Towards an Anti-Zionist DSA or Bust

Email: dsapalestinesolidarity@gmail.com

SIGN ON TO THIS STATEMENT HERE: https://bit.ly/anti-zionist-or-bust-sign-on

Over the past few weeks, our working group has faced an unprecedented number of attacks from Zionists and opportunistically aligned factions. They have failed to diminish our working group’s ongoing organizing in yet another attempt to distract from DSA’s foremost political question heading into Convention:

Will DSA be transformed into an Anti-Zionist Organization in Principle and Praxis? Or will it stay the course and continue to buckle under the weight of its own contradictions?

On Thursday, a mere 2 weeks before Convention, the National Political Committee (NPC) managed another one of these cowardly attacks, voting to recommend to the DSA Convention that they adopt an NPC resolution to dissolve our Working Group by forcibly absorbing us into the International Committee. This out-of-order recommendation comes just one year after the NPC’s other anti-democratic, botched attempt to dissolve our working group into the same International Committee as a way of censoring and purging unapologetic Palestinian and Palestinian-allied voices within DSA.

Even more insultingly, we were only consulted about the resolution when it was already fully written and just one day away from being voted on. Further, despite making ourselves immediately available to meet on July 1st and then July 2nd per an NPC request, both meetings were canceled last-minute due to a failure-to-show by multiple NPC members. We have not been given a face-to-face meeting with the NPC since March of 2022. Yet here they sit, once again, dictating to us what is best for our working group and the Palestine solidarity movement — a movement that is still boycotting DSA over the NPC’s decision from last year.

Instead of conducting themselves like true leaders by seeking to correct past mistakes which have harmed the organization, the majority of this NPC has chosen to quadruple down on their mistakes with no regard nor calculus for the health of DSA as an aspiring mass organization.

In 2019, Convention voted to establish the Working Group with enough foresight to protect it from antagonistic leadership; recognizing the necessity of an autonomous working group, in a historically Zionist DSA, to act as a conduit and partner to the broader Palestinian liberation movements. We are hopeful that this gross NPC overreach seeking to strip the Working Group of its Convention-mandated autonomy will ultimately fail like all the attempts before it, but we recognize that it will require the same level of vigilance and support from the rank-and-file membership of the DSA as in years past to do so — only this time, in-person at convention.

Our Working Group has absolute faith that the rank-and-file membership of the DSA, represented by the delegates to Convention, will see this targeted political attack for exactly what it is — an effort to silence the Working Group and undermine our organizing as we head into Convention prepared to transform DSA into the Anti-Zionist organization that it needs to be. Therefore, we call on DSA members everywhere to encourage your chapter’s delegates to Convention to continue to reject the targeted attacks against Palestinian-led organizing in the DSA BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group by:

1. Voting down the NPC’s out-of-order recommendation to have the BDS working group subsumed into the International Committee, and sign onto this statement in solidarity.
2. Voting for our Working Group’s resolution proposal to make DSA an Anti-Zionist Organization in Principle and in Praxis in its entire unamended form (MSR #12); oppose its gutted, so-called “amendment” form (amendment F) that aims to keep DSA a Zionist organization — a true Frankenstein’s monster version of our proposed resolution.
3. Joining our Emergency Forum: Towards An Anti-Zionist DSA or Bust on Saturday, July 29 at 1 PM ET to hear from movement partners, including the Palestinian Youth Movement and National Students for Justice in Palestine, about what’s at stake at the upcoming convention.
4. Voting to elect NPC members at Convention who support a truly Anti-Zionist vision for the DSA and have demonstrated an ongoing willingness and readiness to be held accountable.

No matter what sorts of attacks continue to be lobbed at our working group — smears, personal attacks, purge attempts, dissolution, bureaucratic maneuvers of dubious status — we see the historical crossroads that lies right in front of our organization and movements, and the moment demands that we force the question of DSA and its Zionist tendencies on the floor of the 2023 convention. As we have seen over these past weeks, even getting the question into the hands of the delegation is going to take a truly collective effort, but if we succeed in just getting the question to the floor, there will undoubtedly be something better on the other side for the socialist struggle — here and elsewhere.

In Solidarity and Until Liberation,
BDS & Palestine Solidarity Working Group Steering Committee

Signed,

1. Jews for Palestinian Right of Return
2. DSA Disability Working Group
3. CUNY for Palestine
4. Not In Our Name CUNY
5. NNJ DSA BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group
6. Denver DSA Steering Committee
7. Students for Socialism USF
8. Champaign-Urbana DSA
9. American Student Union
10. Upper Valley DSA
11. John Ferrara
12. Joanne Demchok
13. Nathan Tabak
14. Miguel C
15. Ethan F.
16. Tim J
17. Shaun Navarro - LVDSA Co-Chair
18. Bert Knorr
19. Tristan W
20. Logan W.
21. Cole Peter Feld
22. Mark Gurarie
23. Jermaine Covington
24. Jack B
25. Lisa Sprinkle
26. Aaron T
27. Skye O’Toole
28. Daniel Teehan
29. Kristen Smith
30. Alex Morash
31. Tova Fry
32. Brandon Hull
33. Amr Ahmad
34. Andrew T
35. Shauna Miller
36. Savannah K
37. Jeremy V
38. Suraj P
39. Jennifer Dillon
40. Stephen H., Houston DSA
41. Amara Modu
42. Nancy Welch
43. Omar F.
44. Simon J.
45. Alyssa Mae Berman
46. Hector M
47. Claire Zeller
48. Jordan H
49. Roseann Saah
50. Ricky S
51. Ahmed Husain
52. Dana Montague
53. Laura Chatham
54. Kaylee Scruggs
55. Judy Richards
56. Austin Binns
57. TJ S
58. Jenise Perez
59. Jonathan Richards
60. Keivan Perkins
61. Amber R
62. Andrew Shapiro
63. Lavender Ciao
64. LaMar Sean Willis
65. Maggie
66. Michael Letwin
67. Nicole A.
68. Abel A.
69. Bobby N.
70. Dayne Goodwin
71. Tom Alter
72. TX
73. Melanie Turner-Harper
74. Mark Hoppmann
75. Christopher Perrando
76. Jon C.
77. Laurie Jaghlit
78. Eden E.
79. Skyler S
80. Brian Ford
81. Jay N
82. Daniel K
83. Gary Potter
84. Jean Allen
85. Leigh Fullmer
86. Kristine G (Akron)
87. Alex Sparrow
88. Cliff Connolly
89. A.P. Factor
90. Jen Williamson
91. Kyle Gilbertson
92. Caroline Bojarski
93. Seth C
94. Allan A
95. Chris W
96. Phil Gasper
97. David Braga
98. Will Mleczko
99. Barry Saks
100. Eric Miller
101. Evan C
102. John Mahon
103. Aodhán C-F
104. Dat Luu
105. Frankie Malacaria
106. Molly Walsh-Warder
107. Julie Watkins
108. James Duke
109. Emily vWG
110. Rose Lintner
111. Atticus Fasnakis
112. Michael Gasser
113. kim
114. Ghassan
115. David Klein
116. Marcy Winograd
117. Sabine Hodge
118. Mike G
119. Jonico Eustaquio
120. Terry Fitzgibbons
121. grey perry
122. Deborah Hellerstein
123. Garrett S.
124. Nishat Akhtar
125. Ben Gifford
126. Zak G
127. Dana Cloud
128. Tim P.
129. Graham Pines
130. Ian M.
131. Danny Brzozowski
132. Sophie Hoyt
133. John E. Douglas
134. Janina Larenas
135. Jared Gampel
136. NB
137. Eric Morris
138. Babak Hemmatian
139. Evan Giller
140. Pat Allen
141. David Guran
142. Jennifer Rhee
143. Greg Geboski
144. Chuck Gelman
145. Julien Ball
146. William Allman
147. Kevin Goehring
148. Amber R
149. Salem Ajluni
150. Allan Fisher
151. Dorah Rosen
152. Nassim Nouri
153. Vickie Mueller Olvera
154. Paul Goodspeed
155. Alice Rosenbach
156. Jeb P
157. John Miller
158. T. J. Demos
159. Lindy Edstrom
160. Ernesto Zegarra
161. Vicki Winters
162. Debbie Gould
163. Catherine Elias