The Nation is a 158-year-old ‘progressive’ left-wing political magazine, in which Maurice Isserman just told us why he has, after many, many years, resigned from the Democratic Socialists of America. The thing is, after several recent years, he should not have been surprised.

Why I Just Quit DSA

After over four decades as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, one of the group’s founding members is leaving in sorrow and anger.

by Maurice Isserman | Monday, October 23, 2023

Maurice Isserman; photo by -Kevin Waldron, via Hamilton College. Click to enlarge.

I’ve belonged to only two nationally organized left-wing groups in my life: the first, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) for just over a year; the second, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for 41 years. My membership in SDS ended in 1969, when I was 18 years old, without any input or agency on my part, when the organization collapsed around me in a chaotic maelstrom of rival manifestos, mass walkouts, fervid chanting, and a few fistfights, all of which scattered the group’s thousands of members to the winds. My membership in DSA ended with considerably less drama last week, when at a somewhat more advanced age I resigned from the organization via an e-mail. I left to protest the DSA leadership’s politically and morally bankrupt response to the horrific Hamas October 7 anti-Jewish pogrom that took the lives of 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and saw over 200 hostages carried off to Gaza, both groups of victims including children and infants.

Editorial disclosure: I added the hyperlink to the Democratic Socialists of America; it was not in Dr Isserman’s original.

Whether DSA will now follow SDS into political oblivion is for the future to tell, but one thing a lifetime of studying the history of American radicalism suggests to me is that, as a rule, there are rarely second acts in the lives of organizations captured by left sectarian “entryists.”

What do I mean by “entryists”? In left-wing parlance, the term refers to tightly organized groups who, without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original members. Without descending too deeply into the weeds of sectarian history, entryism has been a recurring phenomenon on the American left since the 1930s.

There follow about a dozen more paragraphs, most of which deals with the history of the DSA, and the leftist, though not always wild-eyed radical, ideas of DSA activists, and Dr Isserman’s celebration of the fact that a few DSA members, running as Democrats, were actually elected to Congress. They call themselves ‘The Squad,’ but I prefer the term squadristi, singular squadrista, which is what Italians called Benito Mussolini’s infamous ‘black shirts.’

But then we get to the real meat of Dr Isserman’s article:

As the new hard-line caucuses gained influence, the issue of Palestine became ever more important in DSA’s internal political culture. In 1982, when DSA began, support for Labor Zionism was widespread in its ranks. But over the next several decades, the Labor Party faded as a political force in Israel to be replaced by right-wing Zionists, and the prospects for a “two-state” solution to the Palestinian question evaporated. I doubt if many DSAers today would describe themselves as Zionists of any stripe, although many (at least many of my acquaintance), remain committed to Israel’s right to exist as well as its right — within limits that it too often violates — to defend its national security. In any case, there are few if any DSAers, veterans as well as newcomers, who are not critics of Israel’s repressive policies in the West Bank and Gaza.

Dr Isserman has just paid obeisance to the left’s position that Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians is unjustifiably harsh, and I will admit that I inferred that he supports the ‘two-state’ solution. I would note here that Israel, under then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, agreed to a partition which would have left the Palestinian Arabs with all of Gaza, 97% of Judea and Samaria, the so-called West Bank, and some property swaps inside Israel proper to make up that small difference . . . and Yassir Arafat completely rejected what President Clinton later called the best deal the Arabs could ever hope to get.

But that doesn’t account for the singularly important role of Palestine in DSA’s rather short list of international concerns, completely overshadowing the attention paid, for example, to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or to the rights of other oppressed peoples, like the Kurdish Muslims, or China’s Uyghur Muslims. Concern for Palestine, entirely legitimate in itself, also served other purposes for DSA’s new sectarian leadership, furnishing a convenient stick to beat DSA’s moderate wing if it wasn’t willing to embrace the most extreme positions on the Palestinian question—up to and including denying Israel’s right to continued existence.

These are the money lines, telling anyone who pays attention what Dr Isserman would not say directly in his article: the reaction of the DSA has been different because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict involves, as Jeff Goldstein would spell it, the Jooooos. The Kurdish Muslims he mentioned are oppressed by other Muslims, in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, while the Uyghur Muslims are subjugated by the Chinese Communists. The author never used the term “anti-Semitism” or any of its variations in his article, but that’s what it is. The left want to claim that they aren’t anti-Semitic, just anti-Zionist, but they sure don’t seem to care nearly as much when the ‘oppressors’ are not Jews.

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. There was a serious push within DSA to sanction or even expel Representative Bowman for voting to approve US funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system, and for traveling to Israel in 2021 on a trip sponsored by the liberal Zionist (and pro-Palestinian rights) group J Street. (The effort failed, but Bowman quietly let his membership to DSA lapse in 2022—chalk one up for the “partyists.”)

Let’s be blunt here: “From the River to the Sea” is the stated goal of Hamas, and it means the complete eradication of Israel. Why couldn’t Dr Isserman have said that himself?

The author noted that both Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) condemned Hamas October 7^th attack, and pointed out:

DSA’s National Political Committee did not agree with the two most prominent democratic socialists in American public life. Its statement on October 7 made no mention—let alone offering any criticism—of Hamas, declaring instead, “Today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime—a regime that receives billions in funding from the United States.” That same day the New York City DSA chapter urged its members to attend a rally in midtown Manhattan called for the following day by another left-wing group under the slogan “All Out for Palestine.” At that event, on October 8, not 24 hours after the attack, one speaker would giddily note the slaughter by Hamas of hundreds of young Israelis attending a concert in approving terms: “[T]he resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.” That got a big laugh. There probably weren’t a lot of DSAers in the audience, and no DSAers spoke from the podium, but the damage was done — and not undeserved. Politically, you’re judged by the company you keep.

He noted the Seattle DSA’s circulation of a “toolkit“, which included:

Decolonization – from the river to the sea.
Not just Gaza and the West Bank, we want all of ‘48.

I find myself amused at all of those American leftists calling for ‘decolonization,’ when I never seem to see them surrendering their homes or property to the Indians! Of course, I don’t see those leftists picking up a rifle and heading to Gaza to help fight the IDF, either. I wonder why that is.

Dr Isserman mentioned more idiocy by the pro-Palestinian groups, and then concluded with this:

So why am I quitting DSA? There are many reasons. But in the end, the most important comes down to the Sarah Silverman Rule #1 for Judging One’s Political Associates. An organization that can’t take a stand condemning a right-wing terrorist group that set out to murder as many Jewish civilians, including children and infants, as it can lay its hands on, has forfeited the right to call itself democratic socialist. It has, as Sarah says “lost me forever.”

I have to ask: why did it take Dr Isserman, who earned his PhD in 1979, who is the son of a Jewish father and a mother who was the daughter of a Quaker minister, and is a tenured professor at Hamilton College in New York, all of this time to see where things were going with the younger left in this country? I’m not Jewish, grew up in an almost entirely Christian small town, and have known few Jews that I knew were Jewish in my life,^[1]I was ignorant enough of Judaism and Jews that, even as a senior in high school, I never suspected that a family named Rosenberg in the small town in which I grew up was Jewish. I never made the … Continue reading yet I could see it, see it coming years ago. My only guess is that he was so seduced by leftism that he just didn’t want to see it.

Dr Isserman, those people hate your guts, and would line you up against the wall if they could. You need to understand that.