Last Wednesday, a 31-year-old progressive activist allegedly shot and killed two employees of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., in cold blood. As one of them, Sarah Milgrim, a 26-year-old Jew from Kansas, tried to crawl away, the gunman continued shooting at her.
“Free, free Palestine,” he shouted as police took him into custody.
You would think that this would be easy to condemn. Yet when the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America said in a statement released last Thursday that they “reject the violence of last night’s fatal shooting,” some members of the political organization revolted.
Almost immediately, a debate broke out in the national DSA’s internal message board for dues-paying members over how to respond to the killings outside the Capital Jewish Museum.
“Is it good to condemn violence against a genocidal apartheid state?” a DSA member with the username “SebastianFG” said in a post. Other members responded to the post with emojis of a heart and applause.
Other DSA members called the statement “horrific,” “hurtful,” and “irresponsible.”
The Democratic Socialists of America is not just a fringe activist organization. Its national membership has skyrocketed in recent years to more than 90,000, riding the wave of Bernie Sanders’s nearly successful primary challenge of Hillary Clinton in 2016. The political organization has since boasted major electoral success with politicians in Congress’s progressive “Squad,” including Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib and New York City’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The far-left group unendorsed Ocasio-Cortez last year after the congresswoman voted in favor of a resolution affirming Israel’s “right to exist.”
The radical group is deeply fractured over how to respond to last week’s killings of Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky. (The alleged shooter, Elias Rodriguez, was charged with murder of foreign officials, first-degree murder, and other crimes.)