A few weeks ago, I wrote about something I saw in pro-Palestinian activist spaces. There was almost no sympathy for the people killed, raped, and kidnapped on October 7. Alongside that, there were stories that shifte
d the blame for their deaths onto Israel.
I don’t think what I saw was unusual. Over the past three years, parts of the organized left in Europe and the United States have struggled with the same problem, from Germany’s Die Linke to the Democratic Socialists of America. Explaining it means looking at ideas as well as people, including a line of thinking that comes from Tony Cliff’s Trotskyist tradition. It also means being careful. That tradition is only part of the story, and the organizations involved have pushed back harder than their critics usually admit.
Where the blind spot comes from
How does a movement that talks about liberation end up unable to mourn murdered civilians? Part of the answer is a habit of thought often called campism. It divides the world into an oppressor camp and an oppressed camp and judges every actor by which side it is on.
Cliff’s tradition is often blamed for this, and the blame should be precise. In his 1994 essay The Prophet and the Proletariat, the British socialist Chris Harman argued that socialists should sometimes act alongside Islamist movements against repressive states: “with the Islamists sometimes, with the state never.” But he did not ask socialists to cheer them on. He called Islamism a “utopia of the petty bourgeoisie” and said socialists must stay independent and oppose Islamists on women’s rights, minorities and workers’ struggles. In the 2000s, standing beside Islamist groups became a practice, for example in the British Socialist Workers Party’s anti-war campaigns. In that practice, the criticism often fell away while the alliance remained.
What survived was the binary. If Israel is seen only as an outpost of Western power, then whoever fights it is on the right side, whatever they believe and whatever they do. Hamas’s 1988 charter is openly antisemitic. On October 7, Hamas-led attackers killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took 251 hostages. For people who think in camps, those facts were easy to set aside. The dead became background to a story about occupation. Some went further and claimed that most of the victims were killed by Israel’s own forces. Israeli forces did kill some of their own people that day, and Israeli journalists have reported on it. But using that to deny what Hamas did is not analysis. It is a way of not having to feel anything.
Berlin
Die Linke shows both how far this can go and where it stops.
In 2007 the Cliffite group Linksruck dissolved itself into the new party and regrouped around the journal marx21. Its members were open about who they were, and some rose high. Christine Buchholz sat in the Bundestag and on the party executive, where she handled peace and anti-racism. But the party’s sharpest fights after October 7 were not only marx21’s doing. Thousands of new members joined in the big cities, many young and with no factional background. Berlin-Neukölln became the center of the conflict.
In October 2024, delegates at the Berlin party congress struck the words “eliminatory antisemitism” from a motion describing Hamas; some argued the term belonged only to the Nazis. They also removed a pledge to protect Jews “by rule-of-law means.” The motion’s sponsors, among them former culture senator Klaus Lederer, withdrew it and walked out. Within two weeks, Lederer and four other leading Berlin politicians had left the party. A state MP in Saxony-Anhalt resigned, citing “unbearable antisemitism in our own ranks.”
The pressure also ran the other way. In December 2024, the party expelled Ramsis Kilani, a Neukölln activist who had called the October 7 attackers “guerrilla fighters.” Buchholz and her group, by then called Sozialismus von unten, left in protest. The best-known Cliffite figure in German politics ended up outside Die Linke, not running it.
In September 2026, Die Linke came first in the Berlin election with 25.7 percent. Weeks later, the SPD and Greens paused coalition talks. The Linke parliamentary group had taken in a Neukölln member, Vanessa Emde, who faced antisemitism allegations. It had also issued a statement citing the party’s own resolutions instead of the text agreed with its partners. The talks resumed, and a joint statement on antisemitism is to go into the coalition agreement.
That outcome doesn’t prove the party has lost its moral standing. It shows something narrower and more useful. When the issue was forced, the price of governing was a clear commitment on antisemitism, and the leadership agreed to pay it. Whether that commitment means anything depends on what it says and whether it is enforced.
New York
DSA has followed a similar path with fewer brakes. It grew from about 6,000 members in 2015 to tens of thousands after Bernie Sanders’s campaign and Donald Trump’s election. When the Cliffite International Socialist Organization dissolved in 2019, some of its members joined. Parts of DSA then moved sharply toward hardline positions on Israel.
The clearest test came in 2024. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hosted a panel on antisemitism with mainstream Jewish leaders. DSA’s national committee then withdrew its endorsement, saying the panel had “conflated” anti-Zionism and antisemitism. At its 2025 convention, DSA adopted a resolution supporting a single Palestinian state. According to press reports, it also made support for Israel’s right to self-defense grounds for expulsion. Most of these resolutions came from caucuses with no connection to the Cliff tradition. Whatever caused the hardening, it is broader than one sect.
Elected officials have pulled the other way. Zohran Mamdani, a DSA member, won New York’s mayoral race and took office in January 2026. He has called Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide. He has also said Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights for all, and that he would discourage the slogan “globalize the intifada.” A mayor answers to voters, including the largest Jewish community outside Israel. A caucus answers to its members, and the two pull in different directions.
What should change
The problem I described in my first note is not about tactics. It is about who counts.
A movement that asks the world to see Palestinian dead as people cannot refuse to see Israeli dead as people. Holding both views is not a contradiction; it is what believing in universal rights means. Explaining an atrocity by its causes is legitimate. Treating its victims as acceptable losses, or denying they were victims at all, is not.
Berlin and New York suggest this is not hopeless. Parties expel members, coalition partners set conditions, and elected officials choose their words. The left doesn’t need a new theory to recover. It needs to stop sorting the dead by camp and to say plainly that the people murdered on October 7 were murdered.
Originally published on Substack.
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