The Democratic Socialists of America unveiled a national political program this week that codifies the Palestinian “right to resist” and the “right of return” as core planks, alongside demands to end all military and economic aid to Israel and prosecute American and Israeli leaders over what it calls genocide in Gaza. The document, titled “Workers Deserve More,” arrives as DSA members have posted a string of primary wins that have unseated sitting Democrats in New York and Colorado, and it comes from a movement whose most prominent elected officials include New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The program calls the Palestinian right of return, which would bring millions of refugees and their descendants into Israeli territory, a “right.” The document also declares a Palestinian “right to resist military occupation” and a “right to self-determination in a free Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital,” while stating plainly: “End all military and economic aid to Israel. Prosecute US and Israeli leaders responsible for the genocide in Gaza.” Israel is not mentioned again in the text.
A “right” that exists nowhere else
No binding provision of international law grants refugees, or their children and grandchildren, a permanent right to relocate into a country their ancestors left generations ago. The document DSA and Palestinian advocates lean on is UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948, a non-binding recommendation that spoke of refugees “wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours” being permitted to do so at “the earliest practicable date.” A General Assembly resolution is not law, it was never enforced, and its own condition of living at peace with Israel was never met. No comparable mechanism exists for any other displaced population in the twentieth century. The roughly 12 million ethnic Germans expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere after 1945 were never granted a right to return. The nearly two million Greeks and Turks who were moved in the 1923 population exchange were permanently resettled with no provision for return. The roughly 14 million people displaced in the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 stayed where they landed. Displacement after war and political upheaval has been treated as final in every one of these cases.
It has never been treated as a right for Jewish refugees from Arab countries either, despite their numbers exceeding those of the Palestinian refugees, the DSA program invokes. Between 1948 and 1972, close to 900,000 Jews were driven out of Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria and other Arab states, communities that predated Islam by centuries. Roughly two-thirds resettled in Israel, absorbed at enormous expense to a young state already straining under war; most of the rest went to France, the United States and elsewhere. Their homes, businesses and communal property were confiscated by the Arab governments they fled, and not one of those governments has ever paid compensation. The United Nations has passed more than one hundred resolutions on Palestinian refugees since 1949. It has passed none recognizing the far larger number of Jewish refugees stripped of their property and citizenship across the Arab world. Those Jews and their descendants have never demanded a right to return to Baghdad, Sana’a or Tripoli. They rebuilt their lives in Israel and elsewhere, and the world moved on. The DSA program applies no such standard to the Palestinian case, treating a status granted to no other refugee population in modern history as self-evidently a right.
“Right to resist” has a track record
DSA did not invent the phrase “right to resist” for this program, and its recent history shows exactly what the phrase has been used to defend. Two days after Hamas terrorists murdered roughly 1,200 people in Israel on October 7, 2023, and dragged hundreds of hostages into Gaza, New York City DSA organized a rally in Times Square declaring “solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist 75 years of occupation and apartheid.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called the rally “ill-timed” and “cold-hearted,” saying “we’ve seen unprecedented viciousness coming from Hamas aimed at innocent families and children.” Representative Ritchie Torres, a fellow New York Democrat, said the rally revealed NYC-DSA as “a deep rot of antisemitism.” The “right to resist” was invoked while the bodies of murdered Israeli civilians, including babies and Holocaust survivors, were still being identified.
Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the second DSA member currently serving in Congress, was formally censured by the House weeks later for “promoting false narratives regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and for calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.” Tlaib declined repeated requests from reporters to condemn Hamas after the attack. The new DSA program’s language echoes the same framework the movement used within 48 hours of October 7: resistance, occupation, apartheid, with no acknowledgment of the terrorist attack that triggered the war it now demands America stop arming Israel to fight.
DSA Democrats and the push to defund Israel
The program’s demand to cut off all aid to Israel is not a rhetorical flourish. It reflects a position DSA’s own elected members have been moving toward for months. Ocasio-Cortez told a New York City DSA forum in April that she would vote against all future military aid to Israel, including funding for the Iron Dome missile defense system, a reversal from her position the previous July, when she voted against a Marjorie Taylor Greene amendment that would have stripped $500 million from Iron Dome funding out of the defense appropriations bill. That amendment failed 422 to 6. Tlaib voted for it. So did Representatives Ilhan Omar, Summer Lee and Al Green. DSA itself criticized Ocasio-Cortez at the time for supporting any Iron Dome funding at all, calling any aid to Israel “unacceptable” and declaring that “an arms embargo means keeping all arms out of the hands of a genocidal military, no exceptions.”
Mamdani, now leading the nation’s largest city, built his campaign in part on hostility to Israel and rejection of continued US military support for it. Chris Rabb, endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez and the Working Families Party, is running unopposed for Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District and will become the third DSA-aligned member of the House. Avila Chevalier, who defeated Congressional Hispanic Caucus chairman Adriano Espaillat in a primary that drew heavy outside spending from AIPAC, is on track to represent Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. Each has emerged from the same movement whose national program now formally demands that the United States prosecute Israeli leaders and cut off the country’s military lifeline.
A platform beyond Israel
The national program extends well past foreign policy. It calls for abolishing the US Senate, ending the two-party system, and replacing the presidency and the Supreme Court with bodies subordinate to the House of Representatives. On economics, it demands public ownership of major corporations and industries, “aggressive wealth taxes,” a federal jobs guarantee, universal rent control, a 32-hour work week, free universal health care, and reparations for slavery and colonialism. It also calls for defunding the Defense Department, closing US military bases overseas, and lifting embargoes on Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. DSA leaders said candidates the organization backs will be required to endorse the platform in full.
A DSA committee drafted the program between April and June, and the organization’s national co-chairs are set to promote it as the movement’s guiding document heading into the next election cycle. With DSA-aligned officials now running America’s largest city and preparing to expand their ranks in Congress, the program is not a fringe manifesto. It is the platform a growing number of elected Democrats have already committed to carrying into office.
