Israel and Palestine loom large in this issue of Catalyst. In our lead article, Ahmad al-Sholi offers a sweeping analysis of the Palestinian liberation movement since the 1960s. He suggests that in the wake of the genocide Israel has unleashed beginning in 2023, it is time to revisit some of the debates on strategy taken up by the Left, both inside and outside the movement. Al-Sholi argues that even while Israel has systematically undermined every effort at diplomacy over the past half century, Palestinians must face up to the profound limitations of military struggle in their specific context. He presents a sober analysis of what those limitations are, concluding that the only workable route to some kind of resolution to the Palestinian struggle is a combination of mass struggle and a reliance on international solidarity.

Complementing al-Sholi’s essay, Ran Greenstein presents an illuminating comparison of the South African anti-apartheid solidarity movement in the 1980s and the current one for Palestine. Greenstein agrees that the anti-apartheid movement offers lessons for the Palestinian one, including the importance of orienting the movement in such a way as to attract the widest possible support, as against ideological purity.

Even while the Palestinians reel under Israel’s genocidal violence, undertaken with the full support of the American state, politics in the imperial core is undergoing its own changes — chief among which is the astonishing election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City. Eric Blanc reminds us of another ambitious attempt at municipal governance by socialists, the famous experiment of so-called sewer socialism in Milwaukee in the 1930s. Blanc explores the conditions that enabled the Socialist Party to not only take office but also govern successfully and expand its electoral base. As he notes, these past experiences of city and municipal governance should be studied intensively by socialists today, since that’s the realm where they’re currently finding the greatest political success.