Over 20 months into Israel’s extermination operation in Gaza, carried out with the full backing of the US government and its imperialist allies, the US House of Representatives on July 17 voted 442 to 6 to overwhelmingly reject an amendment to the 2026 US war budget that would have stripped a paltry $500 million from the “Israeli Cooperative Programs.”

Only six members of the House voted in favor of the resolution. The four Democrats were Al Green of Texas, Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. The two Republicans were Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Thomas Massie of Kentucky.

One of the hundreds of lawmakers who opposed the amendment to the war budget was Democratic Socialists of America member and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The “cooperative programs” that Ocasio-Cortez refused to vote to defund are part of the massive US military budget and provide additional funding for advanced Israeli anti-missile systems.

After the failure of the amendment, early Friday morning on July 18, the House passed the 2026 war budget in a 221 to 209 vote. The bill allocates over $832 billion to the military and was supported by five Democrats along with almost every Republican. One of the five Democrats was Maine Congressman Jared Golden, a CIA Democrat Ocasio-Cortez effusively praised in an interview with the New York Times earlier this year.

The amendment to the 2026 Department of Defense Appropriations Act was introduced by fascist Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene in response to the July 11 Israeli strike on Gaza’s Holy Family Catholic Church, which killed at least three people, including the parish priest. That same day, Gaza health officials reported receiving 94 bodies at local hospitals.

Unsurprisingly, Ocasio-Cortez’s refusal to back the amendment has provoked widespread anger on social media from some of her supporters and tens of thousands of others outraged over the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the Democratic Party’s unwavering support for it.

In response to growing outrage, on July 19 Ocasio-Cortez defended herself by explicitly reaffirming her support for funding the Israeli military.

In a statement on X, viewed over 15 million times and met with tens of thousands of angry replies, the DSA Democrat wrote: “Greene’s amendment does nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel nor end the flow of US munitions being used in Gaza. Of course I voted against it. What it does do is cut off defensive Iron Dome capacities while allowing the actual bombs killing Palestinians to continue.”

In other words, Ocasio-Cortez is against stopping the flow of so-called “defensive” weapons to a state that the International Court of Justice, the United Nations and several human rights organizations around the world have accused of carrying out a genocide.

In reality, there is no meaningful distinction between “offensive” and “defensive” weaponry in the genocide in Gaza. All weapons provided to Israel serve the predatory aims of Washington. Even setting aside the fact that interceptor missiles can be converted into strike weapons, the very existence of the Iron Dome and other anti‑missile systems has enabled Israel to bomb with virtual impunity in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and Gaza this year alone.

Ocasio-Cortez’s refusal to back the resolution exposes not only a personal failing but also the futility of all politics aimed at “reforming” the Democratic Party and, by extension, the capitalist system. More than a century after the horrors of World War I and the collapse of national reformist programs, the DSA and similar pseudo-left organizations continue to promote the reactionary fantasy that capitalism and its parties can be reformed to serve the interests of the working class.

A “left” face for the establishment and war

First elected in 2018 on the slogan of “taking on the establishment,” Ocasio-Cortez has quickly become one of its most reliable defenders. Her recent vote is not the first time she has walked back even token opposition to the genocide in Gaza while affirming her support for Israeli military systems. In the first month of the slaughter, the New York representative joined Zionists and the entire US political establishment in demanding that anti-genocide protests be “shut down,” denouncing them as “antisemitic.”

She followed this with an October 2023 interview on CNN in which she declared that funding the Iron Dome was “absolutely legitimate.” In the same interview, she stated that “Hamas needs to be dealt with” and did not question the mass displacement and ethnic cleansing of 1 million Palestinians from Gaza. Instead, she said only that “partners” in the region, along with the US, would “step up” to support the forced relocation of Palestinians.

As the US-backed Israeli onslaught claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people, the majority of them women and children, Ocasio-Cortez in 2024 was tapped to serve as “Genocide Joe” Biden’s lead campaign surrogate for the presidential election. Taking on the assignment with enthusiasm, she hit the podcast circuit urging workers and students to “be adults” and vote for Biden.

Despite the best efforts of Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the phony leftists were unable to keep Biden’s re-election prospects alive. Once Biden was replaced by his partner-in-crime Kamala Harris, another loyal servant of US imperialism and supporter of the genocide in Gaza, Ocasio-Cortez was again deployed by the Democratic Party to give a “left” gloss to the thoroughly right-wing and pro-genocide candidacy of Harris and the Democratic Party as a whole.

In a shameless lie before the Democratic National Convention last year, Ocasio-Cortez declared that Harris “is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.” In reality, the Biden-Harris administration provided Israel with all the political, economic and military support required to carry out its ethnic cleansing campaign.

Following Harris’ electoral defeat, Ocasio-Cortez urged her followers to reject “sectarianism”—in other words, not to break with the Democratic Party—while blaming “white people” and specifically “white men” for Harris’ loss. Harris’ embrace of Wall Street, Trump’s border wall, and her pledges to continue “supporting Israel” and the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine were not among the reasons Ocasio-Cortez offered for the defeat.

The DSA responds

Ocasio-Cortez’s statement reaffirming her support for the Israeli military has provoked a crisis within the DSA itself. In a statement published on July 19, the organization said it opposed her vote against Greene’s amendment and was “deeply disappointed by her clarifying statement on her position on the Iron Dome.”

Notably, the statement did not call for Ocasio-Cortez to be expelled from the organization. How one can claim to be a “democratic socialist” while opposing efforts to block military funding to a state carrying out genocide was also left unexplained.

The DSA presented Ocasio-Cortez’s actions as if they were somehow contrary to the politics of the DSA itself. In fact, the DSA is a faction of the Democratic Party, and its politics are the politics of the Democratic Party. Support for Israel in particular goes back to the origins of the DSA in the right-wing, Zionist politics of its founder, Michael Harrington.

“First, the US should support Israel with the necessities for defending itself,” Harrington said in 1975, as a leader of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, the predecessor to the DSA. “Second, the US does have a peacekeeping role.”

Such words could be spoken, indeed are spoken, by Ocasio-Cortez 50 years later. In the intervening half century, the political establishment has shifted violently to the right and the DSA with it. It seeks to cover itself with left phrases and thus felt obliged to issue a pro forma criticism of Ocasio-Cortez’s vote. But this is just for show. In terms of class interests, the DSA represents the privileged sections of the upper middle class, thoroughly hostile to the independent mobilization of the working class against imperialist war and capitalism.