If the events of the past two weeks are anything to go by, we will have the good fortune of outliving the state of Israel—but no rabid dog dies without a fight. On the night of October 17th, the Israeli Air Force bombed a hospital in the Gaza Strip, killing somewhere between 500 and one thousand Palestinians in a frenzied effort to satiate the bloodlust of the most fanatic elements of Israel’s settler society. Why this bloodlust? The Palestinian resistance delivered Israel its greatest military defeat in fifty years with Operation Al-Aqsa Flood earlier this month, exposing the Israeli “Defense” Forces as an army of paper tigers. It is now plain for the Palestinian people and the entire Arab world to see that two decades of glorified police duty in the West Bank, consisting mainly of dragging defenseless families from their homes and brutalizing children for throwing rocks, have left the IDF woefully unprepared to wage a real war for the survival of the Zionist project.

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed a coalition government of Zionist hardliners in 2022, he wrote his supporters a check with the Palestinian people as collateral, and now that check has bounced. By the terrible logic of Israeli politics, the immense cost incurred to national morale two weeks ago can only be made up with a bounty of charred flesh of innocents and fresh lebensraum for the next wave of settler-paramilitaries. The chips are down, there is nowhere to retreat: for Israel, it is a second Nakba or death. In a reenactment of the original sin of 1948, the Zionist entity is now prepared to ethnically cleanse over a million Palestinians from North Gaza.

                Naturally, the United States is as eager as ever to sign off on Israeli bloodletting. The custodians of our enlightened empire from D.C. to Wall Street have never encountered a mass slaughter they wouldn’t bankroll for America’s financial and geostrategic gain. But Israel in particular has always enjoyed premium access to our patronage, because for decades now it has loyally served as America’s colonial outpost in the Middle East. Israel is a country-sized military base that allows the U.S. to diplomatically corral the oil-producing slave-states of the Persian Gulf into a coalition against Iran so long as their pliable absolute monarchs remain in power, and presents the threat of military annihilation with billions of dollars of American hardware if those monarchs ever step out of line or, god forbid, are deposed by their subjects in an anti-imperialist revolution. An arrangement like that is too good to let go of, so no atrocity is too great a liability to stop the State Department from dirtying its hands in the coverup, and no amount of bloodshed could ever stain the hide of the Israeli cash cow enough for the Pentagon to put it out to pasture.

Where has DSA been during all of this? So far, exactly where we should be—on the side of the Palestinians. DSA released a statement on October 7th expressing “steadfast” solidarity with Palestine against Israeli occupation. This was soon followed by other statements from local chapters, and then tangible action in the days that followed as thousands of DSA members took to the streets to demand an end to U.S. aid to Israel. The backlash from the ruling class has been visceral. Imperialist stooges from the New York Times to the House of Representatives have denounced DSA for our refusal to include condemnations of Hamas in our statements, slandering us as antisemites and terrorist sympathizers. In standing with Palestine, we have defiled the most sacred principle of American politics—Israel’s inalienable right to reenact the horrors of the Holocaust that birthed it—and for that the bipartisan consensus has branded us persona non grata. It is a fate generations of Palestinian organizers before us are all too familiar with.

                As a whole, we have held strong under this onslaught, but our weakest links have started to break. A handful of elected officials and candidates endorsed by DSA have turned on us. Congressman Jamaal Bowman, a former member who had a falling-out with DSA over his vote to fund the Iron Dome in 2021, denounced a Palestinian solidarity rally New York City DSA participated in and made sure his staff clarified his lack of affiliation with us. Some DSA members in office, including two state representatives from Colorado, have left the organization entirely. Good. Our platform is unequivocally pro-Palestine. Those who have abandoned it for the sake of electability were parasites on our movement, using our time and resources to seek office without feeling any obligation to defend our core principles. Now is the time for these cowards and opportunists to expose themselves. True solidarity means fighting alongside the oppressed no matter how hated you are for it. The bitter uphill struggle against public opinion is, in fact, our natural place in the world as socialists. Certain “comrades” are now revealing they don’t have what it takes to join us there, but that’s okay, our ruling class has saved plenty of room for them worshiping alongside billionaires and war criminals at the altar of death.

Under no circumstances can we allow ourselves to be cowed into a tepid both-sidesism, let alone anything approaching support for Israel and its “right to defend itself.” We will hear the demand a thousand times: denounce Hamas! Denounce the deaths of Israeli civilians! Denounce the rocket strikes from Gaza!” We must have the same answer every time: “No. Victory to Palestine.” Israel operates the largest concentration camp in world history in Gaza, and is now preparing to liquidate it. Did anyone of conscience denounce the prisoners of Treblinka, Sobibor, or Auschwitz when they revolted against the SS? Would anyone of conscience have bothered denouncing them had German civilians died in the process? No, that would be despicable. It would be equally despicable for us to waste our breath denouncing Hamas. The ravenous demand for denunciations of this or that expression of Palestinian resistance, a demand nearly every public figure and organization in the United States has bent over backwards to accommodate, is an attempt to deflect attention from Israel, its crimes against humanity, and the struggle of an oppressed people to free themselves from it. The abolitionists of the 19th century refused to kowtow to the slavers’ press and put on crocodile tears when slave revolts spilled white blood. Instead, they seized the opportunity to agitate against the system of oppression they knew to be at the root of the violence. They set the standard, and we had better live up to it.

Those of us brave enough to take this position and stand by it (and I have faith I can count the majority of DSA’s eighty thousand members among that number) will without a doubt be hated for doing so. As the Palestinian struggle intensifies, as it threatens to upend the imperialist status quo in the Middle East by activating other forces of resistance and bringing the existence of Israel and Arab comprador states into question, the pressure for us to fold will rise exponentially. But make no mistake: we have nothing to gain by betraying our Palestinian comrades. There is no path to victory for the socialist program through surrendering it piecemeal in a vain effort to win the favor of the ruling class. If we have any hope of success, we will need to take stands as costly as this one on a long list of issues, and if we have any sense of duty to the global working class, we have no excuse to not start here and now.

Trivialities like social ostracism weigh so heavily on our minds in the United States because we live lives of supreme worldly comfort, a comfort which is held up by pillars of chemical fire raining from the night sky on desperate millions enslaved in their own homeland. Peace and dignity, food and water, health and a home, freedom from the fear of extermination—these should be the birthright of all human beings, but in a world such as ours, they are luxuries the privileged few hoard at the expense of the wretched of the Earth. We have no right to qualify our solidarity with the Palestinian people, no right to raise our voice to condemn them, no right to apologize on their behalf, no right to drop our guard or mince our words in the fight against the machine crushing them to death. We have no right. It would be nothing less than treason to humanity.

Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the red flag flying here.