With US-Israeli bombs continuing to fall on Iran and Lebanon, one might have expected American leftists to be focused on antiwar outreach in our neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. The next No Kings protest is on March 28 and we have a great opportunity to lean on that to drive up antiwar activity.

Instead of that outward facing work, my timeline for the past few days has been full of anti-imperialist radicals in the United States defending Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian American author who Zohran Mamdani rightfully distanced himself from last week. Abulhawa continues to mix justified opposition to Zionism with clear antisemitism, such as defending an Australian neo-Nazi by pointing out that the judge who sentenced him was Jewish, dabbling in Holocaust denial, and suggesting that no Jew anywhere in the world should feel safe.

The online discourse around Abulhawa is indicative of many dynamics, including — as I pointed out in a recent piece on America’s missing antiwar movement — the prevalence of counterproductive sectarianism among too many American anti-imperialists. Even if we leave aside the fact that bigotry should be rejected as a matter of principle, anybody with even half a foot outside of Twitter’s far-left echo chamber should see that antisemitic remarks make it much harder to build a mass movement at home to stop US militarism and aid to Israel. Yet for too many American leftists today, practical antiwar activism doesn’t seem to expand far beyond performative radicalism, heated rhetoric, and deference politics.