled opposition to Zionism, U.S. imperialism, and settler-colonialism on the one hand; and commitment to building mass direct action campaigns in support of BDS on the other. The revolutionary Left must build from below, especially among and with Arab, Muslim, Palestinian and anti-Zionist organizers equally committed to smashing Israel’s apartheid state. We must remind people that it was direct action grassroots organizing—including dockworker strikes, trade union work stoppages, consumer boycotts, cultural boycotts, and student strikes—that finally brought apartheid South Africa to its knees:
Supporting Palestine is also critical to other principles of the revolutionary Left. Like the Vietnam War, Palestine is the single issue that has most raised consciousness for a generation of radicals about the role of U.S. imperialism in the world. It has ignited an historical memory of other global struggles against racism and colonialism, from Ireland to South Africa. It has helped draw militant young Muslim, Arab and Palestinian into the fold of socialist politics.
These comrades have the potential to play in what C.L.R. James once called, in reference to Black workers, a “special role” in in the class struggle. Finally, the mass liberation struggle to end the Occupation has brought thousands of people into the streets around the world to proclaim “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
These constitute the relevant conditions for a new global intifada that can only be achieved with the revolutionary Left’s direct engagement, work and support. Indeed, the outlines of that new intifada were provided by Palestinians themselves in the “Unity” protests last Spring, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians both within Palestine and in the diaspora converged and produced a general strike against the state of Israel.
In such direct-action campaigns as these lies the way forward. Forging class struggle to national liberation struggle, and fighting from a clear socialist position of class unity on Palestine, revolutionaries can do what compradors can’t and will never do: free Palestine.
Bill V. Mullen is a member of the DSA and of the organizing collective for the US Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
