Mirah Wood, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s International Committee, recently described the image that moved her on Oct. 7, 2023: Palestinian fighters “in their little slippers” approaching Israeli tanks. In a recording circulated by Canary Mission, she called the attack a shot into “the heart of empire itself.”
Wood serves on the same committee whose members were reportedly flown to China as VIP guests, instructed to avoid subjects considered sensitive by Beijing, and asked to pledge that they will “support, defend and build understanding of Chinese socialism.” Such celebration of Oct. 7 and the committee’s enthusiasm for Beijing follow the same ideological logic. That logic is known as “campism.”
Campism divides world politics into two rival camps: The first is an “imperialist” bloc led by the United States. The second is an “anti-imperialist” bloc comprised of governments and movements that resist Washington. Political loyalty flows automatically toward the second camp, regardless of how its members govern or what they do to their own populations.
The term emerged during the Cold War to describe leftists whose loyalty to the Soviet Union survived Moscow’s violent suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. The related label “tankies” grew out of the same episode. Campism turned allegiance to a geopolitical camp into a test of political virtue. A state that opposed the United States occupied the correct side of history by definition.
Campism’s intellectual roots reach back to Lenin’s theory of imperialism. In that tradition, capitalism survives by expanding abroad, exploiting foreign labor and capturing new markets. American military power and defense spending are therefore interpreted primarily as instruments of conquest. Later theories of dependency added a global “core” that extracts wealth from a permanent “periphery,” aided by Western institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Once applied to foreign policy, this framework grants moral credit to any government that resists the Western “core.” Socialist, authoritarian and theocratic regimes can all qualify. The nature of a government matters less than its position in the global struggle. Opposition to Washington serves as evidence of legitimacy, while alliances with the United States serve as evidence of complicity.
The Palestinians became the flagship cause of this worldview during the 20th century.
At the 1955 Bandung Conference, 29 Asian and African states united around the idea of a Third World that sought solidarity outside the Western order. Israel was excluded, despite being led at the time by left-wing Labor Zionists, because of its alignment with the United States. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser placed Palestine on the conference agenda, and Ahmad al-Shuqairi, who later became the founding chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, represented the Palestinians.
Bandung’s final communiqué endorsed the rights of the “Arab people of Palestine.” Its deeper impact came from the ideological framework it helped establish. Jewish self-determination, rooted in thousands of years of continuous connection to the land, was recast as European colonialism transplanted onto Asian soil. Israel came to represent the entire relationship between the Western “core” and the colonized “periphery.”
Mao Zedong made the geopolitical meaning explicit.
In March 1965, Mao told the first PLO delegation to visit Beijing that Israel and Taiwan were “bases of imperialism in Asia.” He described the Arab campaign against Israel as part of the broader battle against the West. Israel’s destruction, according to this theory, would weaken the Western order itself.
Beijing backed this doctrine with material support. China became the first non-Arab power to recognize the PLO in 1965. It supplied Palestinian organizations, including Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine with weapons, military aid and guerrilla training.
Maoist doctrine also entered Palestinian training camps. An Arabic edition of Mao’s Little Red Book appeared after the 1967 Six-Day War, as Palestinian militants turned away from the failed model of conventional Arab armies and toward the Maoist concept of “people’s war.” The book became part of the curriculum in camps operated by rival Palestinian factions in Jordan and Lebanon. George Habash, founder of the Marxist-Leninist PFLP, called China “our best friend.” Nayef Hawatmeh’s faction embraced Maoism so thoroughly that opponents nicknamed him “Nayef Zedong.”
Camp membership determines which victims command attention and which abuses receive excuses.
The ideological line from Bandung and Beijing reaches into American politics today.
The DSA’s China Working Group promotes the goal of a “multipolar world,” language also used by Kremlin ideologists and Tehran. DSA platforms have called for American withdrawal from NATO, the dismantling of security treaties with Japan and South Korea, and sharp reductions in U.S. defense spending.
Campism presents American alliances as extensions of imperial control. It leaves little room for confronting expansion by Russia, China or Iran, since those states have already been assigned the anti-imperialist role. Their domestic repression and regional ambitions become secondary to their opposition to the United States.
The consequences of this approach extend far beyond political rhetoric.
Roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz. American naval power helps keep that waterway open, and the global economy depends on the credibility of that presence. A diminished American role would give greater leverage to whichever regional power controls the chokepoint. Energy prices, commercial shipping and the security of dependent economies would become more vulnerable to coercion.
The governments and movements treated by campists as natural allies against the American-led order offer their own model of power: mass surveillance in Xinjiang, executions in Tehran, Russian expansionism and attacks on Red Sea shipping by the Houthis. Hamas belongs to the same ideological camp because it fights Israel, and its conduct is judged accordingly.
Within this framework, the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel can be romanticized as a blow against empire. Palestinian fighters become symbols of resistance. Israeli civilians and the character of the attack recede from view. The same framework allows reports of forced labor in China to be dismissed as hostile “scandal stories.” Camp membership determines which victims command attention and which abuses receive excuses.
The DSA has grown into the largest socialist organization in the United States. Its members and activists helped elect New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and support candidates across the country. Ideas once associated with Cold War factions now have a growing presence in American electoral politics and influential parts of the Democratic coalition.
Campism offers a simple moral map of the world. America and its allies occupy the imperialist camp. Their enemies occupy the camp of liberation. Every conflict is interpreted through that division.
Israel holds a central place in this doctrine because it is portrayed as the West’s forward garrison in the Middle East. The hostility directed at Israel therefore reaches beyond disputes over borders, settlements or government policy. Israel’s existence within the Western alliance becomes the offense.
This helps explain why parts of the radical left can celebrate violence against Israelis, defend the Chinese Communist Party and promote the weakening of American alliances without sensing a contradiction. Each position serves the same political vision. China, Russia, Iran, Hamas and the Houthis all challenge an American-led order. Israel stands at its front line.
A doctrine that grants legitimacy according to geopolitical allegiance will repeatedly excuse repression, aggression and terrorism committed by the favored camp. Israel remains its most visible target. The consequences extend to every society that depends on open sea lanes, credible alliances and resistance to authoritarian expansion.
