At its core, this crisis has been a conflict over political principles: will DSA put electoral expediency before its stated support for Palestinians? Are DSA’s electeds accountable to members and the democratically decided politics of the organization, or is it the other way around?
Ignoring the broad support the working group has organized behind its demands, DSA’s right wing has tried to paint the working group as a small group of posturing sectarians, “wreckers” who care more about being righteous on social media than “getting their hands dirty” and “building power.” Some, including members of the NPC, have even ludicrously implied that the working group represents some kind of infiltration plot to destroy the DSA.
These have been desperate attempts to isolate, divide, and confuse what is clear and broad opposition to DSA’s leadership. Instead of an inscrutable faction fight, this has been a conflict over principles: one that has galvanized a broad layer of DSA activists and organizers in a way that electoral strategies simply cannot. Yet, the DSA leadership and the right wing of the DSA attempt to maintain electoralism as the primary strategy within DSA. Not to be confused with the practice of simply using elections as a tactic for the socialist movement, which can sometimes have value, by “electoralism” we mean the focus on relationships with Democratic Party politicians and electing so-called progressive Democrats as the primary arena of struggle. This assumes that the road to socialism runs through the Democratic Party ballot line and the slow accumulation of socialists winning electoral seats on the Democratic ticket. It conceives of power for our side as coming from above and substitutes elected leaders for popular movements.
But the debate at hand was never about processes or personalities, but about Palestine, and is not complicated. If a member of the DSA can vote in Congress to fund Israeli weapons, does the DSA support BDS? If the democratically decided stances of DSA can be disregarded when convenient for politicians, then is the organization really run by its members?
The DSA right’s rhetoric and responses have worked to confuse the power dynamics at hand, painting the situation as one of the NPC and BDS Working Group both having committed wrongs in an interpersonal conflict. In reality, the NPC has enabled liberal Zionism for the sake of electoral expediency, shutting down the dissent of Palestinians and their supporters.
Undermining BDS, Supporting Apartheid
Socialists must recognize that Zionism, the support for an exclusively Jewish state in historic Palestine, is a racist and colonialist movement. It requires the ongoing violent expulsion of indigenous Palestinians, and denial of their most basic rights.
Liberal Zionism purports to support peace and equality while distorting the basic facts and causes of the oppression of Palestinians. Liberal Zionists, including the lobbying group J Street, to which Bowman is attached, present Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians as if it were a symmetrical conflict, with both sides having to compromise for the sake of peace.
While they claim to oppose the “excesses” of Israeli violence and the “overreach” of the occupation, liberal Zionists put a progressive veneer on the false promise of a “peace process” designed to continue the violent dispossession of Palestinians and denial of their basic rights and freedoms. In this way, liberal Zionism opposes actual Palestinian-led movements for freedom and self-determination.
BDS has served as an effective counterweight to this confusion, providing a vehicle for grassroots organizing around the basic demand “that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.” Palestinian civil society organizations, representing every corner of Palestinian society, have laid down what the overwhelming majority of Palestinians agree are the bare minimum requirements for their self-determination.
BDS demands not only an end to Israel’s brutal military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank including East Jerusalem, but an end to dozens of laws discriminating against Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, and recognition of the right of millions of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes from which Israel violently expelled them. Through BDS, Palestinians have defined support for their self-determination as respect for their boycott.
For a socialist organization to say that it supports BDS, while one of its most prominent elected leaders actively supports Israeli apartheid, undermines the movement. DSA “unequivocally supports BDS” while a member in Congress votes for billions of dollars in funding for Israeli weapons. It amounts to crossing a picket line and obscuring what Palestinian self-determination actually means in much the same way as liberal Zionism.
Two Visions of Socialism
The current crisis over Bowman and the BDS Working Group is not, as some have claimed, simply a Twitter debate, but rather stems from a fundamental contradiction within the DSA: that of prioritizing electoralism and connection to the Democratic Party over socialist principles and mass, multi-racial, working-class organizing. Behind this conflict are two wildly different conceptions of power and where power comes from, as well as how to achieve socialism and liberation. This crisis raises a pivotal question about the direction of what is currently the largest socialist organization in the US, as well as the future of the broader Left in this country.