August 13 marks the one-year anniversary of a resolution passed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) that punishes its members for defending Israel’s right to exist.
To be specific, the resolution, “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA,” says that Zionism is “a racist, imperialist, settler-colonialist project that has resulted in the ongoing death, displacement, and dehumanization of Palestinians everywhere.” Accordingly, this means that “making statements that ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’” are subject to expulsion.
Why did it take until August 13, 2025 for the DSA to become blatantly anti-Jewish? It took that long because it was founded in 1982 as a Zionist organization. It takes a while to do a 180 flip.
The person who led the DSA in the 1980s was Michael Harrington, a well-known author and socialist who was a strong friend of Israel. An Irish Catholic—he later became an atheist—his 1962 book, The Other America, was a rejoinder to John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, published in 1958.
Galbraith said that in the post-war period, America had become increasingly affluent, with “pockets of poverty” here and there. Harrington disagreed, arguing that there was another America, one grounded in deep poverty. President John F. Kennedy was impressed with his book, and it became the intellectual source of the “war on poverty,” an initiative that was left for President Lyndon Johnson to fulfill.
When Harrington died in 1989, Israel lost its best DSA friend. After 9/11, the DSA became aggressively anti-American, opposing every U.S. effort to stop radical Islamists from winning in the Middle East. In the 2010s, it teamed up with left-wing extremists such as Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, making plain its enthusiasm for the radical Palestinian cause.
The DSA took a big leap against Israel when Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016. Though he lost, one year later the DSA formally endorsed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the goal of which is to break Israel economically. In 2017, it also adopted its position equating Zionism with racism. In 2023, several DSA chapters explicitly supported the Hamas-led massacre of October 7.
Now it expels those from its ranks who think Israel has a right to defend itself. At last year’s meeting, the resolution that passed also reaffirmed an earlier commitment, one that supports “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 river to the sea.”
In other words, the DSA wants to destroy Israel.
Those who are running for elected office this year have a moral obligation to let their constituents know which side they are on.
