"Why I Just Quit the DSA": A Measured Response
The pro-Israeli "left" is not immune to trafficking in conspiracy theories about outside agitators.
A sampling of pro-Palestinian posters. Courtesy of liberationgraphics.com.
A few weeks after Israel resumed its active genocide against the Palestinian people, the Nation published an article by Maurice Isserman titled Why I Quit the DSA. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t involve myself in the internal dispute of a party I don’t belong to and never plan on joining. In this case, however, the rhetoric he deploys against pro-Palestinian activists within the party not only impacts me but everyone who speaks out against Israel’s indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and denounces it as a settler-colonial state.
That said, I’m not going to respond to Isserman’s accusations directly. A few minor points were already soundly debunked in Hadas Thier’s response, also published in the Nation the next day. Moreover, his major point– that the popularity of pro-Palestinian positions in the DSA are a result of “entryism”– is not a genuine critique of his former comrades’ position at all, but an attempt to cast it as illegitimate for completely unrelated reasons. To respond to such a bad faith argument at this point would be a waste of time and distract from more important issues, which is what most Zionists intend such arguments to do: substitute the discussion of important issues for a game where pro-Palestinian advocates are forced to save face by responding to unreasonable accusations that traffick in Islamophobic, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian tropes.
Instead, I’m going to analyze the rhetorical tricks Immerman uses to undermine the pro-Palestine position and contextualize it in a history of similar rhetoric deployed against left-wingers by their opponents across the political spectrum. I respect the work Mr. Isserman has done for the American left, but he is wrong on this issue and is capable of disagreement without ad hominem attacks.
Before getting to his main argument, it’s necessary to state plainly that other arguments he makes partake in anti-Palestinianism. For example, he took issue with the National Political Committee’s statement that “Today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime”, which did not contain an explicit condemnation of Hamas. In the first place, nothing about this statement is incorrect. The origin of this conflict lies in the fact that Israel kicked Palestinians off their land, ethnically cleansed them, and subjected them to an apartheid regime to this day. Every drop of blood– Israeli or Palestinian– is on Israel’s hands, the current government (which propped up Hamas to divide the Palestinian cause) especially. In the second place, criticism of Israel does not need to be accompanied by a condemnation of Hamas. Why assume advocates of Palestine are pro-Hamas unless they state otherwise? This is the exact sort of black-and-white thinking Isserman criticizes, and plays into an age-old Islamophobic double standard that demands Muslims apologize for acts they never committed. Asking a random Jew if they condemn Israel’s crimes would rightfully and immediately be recognized as antisemitic by most. Few recognize the denial of Israeli war crimes as racist against Palestinians; in fact, the most powerful man in the world cast doubt on if said children are even dead at all and dismissed their deaths as the price of war.
Isserman then takes issue with the statements of certain DSA sub-chapters, which Thier already pointed out in his own piece are cherry-picked and not reflective of the DSA itself. I somewhat agree with him here: casting Hamas as anti-colonial heroes is horrible, hypocritical, and goes against what it means to be a leftist. But he falsely casts it as the position of the DSA itself. Leftists fight each other as a matter of tradition at this point; he of all people should know that a big-tent socialist party with hundreds of caucuses contains lots of disagreement, which he once again had just spent paragraph after paragraph arguing was the case.
To return to the main point of this response, Isserman’s biggest rhetorical sin is that he accuses the Palestine advocates in the DSA of having ulterior motives. In the article, he dramatically recounts how he believes that the organization he helped found became subject to a hostile takeover by “entryists” or “partyists”, who then steered the popular consensus towards what he regards as only the most radical stances on the Israel-Palestine question. To him, the partyists’ motivation has nothing to do with Palestinian rights at all, but is an attempt to break the DSA away from the Democratic Party:
“Starting as far back as the 2017 national convention, chants of ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free’ began to be heard at DSA gatherings, and support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel became a litmus test within the organization for political purity. For the sectarians, discrediting elected DSAers who fail that test helps to move the organization closer to the desired break with the Democratic Party.”
This is the most telling part of the piece. He twists people who don’t wish to be complicit in apartheid into mere saboteurs. Moreover, calling them extremists is an ad hominem attack as lazy as conservatives that call people virtue signallers. Suppose their entire motivation is to break with the Democratic Party. This would still not make them wrong on the Palestinian issue.
This smear, in fact, is in line with a long history of conservatives, liberals and leftists calling everyone who they perceive as doing harm to a movement or a community “outside agitators”. To Isserman, his ideological opponents within the DSA cannot be authentically democratic socialist, so they must be outsiders that joined to mess everything up. This is no different than the conservatives and liberals that attributed all violence and property damage during the George Floyd Uprising of 2020 to opportunists and outside agitators, or even the Portland NAACP’s statement on white protesters distracting from the issue of racism with rhetoric about capitalism— as if the two are not innately linked! But it’s far easier and more effective to fall back on the same tired old lines.
There are no outside agitators. There are no entryists. There are no wreckers. Palestinian liberation has simply been a mainstay leftist issue for decades and decades. Cooking up a conspiracy theory to discredit it should be beneath someone like Isserman, but apparently even that is too much to hope for from the pro-Israeli “left”.