On Tuesday, Missouri Democratic Representative Cori Bush became the second member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to lose a primary election to an opponent funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The pro-Israel group spent some $8.5 million in support of Bush’s challenger, St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell.

With over 95 percent of the vote counted, Bell garnered over 63,000 votes to Bush’s roughly 56,500, giving Bell 51.2 percent of the vote to Bush’s 45.6 percent. The 56,500 votes received by Bush on Tuesday is some 9,000 less than the over 65,300 she received in the 2022 primary and over 17,000 less than the more than 73,200 votes she received in the 2020 primary, when she ousted longtime incumbent Lacy Clay.

In the heavily Democratic district, Bell is expected to defeat his Republican opponent, Andrew Jones, who barely defeated his two opponents in the Republican primary, garnering only 4,200 votes.

Bush is the second member of the DSA, a faction of the Democratic Party that postures as “socialist,” to lose a primary election this year to an AIPAC-backed challenger after calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. In June, New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman was defeated by the executive of Westchester County, George Latimer. Bell, like Latimer, was supported in his efforts to oust a fellow Democrat by current and former Democratic politicians and local trade union bureaucrats.

In her concession speech Tuesday night, Bush attacked AIPAC, telling her supporters, “AIPAC, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.” Asked by a reporter Wednesday if the Biden administration had a response to Bush’s comments, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre condemned Bush’s “inflammatory political rhetoric,” characterizing it as “divisive” and “incredibly unhelpful.”

“It is important to be mindful in what we say and how we say it, but we cannot have this type of inflammatory divisive language in our political discourse, not now, not ever,” Jean-Pierre added.

While the crimes committed in Gaza by the US-supplied Israeli military have already provoked shock, anger and revulsion across the planet, new and more terrible war crimes are on the agenda, both in the Middle East and in the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, regardless whether Kamala Harris and Tim Walz or Donald Trump and J.D. Vance ascend to the White House in January 2025.

Bush, Bowman and the DSA claim to oppose the genocide in Gaza, even as they campaign to reelect the administration that has spearheaded the US-Israeli genocide and is leading and escalating the war in Europe that threatens to trigger a nuclear holocaust. That war, which is connected to the Gaza genocide as a separate front in a US imperialist global war drive that ultimately includes China, the DSA either tacitly or openly supports.

The only social force capable of putting an end to the wars abroad and redirecting those funds towards pressing social needs is the international working class, organized independently of all capitalist parties on a socialist, internationalist and anti-capitalist program.

Jean-Pierre’s comments attacking Bush reflect the fear within the ruling class that widespread anti-war sentiment in the working class will continue to grow as the genocide in Gaza enters its 11th month and the war in Ukraine against Russia nears its third year. Bush’s defeat is part of a drive by dominant factions of the Democratic Party and the financial oligarchy to purge any semblance of anti-war sentiment within the party, while elevating CIA Democrats and trusted Pentagon officials such as Democratic US House candidate from Virginia Eugene Vindman.

Bush, like Bowman, was elected to Congress in 2020 and quickly joined “The Squad,” a group of so-called “progressive” lawmakers led by DSA Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, Bush, like every Democratic House member, voted earlier this year to send over $60 billion in military and financial support to the fascistic Zelensky regime in Ukraine. With US support, Zelensky has blocked elections and imprisoned anti-war activists, including 25-year-old Ukrainian Trotskyist leader Bogdan Syrotiuk.

Bush coupled her support for imperialist war abroad with attacks on the working class domestically. In 2022 she, alongside Bowman and Ocasio-Cortez, voted to block railroad workers from striking after they rejected a pro-company contract imposed on them by the Biden administration with the support of the trade union bureaucrats.

While hemorrhaging members, the DSA, fulfilling its role as a vote herder for the Democratic Party, boasted on its X/Twitter account before Tuesday’s primary that it had organized over 200,000 phone calls in support of Bush.

As of this writing, the national organization has yet to put out a formal statement on Bush’s defeat. However, on the same day that one of its most prominent members lost her seat in a primary, the DSA tweeted that Vice President Harris’s selection of right-wing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate “has shown the world that DSA and our allies on the left are a force that cannot be ignored.”

The DSA boasted that it played a “crucial role” in pressuring the “Democratic establishment into choosing a new candidate and backing down from a potential VP with direct ties to the IDF and who would have ferociously supported the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”

The DSA neglected to explain why Walz, an ardent defender of the Zionist state, who was hailed this past June by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas (JCRC) for his “long record of friendship with ... the state of Israel,” would give any less support to Israel’s genocidal policy than the Biden-Harris administration.

The JCRC noted that following Hamas’s October 7 incursion into Israel, Walz declared at a JCRC “solidarity gathering:”

Here in the state of Minnesota, we stand firmly with the state of Israel and the righteousness of the cause. ... All of us understand what’s coming. This is going to be a difficult time. But it’s a time of moral clarity of what needs to be done, what will be done, and the protection of Israel.