When the news broke on May 21, 2025 that Elias Rodriguez had shot and killed Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, two Israeli embassy aides, in Washington DC, it became immediately obvious that the Palestine solidarity movement in the United States was being violently ushered into unknown territory. Despite the anti-Zionist left’s diverse reactions to the shooting—including celebration, cautious explanation, or even paranoiac assertions of a false flag attack—there was a universal recognition that this act transpired thanks to the exhaustion of every means of nonviolent civil disobedience without any success in ending the genocide.

The act itself can be debated on various grounds: the moral imperative for nonviolent civil disobedience; the potential for the state to unleash even greater repression under the banner of “anti-terrorism”; the futility of individual acts of protest, at least as great as the futility of mass collective action, to end the genocide and sanction Israel. But the meaning and motive of the act are clear: it was an attack on Zionism, as embodied by official diplomatic representatives of its genocidal state. Whether or not it is received as “the only sane thing to do,” as Rodriguez declared in his manifesto,^[1] his act was decidedly not antisemitic, as Israel’s propagandists and allies are insisting with typical histrionics.

Disappointingly, even leaders of the Left have joined the chorus of voices condemning the act as a manifestation of antisemitism. The morning after the shooting, New York City democratic socialist state legislator and mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani posted his own denunciation.^[2] Mamdani has long distinguished himself not just from centrist Democrats, but even his democratic socialist peers for his pro-Palestine views; his first foray into political organizing was as co-founder of his university’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter. He carried his pro-Palestine principles into office, sponsoring state legislation to end tax-exempt status for Israeli settler organizations, going on hunger strike for Gaza, supporting the student encampments,^[3] and passing on a Biden/Harris endorsement in 2024, instead supporting the Leave It Blank campaign, the New York iteration of the Uncommitted Movement. His quickness, therefore, to condemn Rodriguez’s attack as part of “an appalling rise in antisemitic violence” was interpreted by many on the anti-Zionist left as a disappointing example of opportunism.

But perhaps Mamdani’s equivocation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism should not come as a surprise. In his influential 1986 study of class composition and proletarian organization in the United States, Prisoners of the American Dream, US Marxist historian Mike Davis examined the cataclysmic 1984 reelection of Ronald Reagan amid the Left’s willful subsumption into Democratic Party electoral politics. In the summer before the 1984 elections, Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, leading US democratic socialist figures, declared in an interview with The New York Times Magazine, “by now, practically everyone on the Left agrees that the Democratic Party, with all its faults, must be our main political arena.”^[4] The faults in question referred to the Democratic Party’s genocidal war in Southeast Asia, and the domestic repression of the Black liberation struggle. Importantly, as Davis noted, the Democratic Party was identified by the key organizations of the 1960s as the primary agent of counterrevolutionary Cold War violence against colonized peoples at home and abroad. The push to incorporate the Left into Democratic Party politics, spearheaded by Harrington and Howe, ironically came just as the party was widely discredited.

Forty years later, the Left finds itself in a painfully similar situation. The Democratic Party’s unconditional support for Israel’s genocide, as well as its humiliating failure to defeat Trump in the 2024 presidential elections, its own rightward lurch,^[5] and irrational commitment to gerontocracy-as-policy,^[6] have generated a historic legitimacy crisis. According to a March poll by CNN,^[7] the Democratic Party’s favorability rating, at an abysmal 29%, has hit its lowest point since 1992, when CNN started polling. This could be fertile ground for a socialist break from the party. But instead, electoralists are doubling down on the realignment strategy, running more candidates on the Democratic Party ballot line.

Realignment in the 1980s came with the demotion of Black liberation, “the critical democratic issue in American history” (Davis’ emphasis), to the status of just “another progressive ‘interest’.” This signaled another generational defeat for US working class unity and completion of the Second Reconstruction. Mamdani’s recent liberal Zionist rhetorical slippage suggests a similar demotion of Palestinian liberation to “another progressive ‘interest’; yet, like the Black liberation struggle in the domestic context, Palestinian liberation is the central issue of the world today. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned in his September 24th, 2024 address to the 79th United Nations General Assembly:

The democratic project of mankind is dying with life, while the racists, the supremacists, those who stupidly believe that the Aryans are the superior race, are preparing to dominate the world by writing the terror of bombs on the peoples. The control of humanity on the basis of barbarism is under construction and its demonstration is Gaza, Lebanon. When Gaza dies, all humanity will die.^[8]

The ongoing campaign of anti-Palestinian state repression is justified by crude accusations of antisemitism. Considering the stakes, the Left should find it unacceptable that socialist leaders would ever falsely equate anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Instead, our leaders should strive to explain Rodriguez’s act: that it was motivated by outrage at Israel’s total impunity, and that the only rational way to prevent similar acts of violence is to put an immediate end to the genocide and hold the perpetrators. Mamdani, as the only mayoral candidate who has pledged to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he steps foot in New York City,^[9] is extremely well-positioned to offer this explanation, while still emphasizing his political commitments to nonviolence and human rights.

Davis’ Prisoners ends with a balance-sheet of the Left’s realignment strategy in 1984; the strategy was doomed to fail due to the structural hostility of the US electoral system towards independent radical politics. The Democratic Party, from Wilsonian democracy to Cold War liberalism, has historically played the role of the major imperialist party in the United States. No one can really challenge the imperialist order from within an imperialist party. This contradiction is inherent to Democratic politics and can only truncate the horizons of the US left. Rather than continuing the militant popular struggle of the 1960s outside of and against the Democratic Party, the left of the 1980s redefined participation in the bourgeois electoral system “as the admission ticket to serious popular politics tout court.” Similarly, some electoralists defend Mamdani’s rhetorical choices as the cost of building power,^[10] gesturing at his surging poll numbers as proof of concept. But Davis explodes this dualism by reminding us that popular politics require the Left to confront head on the struggles against racism and colonialism, as the central revolutionary democratic struggles of the majority of the world’s peoples.

A break from the Democrats could open more space for elected leaders to refuse concessions to the Zionist right. Millions of people in the US abstain from electoral participation, finding nothing worth voting for in the bipartisan system. In the 2021 New York City mayoral race, only 23.3% of eligible voters participated in the general election.^[11] The Mamdani campaign hopes to win over those 77% of non-voters, especially through the creation of new South Asian and Muslim Democratic constituencies. Socialists should strive to democratically engage the masses of working people excluded from bourgeois politics, and recent polling points to the success of this strategy: Mamdani is quickly closing the gap between him and his main opponent, right-wing former governor Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani’s appeals to the broadest sections of the working class through an agenda of economic populism and social justice are precisely how a socialist candidate should use the bully pulpit. But it seems that playing on the Democrats’ terrain has hemmed him in on the question of Palestine, encouraging him to strike a balance between his liberationist commitments and appeasement of Zionist voters. Furthermore, in the face of mass multiracial dealignment from the Democratic Party and its facilitation of the Gaza genocide, attempts to usher Muslim and other anti-genocide voters back into the fold of the Democratic Party are plainly reactionary.

Mamdani’s condemnation of the Israeli embassy shooting will almost certainly not affect the outcome of the mayoral race. However, this episode may prove to be an important footnote in the cyclical struggle of the US Left to break free from its dependency on the Democratic Party. Leveling the accusation of antisemitism against Rodriguez’s act is self-defeating and will not protect Mamdani from having this rhetoric turned against him and other nonviolent activists. Moreover, Mamdani’s rush to condemn the act on grounds of antisemitism looks increasingly foolish with the release of new details about the attack— the absence of any mention of Jews in Rodriguez’s manifesto, his alleged intentional selection of diplomatic targets, and his plain statement to the cops, “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.”

Davis’s Prisoners offers a warning: an US Left that subordinates itself to the Democratic Party will have to play on their ideological terrain. Downgrading anti-racism and anti-imperialism to secondary struggles will guarantee generational defeat, and each failure will accumulate into greater fragmentation of the working class, making future victories even more difficult to achieve. Vanquishing Zionism is the central task of the international working class today, for the sake of Gaza, all of Palestine, and the whole world. Rodriguez’s action may mark a new phase in this struggle. The only certainty in these uncertain times is that violent repression will reach new heights and breed new resistance. Come what may, the left needs leaders who refuse to parrot the state’s rhetorical justifications for crushing the solidarity movement. Mamdani has already distinguished himself from the democratic socialist pack for his commitment to Palestinian liberation, but this moment requires more from all of us, in every field of action. Genuine independence from the genocidal Democratic Party would be a good start.

-Anne Peters

1. Ken Klippenstein, “The Israeli Embassy Shooter Manifesto,” https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-israel-embassy-shooter-manifesto.

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2. Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani), “I’m horrified by the deadly shooting outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington D.C. last night. My thoughts are with the victims and their families—as well as all those who must contend with the appalling rise in antisemitic violence.,” X, May 22, 2025, https://x.com/ZohranKMamdani/status/1925512772743258616.

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3. New York State Senator Jabari Brisport, “Socialists in Office Stand in Solidarity with Student Encampments for a Free Palestine,” The New York State Senate, https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/jabari-brisport/socialists-office-stand-solidarity-student-encampments.

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4. Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, “Voices from the left: A conversation between Michael Harrington and Irving Howe,” The New York Times, June 17, 1984, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/17/magazine/voices-from-the-left.html.

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5. Schuyler Mitchell, “In 2024 Platform, Democrats Lurch Right on Policing and Immigration,” Truthout, August 20, 2024, https://truthout.org/articles/in-2024-platform-democrats-lurch-right-on-policing-and-immigration/.

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6. Jeet Heer, “The Democratic Party Is Literally Dying,” The Nation, May 23, 2025, https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democratic-party-connolly-gerontocracy/.

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7. Ariel Edwards-Levy, “CNN Poll: Democratic Party’s favorability drops to a record low,” CNN, March 16, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/16/politics/cnn-poll-democrats.

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8. “Speech by Colombian President Gustavo Petro at the 79th UN General Assembly,” Progressive International, https://progressive.international/wire/2024-09-25-discurso-del-presidente-gustavo-petro-en-la-79-asamblea-general-de-la-onu/en.

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9. Medhi Hasan and Zohran Mamdani, “As Mayor, NYC Would Arrest Benjamin Netanyahu,” posted November 25, 2024, Zeteo, Youtube, 36 sec., https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JvQlQH4Roj4.

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10. Matt Cordeiro (@MCDeiro), “I can't believe people are so eager to erase the fact that Palestinian solidarity has been a core component of Zohran's campaign over two totally banal statements all so they can maintain their projection that their personal politics are more important than building power.,” X, May 22, 2025, https://x.com/MCDeiro/status/1925692580668268590.

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11. “Voter Analysis Report: 2021-2022,” New York City Campaign Finance Board, https://www.nyccfb.info/media/reports/voter-analysis-report-2021-2022/.

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