This is from my upcoming book “When Tears Can’t Save Them: Why the pro-Palestine movement failed to stop a holocaust, & how it can still win.”
Since Zohran became prominent, the Democratic Party has continued to go in a direction of posturing as pro-Palestine. In June 2026, over 100 House Democrats voted to block aid to the Zionist occupier (which actually fit with Netanyahu’s plans to transition “Israel” away from relying on the USA). We’ve seen the rise of more “progressive” Muslim Democrats, like the Michigan Senate Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed. And Zohran himself has been able to keep up a sense that his political trend represents progress for the pro-Palestine cause, though the things he’s done have overall been more performative than material.
Upon coming into office, he reversed New York’s ban on boycotting “Israel”; yet this has come along with him keeping the Zionist Jessica Tisch as NYPD commissioner. In July 2026, Zohran also did something that served as an important test of perception for whether somebody views him as an asset to the cause: he came out with a video calling for the federal government to arrest Netanyahu. He didn’t have any legal authority to detain a foreign leader, which was what made it seem tactically valid for him to merely make a statement; when one looks at the larger role that Zohran has played, though, it becomes clear that this was part of an effort to take the substance out of pro-Palestine politics, and make it into something fundamentally performative. This performativeness comes from a particular ideological tendency within the compatible left: the “anti-Zionism” which de-centers Palestinians in favor of Jews.
At the same time that Zohran has been consistently working to de-radicalize the pro-Palestine movement, conceding on critical points like whether Hamas should be condemned and whether the resistance should lay down its arms, he’s gained support from many of the more left-wing Jewish institutions. He’s also gotten the support of NYC’s Jewish petty-bourgeois progressive constituency, who joined in on helping elect him along with most of the city’s other left-leaning professionals. I connect these things not because it’s inherently bad to be backed by Jewish orgs or individuals, but because anti-Zionists need to confront the true extent to which Jewish orgs are in thrall to Zionism.
If we minimize this problem, and uncritically uphold any Jewish group that describes itself as “pro-peace” or “anti-Zionist,” then we’ll be engaging in an especially damaging kind of idpol. This is an idpol that will always end up equating the oppressors with the oppressed in Palestine, and aiding normalization under the guise of a false “peace.”
These things are what come from building a “pro-Palestine” movement on the basis of protecting Jewish feelings, which is the true goal of rhetoric that places central emphasis on the presence of Jewish individuals within pro-Palestine circles. Such rhetoric is flawed from the foundation, because its core driver is not to advance solidarity with Palestine but to defend the reputation of Judaism. Which inevitably will give the bulk of the masses a sense that the “pro-Palestine” movement leaders lack sincerity about fighting the hegemonic order. This rhetoric’s priority is in fact to defend the old mode of discourse, which treated identity as a license to shield oneself from scrutiny.
If we fail to break from this politics, we’ll end up isolating the next iteration of the pro-Palestine movement from the masses, who’ve been coming to reject politically correct language policing even more than they already did. The masses were always repulsed by cancel culture; now that they’ve made the connection between cancel culture and Zionism, any “anti-Zionism” that ostracizes those who use colloquial or blunt language for describing the problem of Jewish supremacy will only divide the struggle. And this is in addition to the damage that such behaviors cause towards solidarity with Palestine itself, which in this framework is treated as something for different Jews to fight for moral authority over.
Such is the implicit message of slogans like “not in our name” or “the occupation is not my Judaism,” which don’t serve to change the minds of the masses; the average person’s support for Palestine isn’t contingent on whether they see evidence that some Jews share this position, because this simply isn’t viewed as a relevant question for the bulk of the population. The only spaces where it’s treated as relevant are the institutional safe spaces within liberal identity politics, which at this point have become synonymous with institutional Zionism.
An example of how “good” Jewish groups can advance these ethno-supremacist gatekeeping agendas is Jewish Voice for Peace. At the time that JVP joined in on the efforts to organize for the Mamdani campaign, it had managed to overcome many of the Jewish supremacist tendencies which defined its leadership in the past. There was a time when JVP embodied the same gatekeeping cancel culture politics that Zohran’s liberal Zionist ankle-biters have used to pressure him; for instance, in 2014 a JVP leader with ties to the IDF smeared the author Alison Weir as an anti-Jewish bigot. The more anti-Zionist direction that JVP has headed in since October 7 is the product of influence by its grassroots base, who needed to struggle against the hegemonic institutions that controlled the org. Shortly prior to October 7, JVP had been receiving funds from the Rockefeller Brother Foundation, which evidently viewed the org as a vehicle for pushing liberal Zionist “peace” politics.
Since the initial post-October 7 upswing in pro-Palestine energy, JVP’s trajectory has been towards trying to appease the Democratic Party and its front groups—potentially as a way to offset the damages from the dismantling of nonprofit funding sources. In February 2026–eight months before a midterm election—JVP’s leadership announced that it was restructuring JVP, along with its lobbying group JVP Action. The purpose of the shakeup was to make the latter group now function under the one “JVP” label; which amounted to a consolidation of the group’s efforts at electorally assisting Democrats. What it did was divert the millions in funds held by the main JVP group towards its electoral wing, showing the priority is not to get these funds to Palestinians but to make sure JVP strengthens its relationship with the Democrats.
We know the org has been going in a more pro-Democrat direction because the restructuring announcement didn’t include the word “genocide,” and this kind of omission is always significant when it comes from an org that’s supposedly anti-Zionist. At the most, the statement said at the end that it wanted to keep “building a Judaism beyond Zionism.” Which, in the context of this opportunistic maneuver, means that even one of the most left-wing Jewish orgs is contributing towards the trend of Jewish ethno-narcissism within today’s pro-Palestine movement.
This saviorist type of “anti-Zionism” has been able to become the most visible kind of “pro-Palestine” politics because the larger movement was pushed into retreat, letting the cause become defined by the actors with establishment backing. And that these actors include organizations which claim to not be Zionist shows us how critical it is to account for the content of something, instead of just its form. The form of JVP and DSA’s politics can appear to be radical, but it’s not enough for the Palestinian people, who continue to experience ever-more intense genocidal violence. This contradiction is growing increasingly visible to the people with an anti-Zionist consciousness; the absence of real change from reformist “pro-Palestine” rhetoric is going to produce a new version of the anti-Zionist movement, one that’s based within the rejection of PC posturing.
The masses already understand the connection between liberal idpol moralism, and the systems of control that keep the Zionist war machine in power. The better we learn this connection ourselves, the better positioned we’ll be to build an anti-Zionist movement that’s actually anti-systemic.
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