A national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America said last week that she would have attended an anti-Israel rally in Times Square one day after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks had she been in New York City at the time, describing the terror group’s slaughter of more than 1,200 people across southern Israel as “inevitable.” 

“I think that Oct. 7 was largely inevitable. If you put people in an open-air concentration camp and you deprive them of rights, of dignity, of food, of the ability to live in safety, you have to expect that they are going to not take that for that long,” Megan Romer, who has served as a DSA co-chair since 2023, said in a podcast interview with The New Yorker’s David Remnick. “That is not defending any harm of civilians or non-combatants,” she added.

In the interview, Romer also came to the defense of Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Democratic congressional candidate in New York City who attended the Oct. 8 rally, which was organized by the DSA. The gathering was announced just hours after the attacks in Israel. 

Romer described “no defense or economic support for Israel” as a “solid red line” for the DSA. 

“Our position is a free Palestine with the capital in Jerusalem,” she said. “I think that could be safely read as a one-state solution.” When Remnick asked if she would have accepted the Camp David Accords negotiated by President Bill Clinton, which would have created a Palestinian state alongside the existing Israeli state, Romer intimated that she did not know what they were. 

“Good question. I need to look at what the actual specifics there were. I don’t know them off the top of my head,” she said. 

Later, Romer described Cuba as having “the most queer-friendly constitution” in the world. She said Hamas is not “queer-friendly,” but placed the blame for that on Israel. 

“I would not say that you can get a lot of social rights when you’re under siege,” said Romer. “I think that most queer people who have been killed in Palestine have been killed by Israeli bombs.” 

In the interview, Romer took a more open-minded approach to Russia. DSA has been critical of NATO’s expansion in Eastern Europe and U.S. military support for Ukraine, suggesting both are partially to blame for Russia’s invasion in 2022. 

Romer said that DSA does “not believe in pouring U.S. money [and] military weapons into anything.” At the same time, she criticized Russia as an “oligarchic dictatorship, which is hyper-capitalist, and Putin is this crazy right-wing oligarch.” 

She said the war could be ended with better diplomatic efforts, and said the U.S. should “be sending huge teams of diplomats” to figure out “how to get Russia off Ukraine’s back.” 

As a number of DSA-aligned candidates have won Democratic primaries in recent weeks, Romer has embarked on a media tour to answer questions about the group’s policies — including its support for abolishing the Senate, taxing the rich and defunding the police. She told Remnick that DSA now has 129,000 members after seeing a bump following the election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani last year.