The Question That Unmasks Democratic Socialists

By Steve Posner

Friday, August 21, 2026

 

Members and supporters of the Democratic Socialists of America are often asked if they believe that Israel has a right to exist. Israel’s existence has been a reality for 78 years. The more consequential question for the DSA members is: Do Israeli Jews have the right to defend themselves? On October 7, Hamas sent its elite fighters across Gaza’s border to attack unarmed Jews in Israel. The ease with which the DSA glosses over their atrocities is crucial to understanding the import of their emerging prominence in the Democratic Party.

 

Even a partial listing of these atrocities seems excessive. Parents were murdered in front of their children, a baby was shot while she was cradled in her mother’s arms, two cowering sisters aged 13 and 16 were slaughtered inside their homes, a 79-year-old woman was killed along with her autistic twelve-year-old granddaughter. Terrified young concertgoers hiding in parked cars were systematically executed. Kids playing at a beach fled into a shelter and were slain along with the adults. A Thai worker was decapitated. Women were found shot, naked from the waist down, bound with plastic ties, their genitals burned with gasoline. Abductors filmed a woman with the seat of her pants soaked in blood and posted it on social media. And the DSA still refused to support any Israeli response other than capitulation.

 

I have been a Democrat my entire life, and I believe that the party’s leadership should ask its candidates, on the record, whether they believe that Israelis have the right to protect themselves from those who denounce them as racist occupiers to be tortured, killed, subdued, exiled. This is what the Arab–Israeli conflict has been about for more than a century. DSA officials and candidates are not expected to be military strategists, but they could tell us what kind of military response would be acceptable to them.

 

The DSA accuses Israel of being a 19th-century-style settler-colonialist project rather than a homeland for the Jewish people, who have been indigenous to the land for more than 3,000 years. Moreover, if the Israeli government is genocidal, then it has no moral right to self-defense. Few would argue, for example, that defending the Nazi regime was morally justifiable. The Allies’ firebombing of Hamburg in 1943, which killed more than 35,000 people, most of them in a single night, wounded 120,000, destroyed approximately 280,000 buildings, and displaced about a million residents, might be considered tragic, but it was not genocidal. Its objective was to cripple the Nazi war effort, not to exterminate the German people. Meanwhile, the Nazis murdered 6 million Jewish men, women, and children not because they were enemy combatants but because they were Jews. Of the roughly 9.5 million Jews in Europe in 1933, about two-thirds were dead by 1945. In Poland, less than 10 percent remained alive after the war.

 

Hamas embedded its army in Gaza’s densely populated residential areas to ensure that Israeli operations could not be conducted without risking large-scale civilian casualties. Israeli retaliation after October 7 decimated much of Hamas’s military capabilities. It also displaced Gaza’s 2 million civilians, who are still sheltering inside tents subject to freezing, flooding, and sweltering heat, pitched alongside overflowing sewage crawling with rats. Though these conditions are appalling, Gaza is not Auschwitz. More than 96 percent of Gaza’s population survived the war that followed October 7. If its intent was genocide, the Israeli military had the opportunity and capacity to carry out violence with a survival rate comparable to the Holocaust’s. These statistics are not cited to callously diminish the death of Palestinians or their ongoing suffering in Gaza’s squalid camps. The issue is whether those deaths fit the commonly understood definition of genocide that gives the word its force: the intent to destroy a people, not merely to defeat an enemy.

 

The DSA’s rhetoric of genocide conjures images of the Holocaust to delegitimize Israel’s military campaign against Hamas. Will those who continue to argue that the war is genocidal tell us if they think that young people attending music festivals and children hiding in their homes should be left defenseless against Hamas killers? These were not collateral damage in a war; they were intentional targets. Must future victims forfeit the right to protect themselves simply because they live in Israel?

 

Within hours of the October 7 attack, the DSA began rationalizing the Hamas killing spree: “Today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime.” The next day, the DSA promoted a rally “in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist.” It subsequently issued a statement characterizing the members of Hamas as victims, not perpetrators, and asserting that their onslaught “was not unprovoked.” The DSA’s San Francisco chapter echoed this justification. “Socialists support the Palestinian people’s, and all people’s, right to resist and fight for their own liberation.” The Salt Lake City DSA declared that “it stands in unwavering solidarity with the people of Palestine in their decades long fight for national liberation.” The national DSA co-chair Megan Romer said that “October 7 was largely inevitable.” On his Twitch stream, progressive anti-Zionist influencer Hasan Piker said that “the Palestinian resistance is not perfect” but clarified that, for him, “it doesn’t matter if f***ing rapes happened on October 7. That doesn’t change the dynamic for me even this much.” At a Qatar-hosted summit, he charged Israel with playing “a significant role in how October 7 took place.” Piker’s political support has been welcomed by DSA candidates.

 

When Israel declared war on Hamas, stating that it “was forced on the State of Israel in a murderous terrorist assault from the Gaza Strip,” Zohran Mamdani, who would later become mayor of New York City, objected that the decision would “undoubtedly lead to more violence and suffering.” What was missing from his high-mindedness was any account of what a humane response to October 7 would have looked like. For the mayor, affirming Israel’s right to exist does not extend to defending it as the national homeland of the Jewish people. “I think any state that privileges one religion over the other is one that I can’t tell you I support,” he said. He does not view Jews as an ethnicity but only as individuals who practice Judaism.

 

The DSA’s rejection of Jewish nationality has socialist roots. Karl Marx dismissed it as “imaginary.” Vladimir Lenin called the idea of a Jewish nation “absolutely untenable.” In 1913, Joseph Stalin wrote that “Jews do not constitute a single nation” because a nation requires “a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” Thirty-four years later, Russia’s socialists backtracked, acknowledging that Palestine’s Jewish population met every one of those conditions. In 1947, Moscow’s representative to the United Nations, Andrei Gromyko, told the General Assembly that it would be unjust “to deny the right of the Jewish people” to establish their own state. Six months later, the U.N. voted to support Israeli independence.

 

The DSA’s rejection of the U.N.’s recognition of Israel as the Jewish national homeland has now become grounds for the organization’s opposition to any effort by Israel to protect its citizens. Resolution 22, adopted at the DSA’s 2025 National Convention, holds that “making statements that ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’” is in “substantial disagreement with DSA principles and policies,” and that it is “an expellable offense.” Do Democratic Socialists therefore conclude that Israeli civilians should be left defenseless by their government? If not, then DSA officials and candidates should state their proposed alternative clearly. It’s up to the Democratic Party’s leadership to demand that they do so. Masking any reluctance in order to win progressive support is a disservice to voters.