Will the Democratic Socialists of America Control the Democratic Party?

 By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

On June 23, radical Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates backed by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani won multiple Democratic Party primaries in New York City and elsewhere in the state. They also were victorious in other parts of the country.

The socialist victories in New York far surpassed anyone’s predictions. Who, three years ago, could have predicted that a Muslim anti-Zionist would be elected mayor of a city with 900,000 Jews and would lead insurgents to victories in that party’s primaries in 2026?  Yet here we are.

Marxist Third Worldist ideology has moved out of the universities into the polling booths, after campus activism, divestment campaigns, and social media have reinforced an anti-Israeli framework for years. The DSA’s platform states it plainly: It pledges “support for Palestinian self-determination against Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.”

The mayor, a long-standing DSA member, worked overtime to appear at countless campaign events for a trio of candidates he dubbed “the Team”: Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander. The last two unseated incumbent Democratic congressmen. Mamdani has assembled a coalition in New York City that is capable of elevating like-minded candidates to office.

In the Seventh Congressional District, which straddles northern Brooklyn and southwestern Queens, an open primary to replace retiring progressive Rep. Nydia Velázquez saw State Assembly Member Claire Valdez’s’s defeat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. She was even further left than Mamdani himself. In the end, it was not even close: Valdez prevailed with 56.1 per cent of the vote to Reynoso’s 35.8 per cent.

In 2019, Valdez joined the DSA after seeing the rise of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and state senator Julia Salazar, both of whom were elected with the DSA’s help. Valdez emphasized her anti-Israel activism as a key part of her campaign. At events, her staff handed out signs that said “Free Palestine.” She launched her campaign alongside Mahmoud Khalil, a key anti-Israel leader at Columbia University that the Donald Trump administration has tried to deport.

Valdez referred to Israel’s war against Hamas as a “genocide” as early as October 13, 2023. She lambasted police for restraining anti-Israel mobs chanting “Globalize the Intifada” and waving Hezbollah flags outside a Brooklyn synagogue last June.  “New Yorkers don’t just have the right to protest the sale of stolen Palestinian land — they have a responsibility to,” she declare. She has repeatedly criticized the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She also boasted on social media of having “wiped my hand on the American flag.”

In the Thirteenth Congressional District, covering the upper Manhattan neighborhoods of Harlem, Washington Heights, and Morningside Heights and parts of the West Bronx, Darializa Avila Chevalier won a much more startling victory over Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a five-term incumbent Democratic Party power broker and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Espaillat’s campaign was heavily backed by AIPAC. Chevalier defied expectations and won by gaining 49 per cent to Espaillat’s 46 per cent. She told the crowd at her watch party that she had fought against the “Democratic machine.” Espaillat lost despite the backing of Democratic leaders in Congress and the state, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council.

When Chevalier, draped in a keffiyeh, first announced her candidacy in November of last year, few outside her immediate circle knew her name. But her message was clear: she presented herself as an organiser working to unite families torn apart by the immigration system and against “what we all know is a genocide in Palestine.”

Chevalier has publicly proclaimed her hatred for Israel, the United States, and “Western civilization” as a whole. She has called for the abolition of prisons, open borders and an end to deportations — even for people convicted of violent crimes. As a student at Columbia University, she was involved in Students for Justice in Palestine. In 2024, she returned to her alma mater to help organize an anti-Israel encampment that was ultimately disbanded by the police.

She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest: “We are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our intifada is an Internationalist one,” it states.

The day after the October 7 attack, Chevalier attended an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square. “I can only say I have been advocating for the human rights of Palestinians for my adult life,” when asked about her attendance at the rally. Chevalier has said that her conversion to Islam was inspired by the Israel-Hamas war. Mamdani celebrated her win, describing Chevalier as a person “of clarity, of conscience and of conviction.”

 

The war was also on the minds of voters in former Comptroller Brad Lander’s race against another AIPAC-funded incumbent, Rep. Dan Goldman, in New York’s Tenth District, covering lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn. Both are Jewish, but Goldman has been a steadfast friend of Israel while Lander is the quintessential anti-Zionist and a key faction of his coalition was anti-Israel. It was a contest that laid bare the party’s divisions over the Israel-Gaza war.

At his son Marek’s bris, Lander gave a speech lambasting Israel. “We pray fervently that by the time you read this, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the settlements, the house demolitions, the violence will be history,” which was later reprinted in a 2003 book titled Wrestling with Zion. Lander enjoyed the night’s biggest victory, winning 65.8 per cent of the vote to Goldman’s 34 per cent. Many Democrats have suggested that Lander has proved useful to Mamdani and other leftists who have been accused of antisemitism for singling out the Jewish state for opprobrium.

In the run-up to Election Day, a chain of Brooklyn coffee shops called Poetica posted that it would have barred Goldman entry had they recognized him during a recent visit to their storefront. “We don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers,” Poetica declared. “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”

At the state level, seven of the eight candidates endorsed by the DSA for the New York State legislature also won their primary elections. One of them is Aber Kawas, a Queens-based community organizer. If she, as expected, wins in November, she will be the first Palestinian woman elected to state office in New York history.

“Were defeated congressmen Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat insufficiently anti-Trump?” asked Will Rahn, a senior editor and writer for The Free Press, rhetorically, in a June 26 column. “Of course not. They lost because they aren’t anti-Israel enough. ‘Free Palestine’ is now the binding issue on the left, the only thing that actually matters.” No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes you’ve championed, if you refuse to fall in line on Israel, you risk being ostracized from communities you’ve long called home.

For most of the postwar era, support for Israel was one of the least controversial positions in Democratic Party politics. That consensus has not merely weakened; it has collapsed. Once viewed as a righteous anti-colonial cause, Zionism has been reframed by radical thinkers as the ideology of a colonial oppressor of stateless Palestinians. Opposition to Israel is now the litmus test in Democratic Party politics.  “There’s a cliff, and we’re heading towards it,” warned Daniel C. Kurtzer, a Princeton University professor who was ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush.

The DSA has now built an entire ecosystem that runs parallel to the official Democratic apparatus, equipped with their own consultant network, endorsing organizations, donors and even billionaires who back them.

A generation after Pat Buchanan was denounced as an antisemite by all proper liberals for saying things like “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory,” will the left now embrace him as a “premature antizionist”? Even satire can’t match this.

Think about it: Since October 7, Israel has done what every other country viciously attacked by implacable enemies throughout history has done: It has lashed back in a defensive war. This is a policy that any state that cared for the life of its citizens would have to adopt.
Yet Israel has become the “omnicause.” That’s why antisemitism and antizionism are two sides of the same coin: hatred of Jews. Jews around the world aren’t being attacked because of Israel. Israel is itself being condemned because it’s Jewish.

American Jews have been blindsided by this, as the French writer Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells us in a brilliant article, “Stand Up,” Tablet, July 6, 2026. “When anti-Jewish hostility arrives wrapped in the language of liberation, antiracism, decolonization, and human rights –when it emerges among allies, colleagues, students, professional peers, or other minority communities — the disorientation is deeper. It is inside the world in which one has built a life. It speaks in familiar accents. It borrows cherished values.”

In “A Profound Question Haunting Jews Today,” New York Times, July 6, 2026, Nicholas Lemann, the former dean of the Columbia University Journalism School, agrees. He writes that for half a century or more, American Jews could achieve, “through being successful, culturally Jewish, Zionist, liberal and not especially observant,” a status that elsewhere has persistently eluded them.

“This set of certainties has evaporated. Today, Israel is the pariah nation of the world, and ‘Zionist’ has become an epithet, something it’s unacceptable to be, at least in progressive circles,” where most Jews have usually found themselves.

So, are the Democrats going to become America’s anti-Israel party? And then what?

 

From Maoism to Trump, Albania Has Travelled a Long and Crooked Road

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

A friend recently joked that he never thought he’d ever see the words “Albania” and “democracy” in the same sentence. What a long ideological journey that poor Balkan country has travelled over the past 40 years.

Since May 31, protesters have been setting off every single day from Skanderbeg Square in Tirana to take part in what has been dubbed the “Flamingo Revolution.” They complain that their government is selling the country out to foreign investors and luxury developers. They accuse Prime Minister Edi Rama and his government of cronyism and corruption, with many claiming that for a long time now, the Albanian government has been making decisions against the interests of Albanian citizens.

It’s the first time in his nearly 13 years in power that Rama, leader of the Socialist Party, has been under serious pressure. But he has made light of the protests as a problem, insisting, rather, that they are “a beautiful example of freedom, of democracy in action.”

So what’s this all about? The demonstrations were first sparked by anger at the planned construction of luxury resorts in a stretch of the Adriatic coast home to rare animals like flamingoes and the Mediterranean monk seal. This has become Albania’s largest civic protest movement since the fall of communism.

The development project was first announced in 2024 and initially drew complaints mostly from environmentalists. The controversy only gained international visibility after it became associated with Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, whose company, Affinity Partners, along with investors from the Gulf states, announced plans to invest more than US$4.6 billion into developing a luxury resort near the city of Vlore on the Narta Lagoon and protected wildlands in Zvernec. 

Kushner and Ivanka Trump also want to turn Sazan Island, which belongs to a national park, into a smaller coastal enclave for the wealthy. Tourism has become an increasingly important part of Albania’s national income.

The protestors assert that Albania has been ruled since the collapse of Communism 35 years ago by self-serving politicians who give state contracts to their friends in business and pay little attention to the economic and other grievances of ordinary citizens.

Olsi Nika, who heads the environmental group EcoAlbania, maintains that the current political system has alienated Gen Z-ers. “The majority of the protesters are young people who were raised with a progressive European mentality,” he explained.

Protesters have chanted, “Rama to jail, Berisha to jail.” Rama has been in and out of government since 1998, while Sali Berisha, who leads the Democratic Party, the main opposition group, was president of Albania from 1992 to 1997 and prime minister rom 2005 to 2013. Berisha was until last November under house arrest because of corruption charges. In last year’s parliamentary elections, Rama’s Socialists beat Berisha’s Democrats, winning 83 seats to his 50.

“At the core of this protest is not just environmental issues,” according to Gresa Hasa, a doctoral researcher at the University of Graz. “This is a fight for freedom and democracy, and a future where the resources and the state works for all of us and where we are not excluded from our own beaches and public spaces.”

Rama stated at a meeting of his Socialist Party’s parliamentary group on June 20 that the opposition has come from a broad constellation of external actors, including Trump opponents, anti-Israel groups and what he calls state-sponsored “digital mercenaries, including those from Iran.”

Iran, he suggested, has been stoking the protests to get back at Albania for sheltering an Iranian opposition group, the Mujahadeen Khalq. Officials have also contended that the tourist industry in neighboring Greece, eager to avoid competition from Albania, has egged on and even funded the protesters.

To call all this a sea change is an understatement. Under its extreme Maoist version of Communism, the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania was hermetically sealed off from the outside world. It was ruled from 1944 to 1985 by Enver Hoxha, who broke with the Soviet Union after 1956 over what he saw as Nikita Khrushchev’s insufficient commitment to Stalinism.

The paranoid Hoxha even built pillboxes all over the country – more than six hundred thousand dome-roofed foxholes were installed literally everywhere. They were less a genuine attempt to fortify the country against invasion and more about permeating Albanian society with a siege mentality. Albania’s increasing isolation, from neighboring Yugoslavia, the USSR, and eventually China, led to mounting economic difficulties and the collapse of the Communist state in 1991.

Albanians, totally naive politically and economically as a result, saw a period of rapid, chaotic privatization of state-owned industries as part of a transition to capitalism, marked by graft, speculation, and disastrous pyramid schemes. Hoxha had confiscated all private property after he took power. When Communism ended, this left Albanian courts forced to adjudicate rival property claims by former owners and their descendants, causing immense problems.

These legal gray areas have made it easier for Rama to court “strategic investors” like Kushner with the promise of both cheap land and cheap workers. But the European Parliament on June 17 urged Albania to suspend construction in the protected area. This is important, since Albania hopes to join the European Union. Might the words “Albania” and “democracy” eventually belong together? Hard to tell.