The Synagogue Siege Is a Taste of Mamdani’s New York

“No settlers on stolen land.” That’s how the “anti-Zionist” organization rallied its supporters to protest what it called a “settler recruiting fair” hosted by New York City’s Park East Synagogue. In reality, what the “anti-Zionists” worked themselves up into a lather over was the partnership between that house of worship and Nefesh B’nefesh, an organization that helps American Jews who want to immigrate to Israel work out the logistics.

Maybe the agitators who surrounded the synagogue, harassing and intimidating the American Jews inside it, are too thick-headed to make any distinction between Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Israel proper. More likely, they see all of Israel proper as occupied territory. Either way, their menacing efforts to hound and intimidate worshipers in an expression of their hatred of others who share that creedal affiliation is the textbook definition of prejudice. And hound and intimidate, they did:

The Times of Israel set the scene:

The protesters chant, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” “No peace on stolen land,” and , “We don’t want no two states, we want ‘48.”

“Palestine is Arab,” they chant in Arabic. One woman holds a sign that says “Zionism is a death cult.”

One woman shouts “You f***ing Jewish pricks” at Jews walking past. Another shouts “you’re a F***ing rapist and racist the two worst things in the f***ing world” at a man with an Israeli flag.

This was not an anti-war demonstration. The war is over — at least, for now. Nor was this a protest against Israeli domestic policies. As one demonstrator’s sign read, “Brooklyn out of Palestine,” which, while incomprehensible, just barely manages to convey the protester’s belief that American Jews, if not the whole diaspora, have no legitimate claim to the Jewish State. The fact that this rabble was bold enough to take its grievances with global Jewry to a house of worship — violating, at least, the spirit of the American civic commitment to the free practice of religion — is a dangerous portent. This is where New York City is going in the coming Zohran Mamdani era.

Mayor-elect Mamdani proposed big plans on the campaign trail. But when it comes to policing, education reform, transit, and housing policy, he’s proven to be negotiable. Where Mamdani won’t give one inch is his devotion to the kind of “anti-Zionism” on display last night in one of the city’s most Jewish neighborhoods.

He is passionate in his conviction that Israel is engaged either in “occupation” when its forces are forward deployed in the Palestinian territories or laying “siege” to those territories when the IDF retreats to within Israel’s borders. Mamdani evinces a religious commitment to the evidence-free assertion that Israel is an “apartheid” state that maintains a rigid “hierarchy on the basis of race and religion.” That would come as a surprise to the Arab Muslim Israeli citizens whose rights are not distinct from those of Jewish Israelis; some of them serve as elected officials in the Knesset and show no hesitation when protesting Jerusalem’s actions.

He grants his endorsement to characters in New York City politics who conceive of the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a “manifestation” of America’s evils. “The idea we have to apologize for a terror attack that a couple of people did and then there is no apology or reparations for genocides and for slavery, et cetera — is something I find reprehensible,” said Mamdani’s choice to fill a state assembly seat in Queens who is herself a fellow Democratic Socialist and “anti-Zionist” activist.

Mamdani has given license to those who resented having to make the distinction between Jews and the Israeli government, and he has sought to harness the demonic energy Hamas’s massacre of Jewish civilians loosed upon the world. For over a decade, New York City’s Jewish citizens have had to worry that expressions of their religious fealty in public marked them for violence. They have every reason to expect that this untenable condition will only get worse in the years to come.

But the city’s Jews and their allies will not placidly accept their fate at the hands of the braying mob. If the city does not defend them, they will defend themselves. Should Mamdani hope to avoid the city’s descent into hostility, paranoia, and vigilantism, if not the return of neo-Kahanism, the mayor-elect is obliged to speak out and direct his transition team to prioritize deterring anti-Jewish harassment and violence. That is, if he’s interested in preventing that outcome. That’s a big “if.”