It’s the kind of no-nonsense language that the Democratic grassroots have been demanding in recent months. Polling shows that an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters have swung wildly against Israel, with younger Independents and Republicans also trending in the same direction. According to one poll, only Russia scored worse than Israel when it came to the negative views among young Democrats (even Iran outscored the Jewish state). 

It would seem, then, that Platner and likeminded progressive office-seekers around the country have hit upon a winning issue. But it’s one thing to adopt more Israel-critical policies in response to popular opinion — and quite another to transform the party into a singularly Israel-obsessed vehicle: one in which opposition to the Jewish state functions as the main priority, a source of factionalism, and an ideological purity test. 

That way lies marginalization, a fate not unlike that of ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his Your Party in Britain. This, just when Democrats are poised to re-emerge from the political wilderness amid President Trump’s historic unpopularity and a faltering GOP majority in Congress.

The danger for Democrats doesn’t lie in the shift itself — a recalibration in America’s relationship with Israel is overdue, as voters across the spectrum are emphatically telling pollsters. The real threat, rather, is in the way an intensified focus on a single foreign-policy issue risks pulling the party off course, leaving it vulnerable to a vocal activist subset that doesn’t necessarily reflect broader public opinion on other questions. 

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Corbyn offers an instructive cautionary tale. After being expelled from Labour in 2024, the 76-year-old socialist went on to co-found a Left-wing breakaway party the following year. Your Party — the name itself was a magnet for ridicule — promised to be everything that Labour wasn’t: an unapologetically socialist outfit that would tax the rich, nationalize utilities, defend the National Health Service against privatization, and, most importantly, take a strong stance against Israel. During its first week, the party attracted hundreds of thousands of voters disillusioned by the Starmer government, as well as a former Labour member of Parliament and four independent Muslim MPs who were elected on pro-Gaza platforms. 

Yet within days, problems emerged. Before it had even officially launched, a leadership fight between Corbyn and another MP resulted in a mini-schism. What was ostensibly a disagreement over the party’s internal structure quickly spilled into a chaotic membership drive, generating as many factions as it did representatives. The bigger problem, though, was the ideological division between its MPs. Unsurprisingly, Your Party’s socially conservative Muslim MPs took a very different view on issues such as gender identity and trans participation in women’s sports, which ultimately contributed to the departure of two MPs. 

The inherent tension in the “rainbow-and-crescent” alliance of progressive activists and Muslim social conservatives is a problem for Democrats, too. Over the last few years, clashes between Muslim-American parents and local Democratic leaders over school curricula have spilled into courtrooms and onto the streets, largely driven by Muslim opposition to LGBTQ content. For the most part, however, the alliance has been held together by a shared opposition to Israel.

Similarly in Britain, Israel was the centripetal force around which Your Party’s members revolved. Or so they thought. Instead, it turned out to be another source of division. Zara Sultana, Your Party’s erstwhile co-leader, came out as strongly as an anti-Zionist, whereas Corbyn refused to use the term. The result was an ironic dynamic in which Corbyn, long one of Britain’s most prominent critics of Israel, was denounced by elements of his own movement for insufficient purity on the issue. Now, the party can barely muster enough candidates to represent it in next month’s local elections.

The United States has a different party and electoral system than Britain’s, but the parallels are clear: Left-wingers’ competitive signaling on Israel incentivizes candidates to adopt maximalist positions, alienating supporters and cannibalizing other issues in the process. In San Francisco’s House race, for example, Scott Wiener, a liberal Zionist, has faced sustained criticism from activists for refusing to describe Israel as an apartheid state or characterize its military campaign as genocide. Several debates were interrupted by pro-Palestine hecklers, which ultimately led to Wiener resigning as co-chairman of the state’s Jewish Caucus before leaving it altogether.

It made little difference. Wiener’s progressive rival, Saikat Chakrabarti — who has embraced the term “genocide” and called for a ban on both defensive and offensive weapons transfers to Israel — is within striking distance of him in the polls. Meanwhile, in Michigan, Senate candidate Abdul al-Sayed, who has shared a stage with Hasan Piker and talked openly about how Israel is “just as evil as Hamas,” is now tied for first in the polls to secure the party nomination. Similar dynamics have unfolded in Illinois’s and New Jersey’s special elections, too, which became as much a referendum on the Israel lobby as on any local issue.

None of this is to suggest that Democrats should maintain the status quo on Israel. Under Netanyahu, the Jewish state has become more aggressive and unrestrained in its conduct across the Middle East, not bothering with the pretense of a two-state solution. The Jewish state has rarely stopped to weigh even the costs of wielding the power of life and death — in perpetuity — over some seven million Palestinians. 

But, again, there is a difference between treating Israel as one foreign question among many, on one hand, and turning it into an ideological litmus test that supersedes everything else, on the other. This has created a purity spiral in which Democratic candidates across the country are jumping over each other to prove their pro-Palestine credentials — or at least, to ward off any hint that they are “soft” on the issue. Even Gavin Newsom, ever the tumbleweed in shifting winds of public opinion, went so far as to compare Israel to an apartheid state (a remark he later walked back). 

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One major reason for this drastic shift is the rise of independent media. As the influence of traditionally pro-Israel legacy outlets has waned, a new ecosystem of progressive streamers and online platforms has filled the space. These outlets will approvingly repost clips of, for example, Graham Platner calling the US’s relationship with Israel “shameful,” while castigating moderate Democrats for equivocating on the issue. 

For influencers and outlets like Zeteo, the Young Turks, Majority Support, and Hasan Piker, Israel is a near daily fixation (to say nothing of Tucker Carlson and other podcasters on the Right), which creates what Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran call an “availability cascade”: a self-reinforcing feedback loop, in which constant mention of an issue makes it seem more important, urgent, or widespread, thereby further increasing its visibility.

Today, the question of whether Israel is committing genocide has the same political potency (and clippability) as “what is a woman?” for progressives and “did Trump win the 2020 election?” for Republicans. In just the last week, it has been asked of former President Barack Obama all the way down to Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg in the New York 12th district contest. And every podcast, speech, and special election primary in which a candidate’s position on Israel determines their standing only reinforces that dynamic at the national level. As a preview of what’s to come, earlier this month, the Democratic National Committee weighed a proposal at its spring conference to condemn the “growing influence” of money in primary elections, with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee singled out in the debate; the resolution was ultimately rejected. Without any kind of counterweight in the party, expect more resolutions like these to emerge.

In Britain, Your Party’s launch was meant to signal a new moment of unity for Left-wing dissidents from the Labour mainstream. Instead, it exposed how little consensus there was beneath the surface. Democrats should be wary of repeating the same pattern. Primary season is already drifting into an anti-Israel spectacle; if that dynamic accelerates, Democrats risk a Corbyn-style implosion that hands Republicans an unforced advantage in 2028.

We’re in the same venue that, just months ago, hosted government ministers and their hungover special advisers at the Labour Conference. But now, we’re here for an event to mark Your Party’s official foundation, and the vibes are unsurprisingly different. The former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, having had the whip removed by Keir Starmer five years ago, is establishing a new electoral vehicle with that other former Labour recalcitrant, Zarah Sultana. It’s worth remembering that both would still be languishing on the backbenches as Labour MPs were it not for the Prime Minister’s Stalinist approach to party management. After all, Corbyn stayed in what Peter Mandelson boasted was a “sealed tomb” of the Labour Left, all the way through the Iraq and Afghan wars, privatizations, PFI. But today, finally, the Left hopes to break from its Labourist sepulcher.

Outside the confines of a heavily scrutinized party of government — with in-built constitutional connections to politically moderate trade unions that represent millions of workers — all the neuroses of the Left come to the fore here in Liverpool. This is Glastonbury for people who unironically quote Lenin, an airport-hangar-sized space teeming with aging members of all manner of sects, and who thrive during the most arcane and interminable of debates. Motions, seconders, points of order: this is the language they speak. After Corbyn has opened with one of his woolly, meandering speeches, full of odes to “communities”, “people coming together”, “peace”, “the homeless” and “refugees”, the journalists are banished from the hall, and the revolutionary proceduralism is turned up to self-parodic levels.

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When the CIA declassified its Simple Sabotage Field Manual, it revealed how its agents would infiltrate activist organizations to hamper their activities. “Haggle over the precise wording of communications, minutes, resolutions”, it reads; “Never permit shortcuts to be taken to expedite decisions”; “Talk as frequently as possible at great length”; and “bring up irrelevant issues”. Your Party’s delegates seem to have imbibed this advice — not because they’re intelligence operatives, but because they have an incredible knack for the reverse Midas. Within minutes of the first session, the chair is being heckled and booed as she begs security to eject a shouting participant. “LET. HER. SPEAK!” goes a sporadic chant from the audience.

It’s as if the entire exercise has been conceived to confirm everyone’s worst suspicions about the hard Left. And when not concerning themselves with how many kulaks can dance on the head of a pin, the two actual issues that provoke the giddiest of cheers are the twin obsessions of Palestine and transphobia, questions that motivate vanishingly small numbers of voters. Most of them, perhaps, are in this room. The night before, one speaker at a pre-conference rally diagnosed a pre-revolutionary mood in the country, as in Petrograd in 1917. Britain, he claimed, was simmering with renewed class consciousness. The war in Gaza has “united the working class” and opened their eyes to the true nature of “capitalism” and “imperialism”. Any day now, the whole edifice could come crumbling down.

Well, maybe not just yet. Demographically speaking, scanning the room of delegates, Your Party appears to largely be retired boomer activists, who cut their teeth in the heightened political tensions of the Cold War, or else in the municipal struggles of the New Left in the Eighties. Some have been involved in the Stop the War Coalition, and many seem to be members of parties that define their politics according to their relation to the work of three or four Russian and German thinkers who died over a century ago. Alongside that cohort are some younger, millennial socialists; the downwardly mobile graduates with no future, angry at high rents, low wages and all of the contemporary identity struggles that consume the hyper-online.

A third cohort had been earmarked by Corbyn, but has been significantly alienated by the first few months of the party’s eager self-immolation: the Muslim working class, represented by the four so-called Gaza independents, two of whom have quit the founding process after falling out with Sultana over trans rights. Corbyn’s strange ability to articulate the vague, platitudinous ethical socialism redolent of a non-conformist preacher could have allowed his Your Party colleagues a semblance of unity. But they have all fallen badly at the first hurdle, humiliating themselves and their movement, turning themselves into a national joke that just keeps on giving.

The former Labour MP Sultana has courted the support of the myriad revolutionary Marxist groupuscules after a pair of botched, unilateral launches threw the nascent party into disarray. After the political operatives around Corbyn preemptively expelled some Socialist Workers’ Party members from the conference, Sultana called it an “undemocratic witch hunt” and boycotted the first day in protest, flouncing away from the venue for the gathered cameras. One old-timer Tankie confides that he was uncomfortable with the exclusions. “Even Stalin,” he tells me, “would wait for a rulebook to be formally adopted before he expelled people for breaking rules”. One prominent Corbynite in favor of the ban jokingly messages to say that the ejection of SWP members from the building is, only semi-ironically, “a delicious vision of what Grey Cuba could have been”.

As well as pushing for the inclusion of the sects in Your Party’s structures, and despite standing on an incredibly thin Labour manifesto last year, Sultana has spent her time on podiums advocating for nationalizing “the entire economy”. Because if there’s one takeaway from this tumultuous foundation process, it’s that those presiding over the Your Party perma-crisis would be capable of abolishing the entire private sector, and managing the whole means of production, distribution and exchange themselves, Soviet-style. Sultana herself is still holding on to £600,000 scraped from the membership portal she preemptively launched, apparently in a bid to bounce Corbyn into action. The Information Commissioner’s Office is investigating potential breaches of the law, and, according to one source, Corbyn is the only person among the Independent and Your Party MPs resisting reporting her to the police and Parliamentary Standards Commissioner. These, then, are the bureaucratic geniuses who could formulate Five Year Plans for an advanced economy.

Yet it’s political differences that have become the core dividing lines between Zarah and Jeremy, with the latter, perhaps for the first time in his life, somehow representing the more Right-wing strand of his party’s thinking. The former Labour leader tells me that there is no Your Party witch hunt, and that, simply put, people “can’t be members of two parties at the same time”. He is also keen to emphasize his more limited desires for public ownership: of water, energy, the old, postwar state-delivered utilities. His is a brand of old-fashioned allotment Leftism, all tatty jumpers, homemade vegan flapjacks and CND marches. Sultana, on the other hand, has adopted the combative, sometimes crazed rhetoric of the convert. One pro-Jeremy wag describes the supportive network of Trotskyists around her as “Cultana”, with a worldview shaped by the extremities of early-2020s identity politics, online cancel culture, “calling out”, and neo-Maoist public purification rituals.

But in insisting on pursuing a “member-led” process, on “empowering the grassroots” and involving a panoply of bizarre interest groups in an exercise in “ultra-democracy”, Corbyn has opened a Pandora’s box, unwittingly handing power to cults that tend towards parasitic relationships with whatever body they attach themselves to. The favored strategy of the “bottom-up social movement”, and the “prefigurative” and “democratic” structure so desired by the Left’s idealists, lends itself not to democracy, but to activist-ocracy, to domination by militant cliques of hardline oddballs who adore whiling their evenings and weekends away in damp halls full of political eccentrics, and who love nothing and nobody but the sounds of their own voices.

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And yet this is the future that Your Party’s foundational delegates have chosen: yesterday, on the final day of the conference, it was announced that members had decided to reject the “single-leader model” in favor of a “collective leadership” made up of a body of 20 non-MPs. Neither Jeremy nor Zarah will lead Your Party. In exposing the public to their spats and civil warfare, the two have lost control of the vehicle they set out to build. What’s more, Your Party members will, after all, be able to have their “dual memberships”, ensuring that it becomes, in effect, an umbrella group of the warring Trotskyist parties camped outside. The foundational conference has voted itself into permanent, certain obscurity.

There’s a genuine political space for a party that represents the socialist — not the ecological — tradition, especially in the country that birthed the labor movement centuries ago. Vast spaces have opened up on Labour’s Left flank, with broad elements of Corbyn’s 2017 and 2019 programs still attracting widespread popular support in polling. Dominic Cummings wrote of a “crude heuristic” that the median voter is, roughly, “national socialist”, meaning that they “are both more left than Blairites (e.g. tax the rich) and more right than Tories (e.g. on violent crime)”. But the hard Left are congenitally predisposed to fail to take advantage. They are stuck in the quagmire of their own dogmas, and they lack ability to compromise with electoral realities. The strong intellectual tradition associated with the last century’s Communist and Labour Party, the work of EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Stuart Hall, Anthony Crosland and many others besides, has disappeared. In its place is a void, with a political culture dedicated to self-destructive language-policing over alliance-building, determined to make enemies, burn bridges, and turn the perfect into the enemy of the good.

Slightly further to the Right, the Your Party tragicomedy solidifies the Greens’ hegemonic pull over any voter more progressive than Starmer. Zack Polanski is the principal beneficiary of this weekend’s debacles, alongside a Labour Party that no longer needs to worry about a competent, coherent force that further bifurcates its Left flank and costs them marginals (if not winning many seats themselves). The chances of that happening, of Labour being troubled by this new upstart, are almost nil. Instead, the Left have fiddled while Rome burns, with Reform on the march, and swathes of working-class Britain rushing to Farage. Your Party will not threaten this seemingly inexorable trajectory, and will be barely noticed by the average voter. Nor will it threaten a floundering Labour, nor the Greens, nor concern anyone beyond its own alphabet soup of acronyms. It is unlikely to survive the next election. Once again, the revolution has been postponed, this time indefinitely.

There are five female speakers at the Holiday Inn and just one man: an extension of her politics. Sultana, born in Birmingham to Muslim parents of Pakistani descent, is one of four sisters. She knows how to fight for herself.

She has toured Britain in the last six months preparing for Liverpool. She says she wants to unite the Left: Corbyn, ever an unwilling savior, tends to hide in his allotment. But he did emerge yesterday for his own pre-conference rally: for his Your Party. Rumors fly. Corbyn’s people brief the media that Sultana-allied Leftists banned from Your Party — the Revolutionary Communist Group, the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) and the Socialist Party (SP) — may try to disrupt Conference. It was counter-briefed that Corbyn attended a Marxist festival this year. Extra security guards have been hired.

If Sultana does kick Corbyn into the sea when collective leadership is passed this weekend — he prefers the single leadership model — she will assume de facto leadership of the hard Left, in the sense that they have leaders. She is, after all, Your Party’s only MP: Corbyn now sits as an independent. If she learned singularity from the querulous king of Islington North, she might surpass him now. She is the second most followed British politician on TikTok, after her enemy Nigel Farage.

Corbyn’s allies called her undiplomatic, which is funny, considering what he is. And at the rally, she is defensive: polished and hurt. “We’re not here for fiefdoms and coronations and jobs for mates, and we’re definitely not here for a toxic culture that witch hunts people on the eve of conference and treats people like absolute shit.” Scores of Socialist Workers were expelled from Your Party yesterday. Though 18% of people were interested in voting Your Party in summer, it then slid to 12%. She doesn’t mention the lost 6%.

The Holiday Inn and Your Party are an odd fit. The hotel is aspirational, made for Thatcherites, and styled to repress the world outside — we might plausibly be in John Lewis — but the revolution they yearn for, or think they yearn for, is not here yet. So, they plot, like people waiting to re-wallpaper a country. Speakers from Bristol Apartheid Free Zone, Stand up to Racism, the National Education Union and Borderlands, a refugee charity, discuss the rise of Reform, the fears of people of color and migrants, and small victories against the boss class. If the hard Left is usually energized by struggle, these are the most defeated I have met. They speak in whispers, and, in the break, strangers do not talk. It is as if they are exhausted, before the battle has even begun. Meanwhile, at Corbyn’s rally, there were squabbles and four people were evicted. Splitters.

The hard Left exists for its contradictions. It constantly debates and it does not debate at all; it needs systems, but it does not trust them; it calls itself progressive, but it never changes. It fights with itself, constantly. Yet it has always housed the same people, city to city. There are ancient revolutionaries, always white, seeking a shared renewal to mirror the one they want for themselves. Every few years a charismatic leader emerges, and they cling to that. Before it was Corbyn. Now it is Sultana.

So today, the revolutionaries include young women of color, energized by Sultana’s rage. Candi Williams, the Your Party organizer for Bristol, tells Sultana with tears in her eyes: “This time last year, last August, I boarded up my windows because we were scared that racists were going to break in.” Her fear is rational, of course, but I fear the hard Left response won’t be. Sultana talks about bussing people in from all over the country to combat far-Right rallies. But this will only feed the anger: all extremists meet themselves in the looking glass of battle. On making Britain safer, and more prosperous — anathema to all extremists — she has nothing beyond a call to abolish capitalism. The country — the working-class — Sultana wants to renew may as well be Plasticine.

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She recites the credo effortlessly, like a comic at the end of a tour: tax the rich; nationalize water and energy; free public transport; fight climate change; Trans rights. She will abolish the monarchy, Zionism, and leave NATO: “Every penny that we spend on tanks, missiles and bombs is money stolen from our homes, our hospitals and our schools”. No one mentions Ukraine.

The real enemy is the Labour Party. She says that Lord Mandelson, “the Dark Lord, alongside his minion, Morgan McSweeney, has created a dark government”, and she will not rest until, “Keir Starmer, David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood and the rest of them are in the docks of The Hague because [the] blood [of Palestine] is on their hands”. This all sounds absurd in the John Lewis Holiday Inn — overthrow the government from here? — and people listen with only moderate enthusiasm.

Her rally represents an incoherence, and she knows it. People ask her: “What’s the point of Your Party? You should just join the Greens.” Instead, she says, she is going to reach out to Reform voters. “One third of Reform voters actually blame the super-rich for the problems in this country,” she says. “We know that the work has to be done by listening to them, understanding their grievances and going on a journey.” Success, she claims, is about talking to those communities, speaking to the “left behind, knocking on doors and yes, some people are going to slam those doors in your face and tell you to fuck off. And that’s fine. People are really angry. But the Right does not have a monopoly on working class anger.”

These voters, she says, are “blaming the wrong people for the misery that’s been caused in their life”.  But how will she stop them? As ever with the hard Left, I think the talk of reaching out is a feint, mere vanity.  No one asks her a hard question here, as the great new Left party is being born. That would be a heresy. She does admit, though, that “often in Left-wing spaces we just say things, and not everyone is always on the same page, and we’re all in different parts of our political journey”. But she knows, she says, that the people are, “watching, they’re waiting. They’re ready to join and fight.”

The line is, then: the proletariat will save us! Perhaps Sultana has read 1984. But I can’t see how the proletariat can save us. They are barely here. This is still a bourgeois movement and, Sultana, the grammar-school educated daughter of an accountant, is no more working-class than I am. That’s the incoherence.

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The event ends when she’s asked how she navigated politics as a Muslim woman in the western world. “I really don’t want to start crying,” she says. “This is why I go to therapy”. This may be a joke, because she adds, “In all seriousness, it has been really difficult… you are just told to be grateful.” Another party member, a young woman, is grateful: “seeing you gave me so much hope that we could achieve something better”. And that’s the heartbreak: promising revolution in a constitutional monarchy will not work. Hard Leftist politics are a drug, and the comedown will be messy.

Your Party will choose its name this weekend from a shortlist: Your Party, Our Party, Popular Alliance, For the Many. Sultana’s choice — The Left — did not make the shortlist. It’s a good name, and very like her: brief, and made for TikTok.

Corbyn said yesterday, “we’re going to get through this weekend,” which is barely the rhetoric of hope. Monty Python was right.