At a Sunday afternoon rally at New York’s Times Square, hundreds cheered as a speaker celebrated the previous day’s attacks on Israel. “Our heroic resistance continues to prove that we will never sit idly while our people are colonized, brutalized, and ethnically cleansed,” the speaker, a young Arab woman, told the crowd. “We uphold the right of our people to resist colonialism and imperialism, and to return to our land by any means necessary.”
What means would those be? One video of the weekend attacks showed Noa Argamani, 25, screaming “Don’t kill me!” as she was separated from her boyfriend and taken captive by Hamas. Another showed the naked body of Shani Louk, 30, a tattoo artist from Germany, being paraded through the streets of Gaza in the back of a truck as Palestinians shouted “Allahu Akbar!” According to Israeli medical services, 260 bodies were recovered from the site of the music festival from which Argamani was taken.
“Who can describe these shameful acts as heroic?”Who can describe these shameful acts as heroic? And yet the Democratic Socialists of America promoted the Times Square gathering and has lent its support to this rhetoric. Six sitting members of Congress—Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Shri Thanedar, and Greg Casar—belong to the organization, which sets the tone for many political intellectuals and journalists.
Accordingly, leftists on social media defended the idea that change must happen by any means necessary. Noah Kulwin, a contributing editor of Jewish Currents, compared the attacks to John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry. Lake Micah, an editor at Harper’s and The Drift, hailed the attacks. “A near-century’s pulverized overtures toward ethnic realization, of groping for a medium of existential latitude—these things culminate in drastic actions in need of no apologia,” he wrote on X. It is interesting to find an editor at a prestige magazine celebrating bloodshed as a means of “ethnic realization.” And it is fortunate for him that he seems incapable of writing clearly, or he might simply have written, “Kill the Jews.” Gabriel Winant, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, said that criticizing Palestinian tactics was “politically meaningless.”
As millennial socialists embrace the bloodiest form of Palestinian nationalism, it is worth recalling the very different perspective once represented by the DSA’s founder, Michael Harrington. Harrington, who died in 1989, started out in the Catholic Worker movement, to which he had been drawn by the concern for the poor and rejection of violence modeled by Dorothy Day. As he lost his Catholic faith, he moved toward socialism (an ideology Day opposed). But unlike many on the left, he rejected Soviet apologetics and the vilification of Israel.
This week, millennial socialism revealed its moral bankruptcy. While videos of atrocities circulated online, its adherents made excuses for kidnapping, rape, and the killing of noncombatants. In recent years, millennial socialists have come closer to the Democratic mainstream, but they continue to distinguish themselves by their eagerness to overlook, excuse, or embrace the crimes of Palestinian extremists. In doing so, they forfeit any right they might have possessed to speak as enemies of injustice and cruelty.
