A recent interview between The New Yorker’s David Remnick and Megan Romer, national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, is making the rounds on social media.
Like so many instances before it, the exchange exposes just how twisted and detached from reality parts of this movement’s thinking about Israel have become.
Remnick asked Romer about DSA-backed candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, who recently won the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th Congressional District, defeating five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat.
Specifically, he asked about Chevalier attending a rally in Times Square on October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas massacred approximately 1,200 people in Israel – and the same rally the DSA had promoted in the immediate aftermath of the attack.
October 8 was not weeks later. It was not after Israel entered Gaza and began its military operation. It was the very next day.
Israelis were still counting the dead, the burned, dismembered, and desecrated bodies. Rescue workers were still discovering naked women who had been raped and tied to trees.
Parents were frantically searching for children who had disappeared from the Nova music festival. Search-and-rescue volunteers were entering destroyed homes and finding families burned alive, clinging to one another in their final moments.
Across the country, families had no idea whether their loved ones had been murdered, kidnapped into Gaza, or were still hiding somewhere in southern Israel.
Entire communities, including communities built by people who had dedicated years of their lives to peace and coexistence, had become crime scenes.
Hamas terrorists had entered their homes, slaughtered and tortured civilians, abducted families, and live-streamed their crimes for the world to see.
Israel did not yet know the names of all its dead, let alone the full scale of what had happened.
And while all of this was still unfolding, the DSA was promoting a rally in Times Square in the name of Palestinian “resistance.”
Let’s set aside the fact that the DSA largely misrepresents the conditions in Gaza before October 7, which, while difficult, were in no way equivalent to a concentration camp, and the fact that anyone who attended or promoted the October 8 rally in Times Square should have to answer for the morality of that decision.
But Romer’s comments about October 7 being “inevitable” reveal a fundamental flaw in how the DSA and parts of the progressive Left understand Palestinians, Israel, and the Middle East.
The DSA worldview depends so heavily on portraying Palestinians exclusively as powerless victims that it struggles to process Palestinian agency when that agency produces something horrific.
The actions committed on October 7 challenge the notion of helpless victimhood, so the massacre instead becomes a justified reaction to Israeli policy rather than what it actually was: a deliberate terrorist attack planned and carried out by people responsible for their own choices.
In no way will I pretend that Palestinians have not suffered tremendously, but they are not helpless victims. October 7 required sophisticated planning and execution, and it could never have been carried out by helpless people.
Living with the consequences
I have seen Hamas operational materials with my own eyes, and I have held maps and instructions in my hands.
Not only did it take them two years to thoughtfully plan out this massacre, but it was done so well and with such sophistication that the more I learn about it, the angrier I get over Israel’s security establishment dropping the ball.
There were detailed maps of the southern communities, with the names of family members. Hamas had prepared hostage-taking kits that included zip ties, drugs, tourniquets, and tasers.
There were clear instructions on beheading and filming, and even a dictionary transliterated from Arabic into Hebrew so that Hamas operatives could tell people to “take off their clothes” and “take off their pants.”
I saw the letter that the former leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, wrote to his movement, instructing them to create scenes of fear and chaos so that the world would see images of “burning kibbutzim.”
Anyone pretending that this massacre was a spontaneous eruption of desperation by Palestinians is wrong. Hamas spent years preparing for October 7, gathering intelligence, training fighters, and developing plans for an assault on Israeli communities.
Whatever one believes about Israel or Gaza, October 7 cannot honestly be described as an inevitable act of desperation.
Palestinians are not helpless, and they are not stupid. They are human beings with political beliefs, ideological movements, and moral agency, just like everyone else.
There was real suffering in Gaza before October 7, and acknowledging that does not diminish the horror of what happened.
But suffering does not eliminate responsibility; poor living conditions do not make massacring civilians inevitable, and political grievances do not make kidnapping children or elderly people and then starving them in the dungeons of Gaza inevitable.
Oppression does not make sexual violence inevitable. These were choices that people made, and they have to live with the consequences of those choices.
This worldview also allows the progressive Left to avoid confronting the parts of this conflict that do not fit comfortably into its narrative: the jihadist ideology of Hamas, antisemitism within parts of the Free Palestine movement, the glorification of violence against Israelis, and support of terrorism within significant segments of Palestinian society.
They cannot confront these realities because doing so would mean admitting that Palestinian society, like every society, contains movements and individuals capable of making consequential – and sometimes monstrous – decisions.
This rhetoric is becoming normalized within the Democratic movement, with far-left figures like Hasan Piker who can say that “America deserved 9/11,” express views that support terrorist organizations, and say that “it doesn’t matter if rapes happened” on October 7.
What is really upsetting is that his views, and the DSA’s views more broadly, are going largely unchallenged by mainstream Democrats.
The DSA and the far Left are completely hypocritical because, while they claim to defend Palestinian dignity, they refuse to treat Palestinians as fully responsible political actors capable of making moral choices, good ones and evil ones, just like everyone else.
It is okay to criticize Western policy in the Middle East that has contributed to Palestinian suffering, and it is equally okay to acknowledge the choices that Palestinian leaders and individuals have made that have also contributed to that suffering.
October 7 was not inevitable. It was planned, and it was chosen, and it is a major reason why Palestinians find themselves in the situation they are in today.
Any political movement that cannot say that clearly has no business claiming to understand this conflict.
The writer is a co-founder and CEO of Social Lite Creative, a digital marketing firm that specializes in geopolitics.
