Op-ed by Farrukh Abadi
On June 10, Democrat representative and DSA member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hosted a livestream with leading members of the Zionist lobby for an event titled “Antisemitism and the Fight for Democracy.”
The featured speakers were Stacy Burdett and Amy Spitalnick, who held and currently hold leading positions in some of the country’s top Zionist organizations including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA). These organizations, whose budgets reach hundreds of millions of dollars, are funded directly by imperialists to lobby the US government to arm and fund Israel and propagate Zionism. The livestream was one such event, where AOC introduced the speakers as “two of the foremost experts in fighting antisemitism in the country.”
For 36 minutes, the speakers trafficked in liberal buzzwords of saving democracy and the common cause of all people, sprinkling in cheap appeals to progressives and Black Americans in particular to support the centrist Zionist position of a “two-state solution” while arguing that opposing Zionism or Israel’s existence is antisemitic and “eliminationist.” AOC reaffirmed these notions, arguing for the need of “allyship” with Zionists and shutting down anti-Zionism.
According to Spitalnick, manifestations of antisemitism include “celebration or denial of the October 7th attack” and “celebration or embrace of Hamas”. She goes on to say that a “major way this is manifesting” is in banning and boycotting Zionists, and “us[ing] the term Zionist as a pejorative”.
Burdett argued that the view that government policies are controlled by “Jewish billionaires or Zionist donors” is antisemitic. However, the history of Zionist influence on US government policies is captured by JCPA’s own “Narrative and Timeline,” where they state: “JCPA successfully advocated for the first U.S. arms sales to Israel” and has helped “to secure critical laws and international compacts”. The imperialist class uses Zionism as an ideological and political tool for domination, regardless of their religious or ethnic background—something shown in a recently leaked group chat in which millionaires and billionaires organized and funded the mass distribution of pro-Israel propaganda and colluded with NYC Mayor Eric Adams to repress anti-genocide student protesters.
The hypocrisy of supporting Zionism under the banner of inclusion and progress becomes all the more apparent when taken to its natural conclusion. During an ADL conference in New York last year, a panelist said that opposing weapons transfers to Israel is antisemitic because it would result in “more dead Jews.” At the conference, they denounced solidarity between Black Americans and Palestinians because Palestine “is not a racial conflict, and those kinds of equations are just stupid and they don’t belong on campus.”
The ADL has a long history of opposing connections between progressive movements in the US and Palestine, which it rightly fears. From the time of the 1917 Russian October Revolution, the ADL has worked alongside and provided intelligence to the US government on communists and progressives engaged in a variety of causes, from civil rights to labor struggles. The ADL targeted the very same progressive Jews whose actions Spitalnick and Burdett take credit for today under the banner of inclusive Zionism. When the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee denounced Israeli colonialism, the ADL published a statement calling the SNCC “no longer a responsible civil rights group. It ties itself to the Chinese-Soviet and now Arab propaganda machines in the United States” and saying that it is an extremist organization comparable to the KKK.
More recently, the ADL’s heavy lobbying for “counterterrorism” laws over the past few decades vastly expanded government surveillance, repression, and restriction of rights, particularly for Arabs, Muslims, and pro-Palestine activists. In a 2017 speech by former FBI director James Comey at the ADL National Leadership Summit, he stated to the organization in open terms: “I can say, from the perspective of the FBI, we’re still in love with you.”
That the ADL traffics in lies and fabricated history is something even Wikipedia has picked up on, and recently categorized the ADL as “generally unreliable” “due to significant evidence that the ADL acts as a pro-Israeli advocacy group and has repeatedly published false and misleading statements as fact.”
AOC’s invitation of leading Zionists for “dialogue” is certainly no accident, but something she has a history of, and is part of her efforts to pull the pro-Palestine movement behind Biden’s election campaign.
In 2021, AOC was hosted by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York (JCRC-NY), another Zionist organization with ties to imperialists and Israel. During the event, the CEO of JCRC asked AOC, “Might there be components of the Green New Deal in New York or around the world where Israeli ecological expertise could be employed…?” AOC’s response was an emphatic “Absolutely,” followed by praise for “Israel’s technology around wastewater circulation…. This is going to be so important for us to collaborate and work together.” It is well-documented that the Zionist project denies water to the Palestinian people and uses it as a weapon of war and occupation, while the ecological impact of the ongoing intensification of the US-Zionist genocide has reached unprecedented levels.
More recently, when a Palestine rally was organized in NYC on October 8, 2023, AOC, along with fellow Democrat representative and former DSA member Jamaal Bowman, condemned the rally. The NYC chapter of the DSA, which had originally endorsed the action, issued an apology afterwards “for not making our values explicit.” This comes as no surprise, as the DSA has historically been an openly pro-Israel organization since its founding in the 1980s and only adopted a resolution for a full boycott of Israel in 2019—though it remains empty words, as attempts for the membership to enforce this resolution by kicking out AOC and Bowman for supporting increased funding to Israel in 2021 was shot down by DSA national leadership.
Later in October, in an interview with CNN, AOC advocated for US military “aid” to Israel for its Iron Dome, saying that “Hamas needs to be dealt with” in a way that is “entirely up to the administration and for Israel to examine and explore.”
As recently as April 2024, AOC, among other “progressive” Democrats, signed a statement saying “All of us support strengthening the Iron Dome and other defense systems and we are committed to a sovereign, safe, and secure future for Israel.”
Though AOC has been among the few members of congress to label Israel’s actions as a genocide, she has also continued to support military aid to Israel and campaign for Biden. Her faux “anti-genocide” rhetoric is a sort of stain remover to clean up Biden’s image ahead of the election, but it is increasingly apparent that instead of cleaning the Democrats, she is only getting her hands dirtier.
Photo: Screengrab of AOC’s livestream event on YouTube.
