Keffiyeh-clad activists turned on Zohran Mamdani yesterday, but he bore up under the heckling. These are his people, after all, and they’re doing the work.
You have to think that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had a grudging admiration for the mob of braying lunatics who heckled him during his appearance at an event memorializing the October 7 massacre.
The masked and keffiyeh-clad activists who hurled epithets and slogans at Mamdani — “coward,” “shame on you,” “Zohran, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide” — evinced the uncompromising ideological conviction toward which the mayor himself strove not long ago. Like Mamdani and his wife, they are true believers in the anti-Zionist cause. Why would Mamdani resent their activism? By attacking him, the crowd was doing precisely what their philosophy prescribes: targeting the symbols of Western authority in whatever form they take.
After all, anti-Zionism isn’t just about Israel. It began as a Soviet conspiracy designed to undermine the West. And if the American humanities professoriate had any interest in educating their charges, the hordes that have glutted America’s city streets and campuses since October 8, 2023, would know it.
I outline anti-Zionism’s underexplored history in my latest book, Blood & Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America:
After Israel’s founding, when the Jewish State was little more than an archipelago of communitarian Kibbutzim populated by a significant number of Russian expatriates, Moscow was not hostile toward Jerusalem. Indeed, the Soviets were among the first countries to grant Israel legal recognition in 1948. But throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the USSR and its Warsaw Pact satellites cultivated military and diplomatic relations with Israel’s Arab neighbors.
Those investments did not yield returns.
In 1967 and again in 1973, the Israelis defeated a coalition of Soviet-backed Arab states, a challenge to Moscow’s geopolitical position that could not go unanswered. So, the instruments of Soviet statecraft were applied to a propagandistic campaign to brand Israel an enemy of proletarian civilization. The author Izabella Tabarovsky was not shocked by the objectively shocking displays of violent antisemitic animus that erupted across the country after the worst one-day massacre of Jews since 1945. She had seen it all before.
“With antisemitic conspiracy theory firmly part of KGB’s thinking, the agency’s head, Yuri Andropov, elevated Zionism to the rank of USSR’s primary ideological nemesis,” Tabarovsky wrote. In Soviet publications and communiqués, Israel was portrayed as a mesmeric force—both an instrument of international socialism’s enemies in the West and, somehow, also a puppeteer hypnotizing Westerners into doing Israel’s bidding.
In Soviet academe, such as it was, “Zionology” became the subject of study. Zionism was declared a “world threat” typified by “militant chauvinism, racism,” and “anti-communism,” Soviet researchers maintained. It was an “anti-human reactionary” movement, an exporter of the evils of “colonialism and neo-colonialism.” The KGB took its new mandate and ran with it. Soviet spy residencies were instructed to collect information on “the plans, forms and methods of Zionist subversion” and work to “weaken and divide the Zionist movement.”
Tabarovsky continues,
Obsessed with the supposedly omnipotent Zionist lobby, the KGB sought to discredit it by forging racist letters in the name of Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League and sending them to Black American leaders and heads of Arab missions in New York. Believing that “virtually no major negative incidents” happened in the socialist bloc without Zionist involvement, the KGB blamed Poland’s Solidarity movement on the few Jews within its ranks. At the U.N., it helped engineer the passage of the “Zionism is racism” resolution.
“They cast Israel as a white imperial outpost in the brown global south,” Tabarovsky observed. “It was a lie, but it worked.” The degree to which the multigenerational grievances that animate Israel’s critics owe their origins to Soviet innovation is astonishing. Moscow’s assets concocted lies about Israelis forcibly sterilizing Arab women, engineering famines to starve Palestinian populations, and even planning to destroy Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque in advance of Israel’s reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple. Soviet media harped endlessly about Israel’s “criminal plan of liquidating the Palestinian people” and circulated false narratives surrounding the Israeli Defense Forces’ deliberate slaughter of women and children.
All those Soviet narratives — Israel the genocidaire, the neo-colonialist project that uses famine and rape as weapons of war — have been with us for a half century, and they’re with us still. Mamdani himself cannot help but accuse Israel of an “ongoing genocide” even today, a year after combat operations in Gaza ceased, with Hamas in control of 40 percent of the Gaza Strip and where a supposed famine has been replaced by an outbreak of childhood obesity and the population increased last year by a rate that rivals almost every other country on earth.
The cause exists independent of the facts that supposedly support it. That’s because the cause is much broader than Israel. Its activists are devoted to bringing down the West, including those who would work within its structures to seek incremental change — even radicals like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and, yes, Zohran Mamdani.
The mayor knows this. Until very recently, at least, he was a fellow-traveler. So, perhaps, behind the stony expression he maintained throughout his heckling, Mamdani repressed a sly smile. These are his people, after all, and they’re doing the work.