American Supporters of Israel on Warpath Against Victorious DSA Candidates

American supporters of Israel, alarmed over recent Democratic Socialists of America electoral victories in New York City, Los Angeles, and Denver, are tarring DSA and progressive candidates as antisemites for their criticisms of Israeli government policies. Despite the overheated rhetoric, the candidates’ statements that are being attacked are not antisemitic. Generally speaking, they are not even inaccurate.

The Editorial Board of the California Post–counterpart to the New York Post, both owned by News Corp –says that Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman, a DSA member, has “brought anti-Israel hatred to the race for mayor.” Did Los Angeles coffee shops run out of decaf?

Raman, who finished a strong second in a field of 14 and could become LA’s next mayor, is under fire for telling a podcatser that she agreed that Israel has committed “genocide” in Gaza.

Agree or disagree, it is by no means a baseless term. A February 2025 study of deaths due to traumatic injury in the Gaza Strip between Oct 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024 found the “annualised crude death rate was 39.3 per 1000 people, representing a rate ratio of 14 [times as many] compared with all-cause mortality in 2022, even when ignoring non-injury excess mortality.” 

The study, published in Lancet, found that women, children under 18, and men aged 65 or older accounted for nearly 60% of the deaths for which age and sex data were available. 

Moreover, numerous Israeli and international human rights groups have called Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide”.

Israel’s supporters are similarly criticizing prominent DSAers like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and recent primary winners Melat Kiros, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier for using the term “apartheid” to characterize Israeli policies towards the Palestinians.

To be fair, at times the accusation of “apartheid”, like “Nazi” or “fascist”, is used as a catchall. And Israelis, like the South African whites, are in a difficult position, regardless of how they arrived there.

Moreover, the analogy between South African apartheid and Israeli policies towards the Palestinians has limitations. For example, one fundamental difference is that South African big business principally sought to exploit black labor, particularly in the mines. By contrast, the original Zionists did not seek to profit off of Palestinian Arab labor–they wanted to create a closed, Jewish economy, and needed the Arabs’ land, not their labor. 

When Israel developed into a first world nation, like other advanced nations as well as the neighboring oil sheikdoms, it gained the luxury of being able to get cheap labor from a variety of places beyond its immediate area. The Israeli economy benefits from Palestinian labor, but ultimately is not dependent upon it. 

By contrast, South African labor unrest–particularly the 1987 and 1990 National Union of Mineworkers strikes–was instrumental in bringing down the apartheid system.

Nonetheless, categorizing Israeli policy this way certainly is not evidence of antisemitism–the apartheid accusation has been made by the Israeli human rights groups B’tselem and Yesh Din, as well as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and numerous others. Zwelivelile Mandela, grandson of South Africa’s former president Nelson Mandela, says, “The Palestinians are experiencing a worse form of the apartheid regime, worse than that we have ever experienced as South Africans.” 

Progressive Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is also under fire for, in Fox News’ words, refusing to state “whether Israel has a right to exist.” Israel’s supporters sometimes attack Israel’s critics over this question, implying that a “no” answer means that the critic is in favor of driving all Jews out of Israel, or worse. 

However, many on the left believe that while Israeli Jews do have the right to live where they are in peace (excluding those living in illegal settlements), the right to maintain a Jewish state on land that was majority Arab is a very different question.

El-Sayed is being attacked for giving what was actually a reasonable repsonse–“the question about a right to exist is interesting, because nobody’s ever asked me whether I believe Palestine has a right to exist. Every single president who’s served has said they believe in a two-state solution. Israel exists…everybody [has] equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination…[which] includes Jews, Israelis, and Palestinians.”

Attacking left-wing American politicians and candidates over their insufficient fealty to Israel is nothing new. One month after Hamas’ attack, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives censured prominent progressive Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the only Palestinian-American in Congress, because she told the truth–“The failure to recognize the violent reality of living under siege, occupation, and apartheid makes no one safer” and the Israeli-imposed system “creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that can lead to resistance.” She called for a ceasefire and the release of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas as well as the Palestinians arbitrarily detained by Israel.

About Hamas’ October 7 attack and Israel’s response, she said “I do not support the targeting and killing of civilians, whether in Israel or Palestine”, and has repeatedly stated, “The answer to war crimes is not more war crimes.” In her speech defending herself against censure she said, “The cries of the Palestinian and the Israeli children sound no different to me–what I don’t understand is why the cries of Palestinians sound different to you.” 

In 2019 Israel barred Tlaib and newly-elected Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from visiting Israel. One might think that the president of the United States would be affronted that any country–particularly one benefitting from so much American largesse–would try to pull off a stunt like this, and angrily demand that the bar be lifted. Instead, Trump supported Israel’s action, explaining that the two US Congresswomen should be barred because they “hate Israel and all Jewish people.” 

Omar was in trouble because, among other things, she had criticized the role of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s spending in American elections. AIPAC is a well-funded and effective political force which does have an outsized influence on US policy as it pertains to Israel, and even Israel defender Mark Halperin acknowledges that “AIPAC has turned off many Democrats by funding primary challenges against politicians who criticize Israel’s wars.” 

Israel’s defenders also fault President Obama–John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, calls Obama’s Israel policy “eight years of ugliness.” Podhoretz and others criticized his administration for refusing to veto United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which condemned Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

Podhoretz doesn’t mention that, while the US abstained, the final vote was 14-0 in favor. The nest of antisemites voting in favor included the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Japan, France, and New Zealand.

Trump is widely unpopular, and the Democrats have a chance to take back Congress in the November midterm elections. However, the party’s progressive/socialist and traditional/centrist wings are badly divided over Israel. Conservatives smell blood in the water, and seek to widen this divide by hammering the Democrats on antisemitism and Israel. As misleading as their claims are, there’s a good chance this strategy will work.