Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Singles Out Israel
In recent years, much of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) movement has adopted a posture of profound hostility toward Israel. Its leaders insist they are not opposed to Jews or even to Israel itself, but merely to the policies of the Israeli government. Yet that distinction becomes increasingly difficult to sustain when every Israeli government—left, center, or right—is condemned as fundamentally illegitimate, and when the movement’s ultimate demands would effectively eliminate Israel’s character as the world’s only Jewish state.
The Democratic Socialists of America has embraced the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, called for an end to US military assistance to Israel, supported efforts to isolate Israel diplomatically and economically, and routinely characterizes Israel as a colonial, apartheid, or even genocidal state. Its official rhetoric rarely acknowledges Israel as a democracy defending itself against terrorist organizations committed to its destruction. Instead, Israel is frequently depicted as the singular aggressor, while Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iranian-backed terrorist groups are often treated primarily as reactions to Israeli policies rather than ideological movements with openly declared objectives of eliminating the Jewish state.
The movement often claims that its opposition is directed only at the Israeli government. But governments change. Since its founding, Israel has been led by Labor, Likud, Kadima, coalition governments, secular governments, religious governments, dovish governments, and hawkish governments. DSA’s hostility has remained remarkably constant regardless of who occupies the Prime Minister’s Office. The target increasingly is not a particular government, but the very idea of a sovereign Jewish state.
That distinction matters. Democracies routinely criticize one another’s governments without questioning each other’s right to exist. Americans criticized the Bush administration, the Obama administration, the Trump administration, and the Biden administration without advocating the dissolution of the United States. Europeans criticize one another’s governments constantly without denying the legitimacy of France, Germany, or Britain as nation-states. Israel alone is frequently subjected to a different standard, where opposition to the government is accompanied by campaigns to boycott the country, sever military cooperation, isolate its universities, sanction its economy, and challenge the legitimacy of Zionism itself.
This antipathy also stands in sharp contrast to the movement’s treatment of many other nations engaged in territorial disputes, military occupations, or internal repression. Democratic socialist organizations devote extraordinary energy to condemning Israel while comparatively little attention is paid to the systematic persecution of minorities in Iran, China, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, or other authoritarian states. Critics argue that this extraordinary focus reflects not merely concern for human rights but a selective moral standard in which the Jewish state is judged by criteria applied to few, if any, other nations.
The events following October 7, 2023, further reinforced that perception. Before Israel had even begun its military response to Hamas’s massacre of civilians, many DSA chapters and affiliated activists issued statements placing primary blame on Israel or portraying the attacks as an inevitable consequence of Israeli policy. Rather than beginning with an unequivocal condemnation of terrorism, much of the movement framed the atrocities through the lens of anti-colonial resistance. For many observers, that response exposed an ideological framework in which Israeli actions are presumed culpable while the agency and moral responsibility of terrorist organizations are diminished or explained away.
For supporters of Israel, the democratic socialist critique therefore crosses the line from legitimate policy disagreement into rejection of Jewish national self-determination. Criticizing settlements, military operations, or individual governments is entirely consistent with support for Israel’s existence. Rejecting Zionism, supporting economic warfare against Israel alone, and treating the Jewish state’s existence as uniquely illegitimate is something fundamentally different.
Whether viewed as a human-rights campaign or as an ideological crusade against Zionism, much of the contemporary democratic socialist movement has become one of the most consistently anti-Israel forces in American politics. By portraying nearly every Israeli government as beyond legitimacy while rarely extending comparable scrutiny to Israel’s adversaries, it has increasingly placed itself at odds not only with many mainstream Democrats, but also with the overwhelming majority of American Jews who believe that Israel, like every other nation, has both the right to exist and the right to defend itself.
