Last week, Jacobin magazine published an article attempting to cover up and justify the record of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in defending and enabling the Gaza genocide.

Over the course of the past two years, the Netanyahu government has systematically sought to kill and displace the population of Gaza in a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. For its first 15 months, the genocide was funded, armed and defended by President Joe Biden, who was endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Throughout the genocide, Senator Sanders has repeatedly declared that “Israel has a right to defend itself” against the population of the territories it illegally occupies, while Ocasio-Cortez has called the defense of Israel “legitimate,” denounced rallies called in defense of the Palestinians as antisemitic and supported the provision of “defensive” arms to Israel.

The support of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez for the Gaza genocide provoked broad anger and deeply discredited the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Ocasio-Cortez is a member. The DSA, through Jacobin, has concluded that now is an appropriate time to attempt to rewrite the record of support for genocide and present the Democratic Party and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez not as defenders and enablers of the genocide but as its opponents. A main aim is to whitewash the DSA’s record in preparation for a potential run by Ocasio-Cortez for Senate and even president.

Jacobin’s article, titled “Ultraleftism Can’t Free Palestine,” is a condemnation of what it calls “ultraleftism,” which in this case refers to individuals and political tendencies that oppose the advocates of genocide, particularly the Trotskyist movement and the World Socialist Web Site.

The article takes the form of an interview between Jacobin writer Eric Blanc, author Bashir Abu-Manneh, an advocate of the US-Israeli regime change operation in Syria, and DSA member Hoda Mitwally.

In the course of the article, Mitwally asserts:

It’s irresponsible when people on the Left spread misinformation about AOC’s record. She has never voted for military aid to Israel; she has never voted affirmatively for the Iron Dome. She has consistently voted against Israel and the military-industrial complex.

Yes, she has made some clumsy rhetorical moves that many of us may disagree with on Iron Dome and at the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC). But I would argue rhetoric is not the same as a bad vote. It makes no sense to focus so much criticism on one of the few people in Congress who has generally been on the right side of this fight from day one.

In reality, Ocasio-Cortez has consistently, and without exception, been on the “wrong” side of the genocide because she accepts the legitimacy of Israel’s war against the Palestinians whom it illegally imprisons and whose land it illegally occupies.

She couples this unceasing support for Israel’s right to “defend” itself with token criticisms of one or another atrocity carried out by the Israel Defense Forces, in a manner indistinguishable from former President Joe Biden or the UK, French and German governments.

On October 7, 2023, Israel began its two-year-long bombardment of the Gaza Strip. The Netanyahu government used as its pretext the Hamas attack on its borders, of which it had detailed advance knowledge and which it facilitated by withdrawing its troops from the border with Gaza.

On October 9, 2023, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly,” in what Human Rights Watch immediately called “a call to commit a war crime.”

Later that month, Netanyahu quoted the Old Testament verse “Remember what Amalek did to you,” in a reference to the biblical demand to “Put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”

In other words, the language used by the Israeli government in waging its war was genocidal from the very beginning.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded by declaring her support for the “defense” of Israel, stating, “When we discuss support for Israeli defensive systems, that is absolutely legitimate,” adding that Hamas had to be “dealt with.” During the October 2023 CNN interview, Ocasio-Cortez neither called for a ceasefire nor mentioned the genocidal rhetoric of the Israeli leaders.

That month, Ocasio-Cortez condemned the “bigotry” of protests against the Gaza genocide, joining with the fascist right and President Joe Biden in slandering protests against the Gaza genocide as “antisemitic.” She declared, “It should not be hard to shut down hatred and antisemitism where we see it.”

On November 28, 2023, Ocasio-Cortez voted for House resolution 888, which declares that “denying Israel’s right to exist is a form of antisemitism.”

At last year’s Democratic National Convention, Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, declaring that Harris “is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.” In reality, the Biden-Harris administration provided Israel with all the political, economic and military support required to carry out its ethnic cleansing campaign. Harris made clear that she would continue the Biden administration’s policy of limitless support for the genocide.

In July 2025, Ocasio-Cortez voted to reject an amendment to the 2026 US war budget that would have stripped a paltry $500 million from the “Israeli Cooperative Programs.”

Defending her vote, Ocasio-Cortez declared, “Of course I voted against it. What it does do is cut off defensive Iron Dome capacities while allowing the actual bombs killing Palestinians to continue.”

In response to outrage among its own members to these actions, the DSA National Political Committee (NPC) withdrew its endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez. It noted Ocasio-Cortez’s statements supporting military aid for Israel and her equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and declared that her actions were a “deep betrayal to all those who’ve risked their welfare to fight Israeli apartheid and genocide through political and direct action in recent months, and in decades past.”

The DSA’s withdrawal of its endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez was a cynical maneuver aimed at quelling anger among its own members. But it is a testament to the deep dishonesty of Jacobin’s article that the statement withdrawing the endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez is never mentioned in the course of the interview. It is simply an inconvenient truth to be ignored.

Jacobin writes that “The US movement in solidarity with Palestinians is far weaker than it should be.” This is because, in Blanc’s words, “some currents of leftists and Palestine activists have a preexisting ideological orientation toward trying to break the Left from the Democrats immediately or in the very near future. And I think that’s part of the reason why there’s been so much focus from those milieus on, for example, attacking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”

Let us attempt to paraphrase this argument. The Democratic Party, and its DSA faction, has supported, enabled and justified the Gaza genocide. This confirms the “preexisting” assessment of opponents of the Democratic Party that it is a right-wing party of imperialist war and violence.

The genocide continues, Jacobin asserts, because the movement against it is “weaker than it should be.” And the movement is “weaker than it should be” not because figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez embrace and defend genocide, but because people criticize the Democratic Party and Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez for embracing and defending genocide.

Ergo, the supporters of genocide work to stop genocide, and the opponents of genocide enable it. If everyone supported the genocide, the genocide would stop!

The reality is the exact opposite of what Jacobin argues. The way to stop the genocide is through an unequivocal break with all those complicit in it. This means not only the “mainstream” Democratic Party but its pseudo-left apologists like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and their promoters in the DSA. Amid the non-stop efforts by the political establishment to promote figures like DSA member Zohran Mamdani in response to popular opposition to capitalism, all class-conscious workers and young people must never forget the role the DSA played in defending and justifying the genocide.