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The following analysis was authored by Tablet Magazine columnist and CAM editorial advisor Lee Smith:
According to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), “Palestine” was on the ballot in the New York metro area on Tuesday when DSA candidates took on relatively traditional Democrats in the party’s primary races. And with endorsements from New York City’s DSA mayor, Zohran Mamdani, the candidates from the progressive faction swept the field, with two U.S. congressional races, as well as four state senate and three state assembly seats, going to the upstarts.
The fact that DSA supporters chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” at their election night victory party was evidence that they believed “Palestine” won.
Palestinian-American activist Aber Kawas won her primary in a heavily Democratic district and is virtually assured of heading to the state legislature in Albany. She first came to prominence a decade ago with blog posts defending Ahmad Farhani, a terrorist who pled guilty to participating in a plot to bomb New York City synagogues. Kawas has also been linked to the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and she’s justified the September 11th attacks, saying, “The system of capitalism and racism and white supremacy and Islamophobia, have all been used to colonize lands, to take resources from other people and so this is a long trajectory and were just seeing the manifestations of that continuation with 9/11.”
But the most radical DSA candidate was Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old doctoral student from a Dominican family who recently converted to Islam. The nominee for New York’s overwhelmingly Democratic 13th congressional district — including Upper Manhattan, Harlem, and a swath of the Bronx — joined Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) in 2014 and later co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). In the immediate aftermath of the October 7th massacre, CUAD promoted and participated in the pro-Hamas protests on campus, with the goal of forcing the school to cut financial ties with Israel.
“We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” according to CUAD’s mission statement. During protests at Columbia in 2024, CUAD issued another directive: “We act in full support of the Palestinian resistance. This action is first and foremost an effort to extend the successes of the Palestinian resistance to the heart of the empire itself, to translate their resilience in Gaza to unrest and violence in America.”
The question journalists and political analysts must now wrestle with is whether DSA officials, including Mamdani, are best understood as communists or as Islamists. The truth is, they’re both.
For Lenin, the path to power was paved by the proletariat. For Mao, the Chinese peasantry was the driving force of history. For the DSA, at least in its New York stronghold, Muslim immigrants constitute the revolutionary class. And it’s important to remember that for nearly a century communism and Islamism have united over anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism. Palestinianism is the joint project weaponized by the Soviets and the Muslim Brotherhood to destroy Israel and bring America to its knees.
Still, what the DSA’s victories mean for the rest of the country, or even for the future of America’s greatest city, is not yet clear. How, for instance, will a radically anti-Israel House member like Chevalier represent the 19,000 Jews living in her district? One DSA official boasted the faction now has a “democratic socialist mandate in New York City,” with more than three million New Yorkers represented by socialists at multiple levels of government, and in some neighborhoods, at every level of power.
With New York now the DSA’s center of gravity, will the movement be able to project more power and exert more influence in races nationwide, or is this a phenomenon that only affects major metropolises with large Muslim populations? Will more anti-Zionists on Capitol Hill and in Albany harden the Democrats’ anti-Israel sentiment or will party elders finally discipline their radicals?
The DSA’s big night probably doesn’t mean that the Big Apple is on its way to becoming the seat of the Islamic caliphate. But nor does it seem wise to write off the ascent of a radical faction with an explicitly anti-U.S. and anti-Israel platform as just another trial New York will naturally overcome as it always has in the past.
Indeed, Tuesday’s results can partly be understood as a coda to the greatest man-made catastrophe in the city’s history, 9/11. New York was given plenty of warnings long before the two planes were flown into the Twin Towers — including the 1989 demonstrations calling for novelist Salman Rushdie’s death, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and the murder of teenager Ari Halberstam on the Brooklyn Bridge a year later.
But state and federal officials ignored the threat of Islamic terrorism in America’s greatest city, and even after 9/11 large numbers of immigrants from Muslim countries saturated in antisemitism and anti-Americanism arrived in the New York metro area. So it’s not that much of a surprise then that the same region is sending to Washington and Albany radicals who want to destroy Western civilization and support the worldwide slaughter of Jews.
Equally worrying is the fact that DSA elites, as opposed to the rank and file, are largely college-educated whites in their 20s and 30s. Anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism have been baked into the curricula of colleges across the country for generations. On graduating, these young progressives are lured to the city by promises of work in the well-funded NGO industry, and then channeled into the political sphere promoting the same agenda as the NGOs — i.e. open borders, redistribution of wealth, and most crucially anti-Zionism, the cause that generates the most excitement and gets
people into the streets, and to the ballot box.
The good news is that, in fact, very few people showed up to vote on Tuesday. And those who came out for Chevalier were white college grads. In NY-13, according to analysts, the less Hispanic and more college-educated a precinct, the more likely it was to vote for the challenger. Chevalier won with 32,790 votes, only 2,000 more than the runner-up and about 9% of her district’s 365,000 eligible Democratic voters. DSA’s crown princess Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her first election in 2018 in the same fashion. She challenged an incumbent who failed to take her seriously and she won with 17,000 votes out of 235,000 registered Democratic Party voters in her district.
The DSA is a small but fanatical and destructive faction in the Democratic Party that can be beat. But Democratic voters and party officials are going to have to start taking DSA’s rhetoric seriously and show up for primaries, because the fate of their families, communities, and nation is at stake. If not, “Palestine” is going to stay on the ballot and America will pay a steep price for empowering voices whose language is drawn from the vicious discourses of the communists and Islamists abroad and now at home who want to burn our country to the ground.
