Key Takeaways:
- Far-left anti-Israel activism has long served as a Trojan horse for anti-American radicalism.
- While far-right and Islamist groups often see Israel as controlling the US, far-left groups typically see the U.S. as the ultimate evil controlling Israel.
- Groups like SJP openly admit their campus protests and divestment pushes are tactical steps toward weakening U.S. universities, “empire,” and Western civilization itself—not merely opposing Israeli policy.
Far-left anti-Israel activism has long served as a vehicle for destructive action against the United States. The recent electoral victories of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in New York drew renewed attention to the anti-American payload embedded within the anti-Zionist movement, but the warning sirens have been sounding, and largely ignored, since the October 7 massacre.
Dozens of news outlets and commentators have suddenly expressed alarm over the anti-American sentiment harbored by many of last week’s successful DSA candidates. Congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier joked about wiping her dirty hands on an American flag in a December 2019 X post, while in a 2015 Tumblr article New York State Senate candidate Aber Kawas described U.S. Independence Day and Veterans Day as holidays representing the destruction of “our movements.”
At the same time that many expressed surprise when the candidates’ anti-American rhetoric came to light, anti-Zionism was a central platform of the campaigns of Chevalier, Kawas, and others. The NYC DSA described Kawas’s election in terms of “Palestine” being on the ballot. The centrality of the Middle East conflict to the DSA campaigns was no surprise, given that Kawas, Chevalier, and even their endorser, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, were veteran anti-Israel activists before entering electoral politics.
The outrage over the candidates’ beliefs was largely confined to those who had not been paying attention to the way anti-American designs have increasingly been smuggled under the cover of far-left anti-Israel activism.
Israel, handmaiden of U.S. Imperialism
While far-right or Islamist ideological strains indulge in conspiracy theories about Israeli control of the American government, far-left ideologies generally hold the doctrinal belief that Washington controls Jerusalem, maintaining Israel as an outpost of American “empire.” Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) founding member and ANSWER Coalition Western Regional Coordinator Richard Becker characterized Israel as a kind of geopolitical hatchet man for the United States during an April 2024 lecture hosted by The People’s Forum and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM).
National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), in social media posts during 2024, asserted that they “know the U.S. empire holds the Zionist entity’s leash tightly.”
Palestinian Center for Policy Research and Strategic Studies Director-General Hani al-Masri described the United States as “the head of the snake” during a 2025 People’s Conference for Palestine panel. Other panelists described Israel as a tool of an American imperial project. One PYM activist asserted that Jerusalem was a “foot soldier of imperialism in the Middle East” that functioned “as the garrison state for empire,” securing the “West’s entrance to dominance through perpetual wars and violence.”
For many of these organizations, Israel is not the ultimate target, but rather America itself. PYM, The People’s Forum, PSL, ANSWER Coalition, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) New Jersey, and Al-Awda: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition explained that a Times Square rally held the day after the October 7 massacre was intended not only to oppose material support for Israel, but also to weaken the “handmaiden of U.S. global imperialism.”
The mission of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, of which Chevalier was a founding member, did not limit itself to hostility toward Israel. In an August 2024 Instagram post, the organization described itself as “Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.”
SJP declared on Instagram in 2024 that the “U.S. empire and its satellite compradors will fall.”
Within Our Lifetime explained in a pamphlet that “the movement for Palestinian liberation in the U.S.” was “necessarily a movement against the racist police state” because the “Zionist occupation is an outpost of the U.S. empire.”
PYM declared in a 2022 Thanksgiving Day Facebook post that the United States should be restored to Native Americans just as Israel would supposedly be restored to Palestinians.
Anti-Israel Strategy Against the U.S.
Some far-left anti-Israel organizations have gone beyond rhetoric and outlined specific strategies for attacking the United States through anti-Israel activism. In June, SJP published its official political program, explaining that its campaigns for divestment and campus radicalization were tactical objectives designed to advance a broader strategy of capturing American universities in order to undermine the United States. Universities, it argued, functioned as pillars of support for the existing American political and cultural order and therefore had to be transformed. Most of the program focused on severing university ties with Israel, described as America’s principal “proxy” and inseparable from the U.S.-led economic system, but its broader strategic objective was explicit: to “weaken the U.S. empire within its core.”
“Universities have functioned as pillars of colonial domination and imperialist conquest. To not just achieve divestment, but to weaken U.S. imperialism, we must unite with disenfranchised sectors of the university to develop the structures and capacity to weaken the power of the war profiteers as a whole.”
The two-year “student intifada” on American campuses was not simply about Israel but a “war between SJP and the university” system. Academia, according to the document, formed part of the American “ruling class.” That ruling class had to be dismantled and replaced with a “revolutionary political education that sets the foundation for collective political action.”
University of Michigan anarchist groups distributed flyers in 2024 describing the October 7 massacre as an attack on American “imperialism” that had to be complemented by action within the United States.
“Ultimately, our main task as revolutionaries in the United States remains to be the unmaking of the American empire,” read the flyer. “Freedom for Palestine means death to America.”
The Bronx Anti-War Coalition expressed a similar sentiment in a July 2024 Instagram post, arguing that Israel’s defeat would cause the rest of the United States and the West to “fall like dominoes.”
Following the assassination of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) founder Charlie Kirk in September, Oregon-based Corvallis Antifascists proposed preventing emerging right-wing unity by using Israel as a “wedge issue.”
At the 2025 People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit, Progressive International Research Coordinator Sachin Peddada repeatedly invoked terrorist Bassel al-Araj’s assertion that Israel was merely a “carbon copy of the United States” and therefore activists had to “destroy the idea of America in Americans’ heads.”
“We have to dismantle this idea of American exceptionalism, of supremacy, of being beyond reproach,” he continued.
The Normalization of Flag Burning
These designs against America have not remained confined to ideological manifestos or conference panels. They have become normalized at the activist level, expressed openly and repeatedly for anyone willing to see.
At a July 4, 2024, Philly Palestine Coalition march “against the U.S.-Israeli empire,” activists burned American and Israeli flags. On that same Independence Day, American flags were set ablaze in New York as demonstrators shouted, “Free Palestine.”
During worldwide Tax Day protests earlier that year, the American flag was burned in New York City to chants of “Death to America, death to Israel.”
During May 2024 demonstrations, anti-Israel activists vandalized the 107th Infantry Memorial in Central Park and burned an American flag at its base. The Grand Army Plaza Sherman Memorial was also defaced.
“F**K Empire,” read the graffiti. “NYPD equals KKK.”
During the 2024 Al-Quds Day rally in Dearborn, demonstrators chanted “Death to America,” while a leading activist argued that it was not simply then-President Joe Biden who had to go, but the “entire system.”
The significance of SJP’s political program became evident in 2024 when activists removed the American flag from the City College of New York flagpole during a campus occupation and replaced it with a Palestinian flag. When the NYPD cleared the occupation, officers reported finding American flags that had been “torn, burned, and desecrated.”
During raids clearing encampments at New York University, The New School, and Columbia University, the NYPD reported discovering literature proclaiming, “To Gaza and across Turtle Island, disrupt, reclaim, destroy.”
“Death to Israeli real estate! Death to America!” the poster continued.
It is therefore obvious, to anyone who has been paying attention, that an anti-American campaign is being advanced under the more politically palatable banner of anti-Israel activism. It should come as no surprise that Chevalier, Kawas, and congressional candidate Claire Valdez made opposition to Israel the centerpiece of their campaigns rather than foregrounding the DSA’s broader platform calling for the abolition of the Senate, the Electoral College, prisons, police, borders, and judicial review.
Like other ideological contagions that first gained traction on university campuses, this anti-American crusade, fused with anti-Zionism, was dismissed and trivialized. Now panic is setting in as the contagion has escaped the campus, entered the political mainstream, and begun winning elections. America’s future may depend on whether enough people recognize the anti-American ideology behind the anti-Israel rhetoric, and whether an effective inoculation can be developed before it is too late.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
