This is from the book I’m writing, which will be called “When Tears Can’t Save Them: Why The Pro-Palestine Movement Failed To Stop A Holocaust, & How It Can Still Win.”
To find the problems with someone like Zohran, you don’t need to discover any conspiratorial NGO link. You just need to admit that it’s inherently reformist for somebody to run within the Democratic Party; as well as that it’s inherently Zionist to say “Israel has the right to exist,” or to condemn October 7, as Zohran has also done.
These are the core contradictions with Zohran to focus on, and recognizing them doesn’t mean we should become ankle-biters towards the problematic leader in question; it means we need to wait for those contradictions to come to the surface, and hold the leader accountable to the promises they’ve made. Zohran has promised that he’ll divest NYC from the Zionist occupier, and he won’t be the last Democratic politician to say they’ll implement a divestment plan. In the case of both Zohran and these other Democrats who endorse BDS, the best strategy is to nurture the movement behind them, while guiding that movement away from the Democratic Party and its NGOs.
What these establishment forces seek to do with Zohran, and with every other populist leader in bourgeois politics, is get the leader’s support base to passively accept whatever compromises these politicians will inevitably make. To combat this pacification effort, we must apply the kinds of criticisms that truly expose the essence of why these politicians are flawed; that speak to how these figures have gotten influenced by the pro-normalization forces, or how they may further get influenced by them.
BDS is the core issue we’ll need to focus on in these critiques. Zohran’s divestment promise is something he does deserve credit for making, especially while facing an opposition that’s so obsessively and aggressively hateful. And if it were implemented in NYC, that would open up the potential for many other cities to divest. We can’t uncritically believe a promise that’s this incredible, though. Whether Zohran keeps that promise, or gets successfully pushed into going back on it, has yet to be determined.
When that question is answered, we’ll know how well the imperial state can truly enforce its preferences across all levels of government. Nothing is guaranteed when you’re hoping for a reformist to deliver, but one green flag is that J Street hasn’t provided any backing for Zohran; additionally, since the primary J Street has effectively gone on the offensive against him. In one July 2025 post, J Street linked to a podcast hosted by the PAC’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, where the guests accused Zohran of enabling “antisemitism.”
This was the message from the author Talia Benamy, who said about Zohran that “his activism for years and his rhetoric of late included a lot of things that I really find incredibly troubling. And even in the past week when he's been given easy opportunities to show that he's listening, he swings and he misses. So there are a lot of things that are concerning about how he has comported himself, and I think that if he's not able to listen to the concerns that we as Jews have now, I'm not sure that he will do better.”
These are the standard rhetorical weapons that Zionists use: appeals towards empathy, and appeals towards lived experience. To portray all serious pro-Palestine activities as anti-Jewish, they need to portray the Jewish experience as something which Zionists hold sole ownership over; within this reasoning, a Jewish person who interprets supporting Palestine as an act of bigotry must necessarily be correct, just because they are Jewish. And it’s this same discourse manipulation tactic that’s been adopted by the compatible left.
This is how the “anything but class” left makes its arguments: by casting anyone who challenges the prevailing liberal doctrines, and puts too much emphasis on workers struggle, as disregarding the perspectives of those from a given identity group. There’s a reason why Finkelstein is someone whose experiences have led him to put major focus on our modern version of cancel culture: the overlap between the Jewish supremacists who’ve slandered him, and the empire-aligned leftists who’ve worked to isolate anti-imperialists, is big enough that these two categories can feel interchangeable.
The leftist iteration of cancel culture is an extension of what Zionism has been doing for many decades; in our modern discourse, Zionists were the first ones to utilize the tactic of claiming victimhood in order to shut down one’s opponents. As Finkelstein wrote in his 2022 book I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It, cancellation is historically something that’s been weaponized against those who challenge injustice, with Palestine supporters being one of cancellation’s biggest modern targets:
Cancel culture is as old as culture itself…Julien Benda, in La Trahison des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals), posited that, if you’re faithful to the values of Truth and Justice, it must inevitably come to pass that you’ll be ostracized—or, in the current idiom, ‘cancelled’—by society: ‘A clerk who is popular with the laymen is a traitor to his office.’ He gestured to Socrates and Christ. A true clerk, according to Benda, accepts Christ’s dictum that ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ Had Benda lived longer, he could have added to this martyrs’ pantheon Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, both of whom, it is now forgotten, were reviled at the time of their respective assassinations.
The cancellation attempts against Zohran–particularly when they come from actors who are working with liberal Zionist PACs or NGOs–have the purpose of shoving aside all political forces which truly advance resistance towards the occupier. Though Zohran condemns the resistance itself, which is not good, his divestment promise is something that would accelerate the occupier’s collapse if it were implemented. So liberal Zionist forces like J Street are working to reinforce the smear narratives against Zohran–and his supporters by extension–with the aim of making it so that there’s no mainstream presence for a real pro-Palestine movement.
These liberals want the only “pro-Palestine” current to be the one that postures against Netanyahu specifically while defending Zionism itself, and that seeks endless Israeli-Palestinian “dialogue” while undermining any actions that would endanger the occupier’s future.
The problem with Zohran is not that he’s synonymous with these actors, but that he’s made concessions to them which have weakened his ability to challenge their agenda. The “soft” Zionists depend on there being Palestine supporters who treat Zionism sympathetically, and who recognize “Israel’s right to exist” while condemning the resistance. Even if Zohran has only taken these stances in order not to alienate New York’s substantial Jewish Zionist population, the effect is the same: the pro-Palestine movement gets weakened. And whenever someone takes a position for the sake of not provoking reactionaries, this gives the reactionaries a greater advantage.
For Zohran to come to a place where conceding towards the Zionists would seem like it makes strategic sense, he first had to enter into the Democratic Party, with its carefully managed controlled opposition wing. If Zohran and the movement behind him can use the Democratic Party as a vehicle for divestment, we must defend this effort against the Zohran ankle-biters. But we cannot repeat Zohran’s error of seeking out the Democratic Party as an option for trying to advance one’s progressive goals.
The biggest reason why we can’t let ourselves even partially be pulled into the Democratic Party is that if we do, we’ll give the Zionists leverage which they wouldn’t have otherwise. They’ll be better able to impose their agenda of normalization onto the pro-Palestine movement, and silence voices which represent Palestine from a perspective of national liberation. Zionists want to make it so that the only Palestine-related figures with a mainstream platform are the ones who align with the Palestinian Authority, and who share its vitriolic hatred towards the liberation fighters.
When the P.A.’s president Mahmoud Abbas attacks the resistance, he does so in a way that’s exceptionally damaging, because his goal is not to argue that the occupier isn’t committing crimes. He seeks to position the P.A.’s collaborationist camp as the true ally of the Palestinian people by casting Hamas as an asset to the occupier, in contrast to the P.A.’s supposedly principled and “peaceful” efforts to help the Palestinians.
This is what Abbas did in April 2025, when he said that “Hamas has given the criminal occupation excuses to commit its crimes in the Gaza Strip, the most prominent being the holding of hostages. I’m the one paying the price, our people are paying the price, not Israel. My brother, just hand them over. Every day there are deaths. You sons of dogs, hand over what you have and get us out of this.”
Note the psychological slip where Abbas said he personally is “paying the price,” which in the context of the Gaza genocide reveals just how grotesquely self-centered his mentality is. Abbas is one of the Palestinian elites who’s been assigned by the occupier to facilitate the colonial violence against the West Bank’s people, with the P.A. being nothing more than a tool for occupier to round up Palestinians while pretending that it’s given the Palestinians autonomy.
When Abbas and these other collaborators use language about how they view “Israel” as a criminal occupier, they’re playing their part in this theatrical ruse; in this story where the normalization agents who arrest Palestinians for “Israel” are somehow fighting the occupation.
The entire narrative these controlled opposition actors are promoting is an obvious absurdity, but there are ways that the Zionists can make the marketing of this narrative successful. As long as there’s a layer of ostensibly pro-Palestine commentators, politicians, and organizations that reinforce liberal Zionism’s key beliefs, the occupier will continue to be able to blunt opposition towards its crimes. It will keep having covert allies who lead Palestine supporters away from supporting the resistance—and by extension from practical actions like divestment—while upholding the collaborators as the “good” Palestinians who oppose “extremism.”
These are the agendas that always get reinforced when somebody pushes soft Zionism, like Zohran does. When Sanders and the others within Zionism’s J Street wing refuse to endorse BDS, this of course can’t stop the individuals who support BDS from participating in it. But because of the concessions that the Zohran wing makes, the anti-divestment obstructionists are further empowered.
The Zohran camp is the most left-wing current within American Zionism, but it’s still Zionist. Which means that even though Zohran himself isn’t an NGO agent, the NGO wing has many openings to influence where his potential term will go. And if we fail to sufficiently build up an independent pro-Palestine movement, this wing will also be able to neutralize the mass energy behind Zohran, which is what Zohran’s antagonists are truly so frightened of.
Building up that organizational strength is the only solution. We in the world’s working class have the exceptional advantage of being able to paralyze the core economic functions of the machine behind this holocaust, and we must use that power. There is a path towards getting the proletariat in the position where it can do this, but to follow that path, we will need to reject all opportunities for making deals with our ruling institutions.
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