Read this and take a deep whiff of the future of the Democrat Party. And not just through Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez either, but through the radical activists who have mainstreamed anti-Semitism and the destruction of Israel.
Ocasio-Cortez has never demonstrated much support for Israel, but at least at one point, she understood the difference between offense and defense. Thanks to the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America – AOC’s base – the House Democrat has dispensed with any such nuance on Israel. Ocasio-Cortez pledged to reverse her previous support for Israel’s missile defense systems in a “private” meeting with the DSA:
During a private meeting with members of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America on Tuesday night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that she would not vote to send any military aid to Israel, according to a partial recording of the virtual forum shared with City & State.
“I have not once ever voted to authorize funding to Israel, and I will never,” Ocasio-Cortez said in response to a question about whether she would support an arms embargo. “The Israeli government should be able to finance their own weapons if they seek to arm themselves,” she added.
“I wanted to clarify,” an NYC-DSA member asked in a follow-up question. “If the moment presents itself in Congress, will you commit to voting ‘no’ for any spending on arms for Israel, including so-called ‘defensive capabilities?’”
“Yes,” Ocasio-Cortez quickly answered.
The timing of this flip is particularly revealing. Israel has been under missile and drone attack ever since the October 7 massacres of Hamas, and for that matter, for the 19 years previous to that. The Iron Dome system allowed Israel to ignore Hamas in Gaza for much of that time, choosing not to take the bait as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad kept up a steady barrage of missiles. War broke out when Hamas chose to invade Israel, or when Hezbollah did the same in the north, at which point the progressive elite in the West would insist that Israel sign cease-fires based on promises of disarmament that never got fulfilled.
Iran began directly attacking Israel over the last two years, which prompted retaliatory strikes. And now most of the Gulf states are under a similar barrage, protected in large part by the ABM umbrellas developed by Israel and the US against the real threat in the region. Rather than focus on the actual existential threat that has finally united Israel with the Sunni Arab states in the Gulf as well as with the US, Ocasio-Cortez and the DSA want Israel disarmed against the Iranian Islamists with massive missile and drone batteries designed to destroy Israel entirely.
Leftists argue that these defensive systems allow Israel to conduct offensive operations, which has been the dipstick argument against ABM systems for decades. AG Hamilton dismantled this argument on Twitter after Mehdi Hasan attempted to float it yet again:
Mask off.
What really upsets them about the Iron Dome is that it limits the number of Israelis that terrorists can kill. That’s the mentioned “costs”. They prefer that number be higher. With no regards for how the lack of this tech would force Israel to respond.
Notice this… pic.twitter.com/QhQTzncC3U
— AG (@AGHamilton29) April 1, 2026
Notice this isn’t even about a funding discussion.
Luckily, whether Israel has the technology to save lives isn’t dependent on people like Mehdi Hasan. They invented it. The funding question just relates to our role and extent of access we have to the tech.
To the extent this leftist argument even has value, it relates to the deterrent value of ABM systems when it comes to less asymmetric conflicts. Until October 7, Israel saw Hamas as a manageable threat, but Hezbollah a much more serious enemy and Iran a potentially existential one. Iran was careful not to directly engage Israel until the October 7 war, when it finally attempted the “unity of battlefields” strategy undergirding its proxy-army encirclement strategy – and ended up failing miserably. Ironically, the Iron Dome system ended up benefiting Hamas in practice, as it allowed the Israelis to ignore most of their missile attacks until Hamas started a real war, and forced Israel to deal with the danger Hamas presented to their agriculture in the south.
But this isn’t about reason or rational discourse over the balancing of interests in the Middle East. If it were, we’d also note how much the other Gulf states now rely on Israel’s ABM capabilities, not just in how well it allows Israel to have a full range of strategic options when dealing with its terror-network enemies and the state sponsor that runs them. The DSA pressure on Ocasio-Cortez, and her enthusiastic response to it, is part of the decay of the Democrat Party into the nihilism of the global Left, with “Palestine” as a brand for outright communist/socialist revolution. Nora Bussigny discovered the decay in France while participating in leftist activism, even if she never quite connected the through-line of “Palestine” to the more fundamental ambition:
I am not Jewish, and I have never been to Israel. On October 8, it was journalistic reflex that led me to reactivate one of the fake activist accounts I had used during my previous investigation. I returned to social media forums to observe the reactions of feminist and LGBTQ+ militants, who are usually very vocal when denouncing violence against women and minorities.
I was curious: How would they respond to the mass murder and rape perpetrated by terrorists on October 7? What I found wasn’t just embarrassed silence, but genuine scenes of joy, expressed shamelessly to their tens of thousands of followers. “Finally, the colonized rebel against the colonizer!” “Finally, the oppressed fight back against the oppressor!” One of the leading figures of “ecofeminism” and the French decolonial and indigenous movements, Fatima Ouassak—held up as a model of intersectional feminism—posted this on her X account that very day: “During the anti-colonial war in Algeria, Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre took a stand (without hesitation) for the Algerian armed resistance, against France. In the war between colonizers and the colonized, we must support (without hesitation) the side of the colonized. #FreePalestine.”
All of a sudden, I realized that my book, published only three weeks earlier, had missed the elephant in the room.
A political and activist left that had spent years aspiring to a “convergence of struggles” was finally uniting. That convergence rested on a common enemy. A figure whose mutual hatred binds them together. That figure was the Jew—or rather, the “Zionist.”
I watched this shared hatred of the Jew bring together Islamist preachers, supporters of the Islamic Republic of Iran, feminist and LGBTQ+ militants, radical ecologists, and anti-police activists—all in the name of a fight “against Zionism, the United States, the West, and imperialism.”
This is not about justice for Arab dead-enders in Gaza and the West Bank. It’s not even about Israel, at least not entirely. Ocasio-Cortez, the DSA, and the rest of the progressive Left want to deconstruct and dismantle Western civilization entirely by first disarming it, and then by pushing defeatism while the enemies of liberty and democracy in Tehran, Beijing, and Moscow attack and destroy it.
AOC is hardly alone in this effort. She’s just one of the first to remove her mask as both an anti-Semite and a Quisling in a moment of war to stop the Iranians from achieving the DSA’s true goals with the use of nuclear weapons.
