Why DSA Should Agitate for a One State Solution

To take the strongest stand for Palestinian liberation DSA should support a one state solution and the left wing of the resistance.

By Maria Franzblau and Sarah Milner

This article is part of an ongoing debate in DSA and Reform & Revolution over how to orient to Palestinian liberation and reflects the majority position of R&R as voted on at our 2024 convention. For a different perspective from R&R comrades, please read this piece.

On October 7th, it seemed inevitable that a wave of repression and opposition to our politics would come crashing down on us. Instead, the last 8 months have seen the resurgence of a mass protest movement which has only grown stronger in the face of intense opposition from the leadership of both parties, which has swung US public opinion to be more critical of Israel than it has been in decades. 

Such a dramatic shift in consciousness shows the depth of the crisis of legitimacy facing our country’s ruling class. Once untouchable questions have become live political issues: only a few years ago, advocacy for Palestine and against Zionism was a marginalized act, taken by individuals who risked their career to do so. Now, conditions have reached such a point that unions are openly calling for ceasefire and engaging in political strikes. 

DSA’s intervention in Palestine solidarity has been on the whole stronger, more consistent, and more politically discerning than our approach to BLM four years ago. In particular, YDSA distinguished itself during the wave of protests on college campuses. Round-the-clock social media coverage, chapters taking leadership across the country, a member forum, a training program, and other work all helped distinguish YDSA as leaders in the campus occupations—a fact which our enemies in the ruling class have taken notice of.

As the cost of the war rises in dollars spent and blood spilled, the “international community” has raised pressure on Israel to end the war. Ireland, Norway, and Spain have recognized the State of Palestine. The International Criminal Court prosecutor put out an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The Biden Administration, which once called supporters of a ceasefire “disgraceful,” is now pressuring Israel to accept a ceasefire deal.

These are promising developments, but it is important to temper them with a careful assessment of our situation. Despite the surge of protests, our movement still has only minority support, and despite a stronger intervention, DSA still has a long way to go to position ourselves as enduring leaders of a durable, credible opposition. Fighting for a free Palestine requires more than a ceasefire. Even if the war stopped tomorrow, the occupation and exploitation would continue. As Marxists, we need to not only consider immediate questions, but also longer term ones. The occupation of Palestine is rooted deeply in imperial relations between the United States and the whole of the Middle East. To actually end the oppression of Palestinians, we will have to challenge the fundamental logic of American foreign policy. Our job is to turn protests and upsurges into a durable challenge to the capitalist system—to go from mass reform movements to political independence. 

This is a complicated and delicate task. Winning people to socialist politics means convincing people, at scale, of our politics and our theory of change. 

But it is far harder to achieve this without a clear programmatic basis unifying our work. As socialists, we recognize the interrelation of capitalism and imperialism. But for many newly radicalizing Americans, this conclusion is less obvious—let alone the following conclusion that challenging capitalism requires building DSA into a socialist party. To convince people of that, we need a baseline to our politics which strikes at the heart of the issue—the settler colonial project of Zionism and US imperialism, and its incompatibility with peace and democracy.

Having such a position would equip us to better fight within the movement and lead outside of it. It would draw the clearest connecting line between mass organizing and our socialist positions. It would confront the cause of the occupation directly. For these reasons, DSA should formally adopt support for a single, secular, socialist state of Palestine. 

Why Take a Stance? 

Thus far, the left has adopted de facto an ambiguous middle stance, holding together a tenuous coalition around the call for ceasefire. The ceasefire movement extends from Democrats who support a two-state solution to activists who give outright praise to Hamas and Ansar Allah, and encompasses millions of people in between.

Within DSA, support for a one-state solution is the majority position of our active membership and nearly all caucuses, including Reform & Revolution. But despite this apparent unity, DSA does not actually take an explicit position on the state question at a national scale. Our current platform, passed at DSA’s 2021 convention, reads that we:

“Support self-determination for the Palestinian people and a political solution to the current crisis premised on the guarantee of basic human rights, including an end to the military occupation, an end to discrimination against Palestinians within Israel, and the right of return of refugees, as outlined in the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.”

More recently, DSA voiced support for “the liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea” in a statement on the wave of student protests. This gestures toward a one state position, but behind the phrase, we still lack programmatic clarity on the question.

There are advantages to this kind of lack of clarity. It allows our big tent coalition to hold together a diverse array of members, with a wide range of often conflicting tactics and views on Palestinian liberation. 

But ambiguity also poses risks, especially when our movement is under significant pressure. The Zionist lobby, made up of powerful groups like AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), has poured billions of dollars into political campaigns to cow politicians into supporting Israel and to oust the small handful of elected officials who advocate Palestinian liberation. This, alongside genuine political underdevelopment among many working people, creates immense pressure for elected officials to support Israel or at the very least accept its “right to exist” as a settler colonial state. 

In Congress, DSA-endorsed elected officials have been among the most vocal in calling for a ceasefire and supporting of Palestinian rights, but often-times these arguments make major concessions to Zionism. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently signed onto a letter defending Israel’s “right to self-defense” and supporting “strengthening the Iron Dome.” Jamaal Bowman voted to fund the Iron Dome and met with far-right Israeli politician Naftali Bennet in 2021. Both representatives have also endorsed Joe Biden who has supported and funded Israel’s genocide in Gaza at every step.

The question of whether to endorse AOC and Bowman in their 2024 re-election bids has gripped DSA in controversy once again. Bowman, swamped by AIPAC donations for his opponent George Latimer, faced an uphill primary battle and approached New York City DSA for an endorsement. This could have been an opportunity to secure commitments from Bowman that he would, for example, not vote to fund the Israeli military. Instead, the endorsement questionnaire largely gave Bowman softball questions and the proposed endorsement was uncritical and unconditional. NYC DSA members voted “yes” to endorse Bowman without conditions by a wide margin.

DSA’s campaign for Bowman, a spirited but losing effort, was caught in a similar middle space to Bowman himself. Bowman had spent his first two terms vacillating on Palestine, first turning to the liberal Zionist approach of J-Street and alienating the Palestinian liberation movement, then turning toward DSA after losing the support of J-Street and local Democrats. Even in this re-election campaign, where he courageously called Israel’s war a “genocide” and reversed his position on funding for Israel, Bowman still endorsed Joe Biden for re-election and called for a two-state solution. It is doubtful that Bowman would have campaigned on a one-state solution or withdrawn support from Biden had we asked him to. But without an accepted organizational position, we had no way to even make the ask, no way to navigate the question if such an ask was refused, and no way to take full advantage of national media focus. The vacillation between the militant language of protest and the tepid approach of politicians leaves even talented campaigners like Bowman—and even strong chapters like NYC DSA—weakened and alienated from pro-Palestinian organizations.  

The stances taken by DSA-endorsed officials are not problematic simply because they need to be “pure,” but because they make our stance, and the socialist position on the crisis less clear. Everyone can tell that the two-state strategy has failed, and people are looking for what the alternative will be. Instead of blurring the lines between top down “appeals” for two states by politicians and a radical mass movement to end apartheid and Zionism as a whole, our elected leaders should be clarifying the distinction.

Our goal as socialists must be to win our immediate aim of ceasefire to end the genocide in Gaza, but also to undermine Zionist, imperialist hegemony in American politics and to win over a majority of the population to oppose Israeli apartheid. This means moving beyond a liberal pacifist outlook which mourns the humanitarian crisis and criticizes one or another policy of the Netanyahu government without getting to the root of the issue. Both DSA and our public representatives should base our arguments in a socialist internationalism which recognizes Israel as a settler-colonial project and the role that workers in the Middle East and across the world have in resisting, boycotting, and striking to end that project.

So far, DSA’s NPC has elected to nearly maintain our status quo of messaging, leaving our stance on one and two states to individual members to articulate. This might be helpful in the short term, giving us greater tactical flexibility and reducing tensions between caucuses. But fighting for a free Palestine and building a democratic socialist party requires more than just short term unity. By staking out a clear oppositional stance, consistently advocating for it, and leveraging our organization’s resources behind it, we can achieve more durable gains. If DSA can stand out as a radical, effective fighting force, we can convince people not just to join a protest, or sign a petition, but join the socialist movement on a long term basis. 

Zionism Must Go 

Any proposed solution to the Palestinian national question is going to run into a fundamental challenge: Zionism is incompatible with the rights and demands of the Palestinian people.

The material basis of this conflict is the settler-colonial state form of Israel. Since Zionist militias massacred and expelled over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in the Nakba in 1948, Israel has occupied Palestinian land, treated Palestinians living within their legal borders as second-class citizens, and denied millions of Palestinian refugees the right of return. The ideological basis for this is Zionism, which argues that, in order for Jews anywhere in the world to be safe, there must be a Jewish-majority state in historic Palestine with full military supremacy.

Today, this settler-colonial process is entrenched in the Israeli economy and society. Israel is a highly militarized society with mandatory conscription, receives billions in US military aid amounting to 15% of their defense budget, and is a top 10 weapons exporter. Over 700,000 Israelis live in illegal settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and, as Israel faces a major housing crisis, the state is actively subsidizing young families to move to the settlements for cheap housing.

Israel, as a political project, as a national consciousness, and as a capitalist state exists only in relation to the dispossession of Palestinians.

Rather than confronting this relation, the two state solution seeks to strike a compromise with it, preserving the conditions of Zionism while ending their effects. This has been tried before—the negotiated peace processes were attempts to reconcile Zionism and the rights of Palestinians, each time, they collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions.

In his 1999 op-ed “The One-State Solution,” Palestinian-American academic and author Edward Said articulated a blistering critique of the peace process, referring to the recently ratified Oslo Accords, which rings true today:

Israel’s raison d’etre as a state has always been that there should be a separate country, a refuge, exclusively for Jews. Oslo itself was based on the principle of separation between Jews and others, as Yitzhak Rabin tirelessly repeated. Yet over the past 50 years, especially since Israeli settlements were first implanted on the occupied territories in 1967, the lives of Jews have become more and more enmeshed with those of non-Jews.

The effort to separate has occurred simultaneously and paradoxically with the effort to take more and more land, which has in turn meant that Israel has acquired more and more Palestinians… But so tiny is the land area of historical Palestine, so closely intertwined are Israelis and Palestinians, despite their inequality and antipathy, that clean separation simply won’t, can’t really, occur or work. It is estimated that by 2010 there will be demographic parity. What then?

The estimate Said was referring to came true: there are now about 7 million Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza to about 7 million Israeli Jews. All live under Israeli authority of some sort, but the vast majority of Palestinians lack voting rights and freedom of movement. The question of “what now?” is now one of the most important questions facing Israeli society.

In answering that question, the Israeli right has taken Zionism to its logical conclusion: a Jewish supremacist apartheid state. The current Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, supports the annexation of the West Bank without extending voting rights to its inhabitants and rejects the possibility of a Palestinian state at all. Other members of his coalition, like the fascist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and his “Jewish Power” party, support colonizing Gaza and ethnically cleansing its population. These views are only becoming more entrenched in Israel as illegal settlements grow rapidly, as these settlers are the political base of the fascist parties and have formed lynch mobs to injure and murder Palestinians.

On the other side of Israeli politics are the “liberal” and centrist Zionists who wish to maintain Jewish supremacy but oppose the “excesses” of the ultra right. The two leading opposition figures to Netanyahu, liberal Zionist Yair Lapid and centrist Benny Gantz, oppose Palestinians controlling their own military or electing their own government if it means Hamas holding power in any post-war scenario. Gantz even opposes allowing the collaborationist Palestinian Authority being allowed to control Gaza.

The genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is the natural conclusion of this dynamic. So long as the people on the whole land of Israel-Palestine are segregated into an apartheid system, the Israeli claim to the whole land will be expressed as violently taking that land from Palestinians. 

We cannot defeat Zionism without actually defeating Zionism. Zionists will never accept Palestine in anything except a subordinate status. Palestinians will never accept that subordinate status. 

A two state solution reduces the aspirations of Palestinians to statehood. But while this is an essential part of the Palestinians demands, there is a deeper, more material question underlying their movement for liberation. The Palestinian masses want to be able to return to the hometowns their grandfathers were evicted from. They want to have access to the water and farmland that has been redirected into Israel. They want to have representation in the government which controls their lives. They want to be able to express the full freedom of an end to colonial relations, not merely to live in a state which replicates those old relations. 

Our analysis, our solution, and the demand we advocate for has to arise out of these material conditions, otherwise it is incapable of presenting a genuinely revolutionary course forward. A single state is the only just socialist position. 

Fighting the Long Fight 

A democratic single state solution will not be immediately popular. Especially in Israel and Palestine itself, we have to face the reality that most people do not see cohabitation as viable, and two-states remains the most popular (or least unpopular) solution in polls. In second place is an undemocratic one-state solution: ethnic cleansing. While there is support for one secular and democratic state among some Israelis and Palestinians, it makes up a smaller percentage and now seems more distant than ever.

There is plenty of reason to be pessimistic about the possibility of winning a democratic one-state solution. Arguably the single biggest obstacle is Israeli society. A massive section of Israeli Jews would need to be willing to acquiesce to a single democratic state, and currently there is neither the political will among them nor the military strength of Palestinians to make them do so.

But if we look at the present-day conditions of Israel and Palestine, and the ways that Palestinian resistance has historically been able to change Israel’s political landscape, we can see that one secular state is both necessary and possible to win.

First, socialists must grapple with the one-state reality in Israel and Palestine. In practice there is one society, brutally segregated, with Israel holding sway over the lives and rights of the entire people of Palestine. This apartheid system leaves Palestinians at the mercy of a government they have no control over, subjected to the whims of a military they have no rights under, and trapped in borders they have no say over. Israel also dominates the Palestinian economy, using their control over imports, exports, and work permits to restrict political activity, control natural resources, and impoverish the West Bank and Gaza. Israel is now using their immense military, political, and economic power to conduct a genocide aimed at taking all Palestinian land into Israeli control. 

Second, we must recognize that the rightward motion of Israeli politics is not a given, and that Palestinian resistance is capable of dealing powerful blows to settler-colonialism. In our caucus position from October, we argued that the strongest resistance would adopt tactics along the lines of the First intifada– mass organizing, democratically run civic councils, secular appeals to international resistance. In a 1990 interview George Habash, the Palestinian Marxist who founded and led the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), described the ways the First Intifada was impacting Israeli society:

…On the Israeli plane, the Intifada has had numerous economic, social, psychological, military and political effects. At the economic level, for example, the rate of growth of Israel’s Gross National Product has started to fall, to the point where GNP is no longer growing, even in a minimal fashion. Israeli economic losses attributable to the Intifada are estimated at five million dollars a day. At the military level, Israeli army chiefs now recognize that they are incapable of defeating the Intifada. Cases of refusal to serve in the occupied territories have multiplied. At the political level, movements of protest and opposition have appeared. The effects of the intifada have reached small political parties represented in the Israeli Parliament. There have been political embarrassments inside the coalition government, and differences have emerged even inside the two big political parties, the Labour Party and the Likud.

To sum up, I can say that a current has appeared inside Israel demanding peace and the recognition of Palestinian national rights. In mentioning this reality, we do not ignore the fact that the general Israeli attitude remains intransigent on the question of peace, and even that opinion polls in Israel indicate generally a tendency towards the extreme right so far as the rights of the Palestinian people are concerned.

Socialists often conclude, from the rightward shifts and material impact of settler colonization, that the Israeli working class cannot play any role in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.  We agree that Israeli workers will not be the protagonists of the resistance. But demoralizing Israel’s right-wing parties, inspiring and growing the small radical left, and intensifying pressure to force protests and political crises are all vital parts of building a winning movement. Israeli workers will not be won over through abstract appeals to their morality or by making concessions to Zionism. But our caucus does assert that the unity of Israeli society can be broken up by a combination of armed resistance, mass protests and strikes, and international pressure.

Our goal in the US must be to exert maximum pressure on Israel in a way that raises the confidence of our comrades in Palestine and starves the Israeli government of money, weapons, support, and legitimacy.

In the US, the movement is already engaging with the questions that point towards a confrontation with Zionism. Protesters have called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, the abolition of Israeli settlements, boycotts and divestment from Israeli companies, an end to US aid to Israel, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the end of apartheid, and Palestinian self-determination. In our view, it is time for DSA to take this to its logical conclusion: a secular and democratic state with universal rights, protections for minorities, and reparations for the Palestinian people by expropriating the capitalist class.

Ending Israeli apartheid is not only a popular message and a stirring slogan, it is a demand which points directly to broader questions of imperialism, capitalism and revolutionary politics. The segregation, exploitation, and dispossession of Palestinians is the basis of Israeli class society—occupation serves the immediate and secondary interests of the wider capitalist class. The Palestinians, in contrast, are doubly chained, by capitalist exploitation and by the settler colonialism it inspires. By agitating directly against Israeli apartheid, we can target the underlying logic of American imperialism and oppose the two capitalist parties that uphold it.

As we have discussed in previous articles, socialists also need to deftly respond to attacks calling our movement antisemitic. Support for a democratic one state solution allows us to directly respond to these attacks: we support equal rights for everyone. If Israel in its current state cannot survive equality, that calls into question the state of Israel, not the right to equality. 

The political integration of Israel and Palestine, the intensification of Israel’s economic control, and the constant motion of borders all point towards the stark choice between three options: genocide, two unequal states, or one democratic state. Only one solution offers genuine liberation. 

Socialist Support

“Commend” Hamas?

So how do we get there? Our comrades in Red Star laid out their position. They argue that Hamas is at the center of the resistance movement, and that it is a counterproductive waste of time to criticize them. Therefore, they say, the best way for DSA to support the Palestinian liberation movement is to “commend” Hamas.

This is an understandable instinct for leftists to have. The logic that we should prioritize the overwhelmingly dominant force in the resistance is compelling when one is looking for the shortest route to ending the genocide. But Red Star’s argument does not hold up well under scrutiny. Being at the center of a resistance movement does not guarantee a force has the ability or ideology necessary to lead a movement to victory.

We support the resistance, and cheer for Israel’s defeat, without conditions. That isn’t the same as agreeing with every single force complete with their program. If we’re going to consider “commending” Hamas as a political force, we should consider what they believe and what they have done in power. Red Star’s article focuses primarily on Hamas’ role as a leading resistance force. But their rise is highly contextual. The turn towards the top-down guerrilla strategy of Hamas is driven by the social dislocation and disorganization of the blockade and years of bombings, dissatisfaction with Fatah and the PA, and the arrest of the most popular opposition leader in Palestine, Marwan Barghouti. Hamas’ conservative leadership was not inevitable and support for their politics is not monolithic among Palestinians; they are the current leaders of a diverse movement that has tried many tactics to defeat Zionism to varying degrees of success.

Our analysis of them must take into account both their approach in fighting the war against the IDF and their role in government, compared to the movements of the past.

Since their takeover in 2007, Hamas has led an authoritarian, conservative, pro-capitalist government in Gaza. When Gazans protested in 2019 and 2023 against hunger and austerity, they were met with beatings, arrests, and detentions from Hamas security forces. Hamas also upholds a British colonial law criminalizing same-sex intimacy, referred to treating LGBTQ people equally as “promoting deviancy and moral decay,” and has returned abused women and girls to their abusers.

Of course, the most vicious and powerful oppressor of Palestinians in Gaza is the wretched Israeli blockade, which has made Gaza into the world’s largest open air prison, and the ongoing genocide that has murdered over 37,000 Palestinians. That is why we must support the armed resistance against Israel and oppose any effort to equate those resisting genocide with those perpetrating it. But this is vastly different from saying we should “commend” Hamas and effectively silence all criticisms of them. To do this is to forget our socialist principles and ignore the millions of Palestinians who oppose Hamas’ leadership.

Bringing up these facts has nothing to do with “purity,” it is about the obstacles they pose to victory. In some ways, the military resistance led by Hamas has seen successes. Israel vowed to “eradicate” them from existence, but 9 months of devastating fighting later the resistance is not only still fighting but Hamas is actively gaining recruits by the thousands. Meanwhile, a mass movement for Palestinian liberation has formed across the world which is pressuring states and institutions to cut ties with Israel and force a ceasefire.

But other key tactics which have dealt blows to colonial powers before are impeded by Hamas’ leadership. The tactics of the First Intifada which mobilized all of Palestinian society, like democratic committees of women and workers organizing day-to-day resistance, would be hard enough to recreate in present conditions. But the repressive, anti-democratic practices of Hamas in Gaza make this type of grassroots uprising even harder. Further, Hamas’ conservative Islamist politics and attacks on civilian targets have garnered them far less explicit support from protestors and states than successful, secular nationalist movements like the National Liberation Front in Vietnam or the African National Congress in South Africa.

Within Israeli society, there have been promising signs that many are losing faith in the war, like a conference of thousands of people in Tel Aviv calling for an end to the war. But the bulk of Israel is nowhere near the “current demanding peace and the recognition of Palestinian national right” that George Habash once described in the First Intifada, the type of shift we argue will be necessary to force the liberation of Palestine. For example, after months of collapsing support in the wake of October 7th, recent polling shows Netanyahu’s Likud party once again gaining in the polls.

We cannot pretend to predict the future, but all available signs indicate that the end of the war will not result in full liberation from the river to the sea. The Biden administration’s ceasefire plan, for example, is premised on Gaza being “supervised” by Qatar and Egypt while the US continues to insist on Hamas being removed from power. Were it implemented, we should celebrate it as a major step forward which would ameliorate the suffering of millions, but we should also be clear that it is still a crooked bargain that denies Palestinians their self-determination.

Red Star notes that the alliance in Palestine is a popular front. History has shown that these kinds of cross class alliances might stay together against outside aggression. But when the fighting ends, the class character of the competing elements comes to the fore. If our goal is a lasting liberation movement, socialists have to be ready for the breakdown of such a popular front, and that means examining the governance of Hamas as evidence for the role they will play the day after Israel is expelled. 

As the struggle transitions from an immediate battle against the Israeli invasion to a longer struggle over the terms of a post-war Palestine, this contradiction will become clearer. Hamas risks either losing their dominant role in the resistance, or leading it to a moderate conclusion. 

Red Star’s article focuses heavily on the material dynamics at play right now, but it loses sight of the dynamics that will emerge from the struggle. Socialists need to think about the long-term fight for one state, and illusions about Hamas don’t help that. Instead, we should be thinking, and talking modestly but openly, about our disagreements with Hamas. Those disagreements aren’t about whether resistance is needed, they are about what kind of resistance will offer the clearest route to democracy and a single state.  

If our goal is to simply win a ceasefire, a short-term strategy of supporting anyone who points in the right direction might work. But if our goal is defeating Israel and winning a free Palestine, DSA should be thinking on a longer timeline than just the end of fighting. 

Support the Left-Wing Forces!

As organizers in the US, we can’t prescribe from afar the precise day-to-day tactics that the Palestinian resistance must employ. But as socialists with the precedent of history, we can determine some key facts and develop a clear perspective of what principles are essential for liberation. We know from the First and Second Intifadas that a combination of mass movements of the Palestinian people, armed resistance, and international solidarity is capable of dealing blows to Zionism. We know from the failures of the Palestinian Authority that collaboration with the oppressor will not yield liberation. We know that full liberation means democratic control of society for all Palestinians, meaning workers, women, LGBTQ people, and people of all religious backgrounds or none at all.

What, then, should our position as socialists in the US be towards the Palestinian resistance? The majority position of Reform & Revolution argues that it should be “critical support for the left-wing of the resistance.” What does that mean? We support the victory of the Palestinian armed resistance in Gaza, as it exists, against the Israeli military. But we do not believe that Hamas will be the force to bring about Palestinian liberation and we believe socialists in Palestine should seek to win leadership of the resistance from them. Right now these forces are best represented by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). While they are currently in a popular front with Hamas against Israel, they have electorally opposed Hamas and uphold socialist politics. It is good that the PFLP and DFLP are fighting the common enemy with Hamas. It is less good that they are, to outside observers, uncritical of Hamas, and not seeking to differentiate themselves from them.

Why does it matter to have any position, though, if we are not able to immediately influence the resistance?

First, because the international positions taken by DSA will become increasingly important as we grow as an organization and raise our profile internationally. As our Red Star comrades put it in their article:

When, on that long-awaited day, the people of Palestine look around at who stands by their side, where will socialists find ourselves? Will we find ourselves by their side, having taken revolutionary strides forward to fight for liberation and socialism, to stem the flow of American weapons and hasten the day of their victory? Or will we have allowed things to stay the same yet again, afraid to advance beyond the status quo, leaving us detached from them?

The comrades in Red Star are wrong to point towards Hamas as the ultimate liberatory force. But they are very right that socialists will be judged by their commitment to real liberation movements, not hypothetical ones. A commitment to socialism and secularism, if it is to emerge, will have to come from within the ranks of those presently fighting. 

However we cannot wish for Hamas to be socialists just because they lead the resistance. We have to think through the fact that, not only are they central to the resistance movement, they are also the sort of nationalist government whose victory has led to neocolonial policies across the world. This is a central contradiction the socialist movement needs to engage with. 

Second, this question is critical because clarity in our approach to the Palestinian resistance directly informs our actions and messaging in the United States. An approach based in uncritically commending Hamas like Red Star, or outright embracing social conservatism like others, is out of step with the principles we want to win American workers to. Such an approach also provides a much weaker foundation to argue against moderates within DSA when they defend unconditional endorsement of candidates like AOC and Bowman. We need a defensible, radical position which we can say in public.

In practical terms, we unabashedly support the right of Palestinians to resist Israeli occupiers. We reject imperialist talking points that call for the “eradication” of Hamas at the hands of imperialist intervention, or which defend Israel’s right to “defend itself” from people under occupation. But we should not pretend Hamas are something they are not. If we want a single, secular Palestine with equal rights for all, Hamas will not bring it about. Other forces within the resistance will have to take leadership. 

What DSA Can Do 

The present struggle for Palestinian liberation is limited by our lack of coordination. In the R&R minority article, comrades point out that our movement suffers from genuine issues of unpopularity. They are correct in this assertion, but the alternative they propose is not a viable one. Replacing an actual anti-colonial struggle with an idealized one accepts the framing that the center of the problem in Israel-Palestine is Hamas. 

But the central task of socialists is not to replace the resistance movement. The central question is the nature of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. 

DSA’s current approach reflects a haphazard combination of the politics of Red Star internally, and reformist politics externally. We talk radically about Palestine in our statements, but our campaigning, like for Bowman in NYC, is not clear in how we are different from two-state supporters or liberals.  

This leaves us rhetorically and theoretically trapped behind politicians who are trying to strike a compromise with Zionism. If we want to break through consciousness on this question, we have to be messaging about why a reformist approach is unworkable. A coordinated demand for a single state offers several things to DSA. Most importantly, it allows us to underline the core distinction between ourselves and our imperialist opposition. Not only are we fighting for a more just solution, we are in fact fighting for the only solution which makes sense. Confronting the One State Reality means we can talk openly and as sharply as possible about the genocidal aims of Israel, and they way their government conceives of their entire state project as an effort to eliminate the Palestinains. It allows us to highlight and aggressively attack the most egregious aspects of the exploitation of Palestinians: the fact that they live under the colonial domination of Israel and yet have no rights guaranteed by them. 

Our rhetorical approach has to be designed around redirecting the conversation towards the role of Israeli settler colonialism and American imperialism in the convoy. Praising Hamas does not do this, and focusing on condemning them does not do this either. We need our own positive vision to express our socialist principles. 

A single DSA elected successfully bringing the one state debate into the mainstream would force a confrontation over the nature of Israel itself. Right now, any opposition to Israel is portrayed as antisemitic. By drawing out the crisis of Israeli settler colonialism itself, we can show that this logic is an argument against equal rights for Palestinians. When we talk about the necessity of cohabitation, we can expose that the imperialist framework holds that any Palestinian rights are a threat to Israelis. With each attack, we can point people back towards the real problem: Zionism. 

In a previous article, Sarah M. argued that DSA should fight for democracy in protests and a leading role for our organization in the movement. Such struggles are directly related to the fight for a one-state position. This is part of our effort to attach mass deliberation to mass organizing. Democracy in protests is the means by which we can actually cohere messaging around class appeals, an external focus, a call for equality and an end to apartheid.

As mass movements develop, there is a surge of dialogue. A key role for socialist cadre in these surges is to cohere that dialogue around demands. The demands we advocate for should be extensions of the essential logic of the protests towards the logic of challenging capitalism. We are not just looking to amplify the struggle, but to simultaneously push it forward. 

But we will not immediately have a majority in protests. Some might be unwilling to clearly state the need for equal rights for all people. Others might be afraid to stand against the hegemonic two state consensus. We will have to patiently argue a socialist perspective. Just like with democratizing protests we are organizing, not just for today, but for the next mass movement. 

A unified demand would also require a much sharper intervention by the NPC. Moving away from our current less coordinated messaging, we would need to produce public materials, videos, and statements on our position (Reform & Revolution recently put forward a resolution to the NPC to improve DSA’s messaging). We would need to ask politicians to support it and use their platforms to push our arguments for a single democratic state into the public consciousness. 

DSA has not adopted a unified demand in this way since the Green New Deal, and a call for a single state solution would be quite different. Many DSA members support a single state as a general concept, but don’t hold a specific, socialist vision for making it happen. It would make sense to move slowly, so as to build consensus. Internal forums and political education events would be a strong starting place—a discussion in Socialist Forum, and NPC members speaking at chapters. Such outreach could be linked to sharing skills from protests and distributing other resources. 

But as consensus is built in DSA, we should aim to escalate the expectation, working with chapters and elected officials to coordinate consistent messaging. While such a demand should not be a red line for general membership, it should be the basis for coordinated national action, including via electoral campaigns. As consensus develops in DSA, we should eventually make the expectation a red line for endorsement. 

The most powerful thing we could achieve would be to have politicians openly campaigning on rejecting Zionism as a project, alongside unified comms, pamphlets, banners, slogans and chants for rallies, and public town halls agitating for a free Palestine. 

Finally, if another one of our goals is to build up the foundations of an independent party, expressing real independence requires unity for our interventions in unions, electoral campaigns, and social movements. In each space, we would likely start as a minority. 

But there are different kinds of oppositional stances, more and less favorable ones. A stance against apartheid and for socialism and equality equips us in two ways. In more hostile spaces, it gives us a strong, defensible foundation from which we can aggressively agitate for our position. In protest movements, where we are fighting for more universalist messaging, a focus on class and against self marginalizing tactics, gives us a single unified message which distinguishes us from nationalist, capitalist, and reformist groups. An appeal based on universal human rights and opposition to nationalism or apartheid is far and away the most effective way to win people to our positions. From this framework, we can point directly to the critical role of class struggle, and the capitalist relations at the heart of the colonial system. 

Winning a majority of US society over to this position will take years. But right now, with the public primed for confrontational messaging, a clear stance fundamentally distinct from the capitalist position could actually be a catalyst to position us as the most credible opposition. We can make our interventions as effective as possible if we have a unified message and strategy. By joining together the call for protest democracy and the call for a single state, we can point people towards DSA as the force best suited to win the battle for Palestinian liberation. 

When socialists are fighting a difficult, long term battle, we need a clear answer which actually solves the problem we are agitating on, and gives us a foundation to build enduring consensus. We need to win people over on the basis of a socialist solution to the oppression of Palestinian people and Zionism. 

For that reason, DSA’s NPC should adopt support for a single, secular, socialist state as our position, and begin work to cohere our members, allies and elected officials around that position.

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Photo credit: Palestinian-Israeli May Day 2024 parade in Nazareth. Taken by @z_00pIz on X