His message and governing attitudes, as the man in charge of the nation’s largest police force, have real consequences for the safety of Jewish New Yorkers.
Given the persistent abhorrence of Zohran Mamdani’s anti-Israel politics, his defenders have lately leaned into the argument that it doesn’t matter. He’s just running for a local government office, they tell us; why care about his views of foreign policy? Mamdani himself used this dodge in refusing to answer questions on Fox News about Hamas.
There are a number of good reasons to care. First, it’s central to his political identity. Mamdani is 33 years old (he turns 34 tomorrow). He has never held any sort of executive office and has done little as a state legislator, so voters really have nothing on which to judge him but his beliefs and words in the past. And as a New York Times profile by Nicholas Fandos details, anti-Israel politics have been the driving force in Mamdani’s life, from his formative influences in his father’s academic circles to his own college activism with Students for Justice in Palestine, in which he was so radical that he cut ties with the liberal Jewish group J Street:
Mr. Mamdani’s activism came to a head his senior year, when Students for Justice in Palestine launched its campaign to persuade Bowdoin to join a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Mr. Mamdani, who photos show stuck an “End Israeli Apartheid” sticker to his laptop and sometimes wore a kaffiyeh, wrote that the institutions “are both actively and passively complicit in the crimes of both the Israeli military and the Israeli government in all its settler-colonial forms.” . . . “It’s becoming a mainstream issue,” he said in a polished interview with a local public radio station. “You can’t be progressive anymore on everything but Palestine.”
Those interests brought him into politics in 2015: “Mr. Mamdani saw the potential to build a city-scale politics of the sort he had been thinking about since he was young: unabashedly progressive, Muslim-friendly and pro-Palestinian. In the years that followed, he has said, his interest in B.D.S. [the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement] brought him to the Democratic Socialists of America.” They also dominated his approach after being elected to the state assembly in 2020:
“Every single one of us who is committed to dignity in Greenpoint has to be committed to dignity in Gaza,” he said at a demonstration outside Israel’s mission to the United Nations in May 2021, months into his first term. “We will hold every single person who has power in this city, in this state and in this country accountable for their incomprehensible fealty to the Israeli state,” he said.
At a Jewish Voice for Peace rally around the same time outside the Brooklyn home of Senator Chuck Schumer, the country’s highest-ranking Jewish leader, he called the Assembly “a bastion of Zionist thought” and lamented that he had colleagues who could not see “that separate laws for separate people is not all right in this country or in any country.” . . . Mr. Mamdani introduced state legislation threatening to strip New York nonprofits of their tax-exempt status if their funds were used to support Israel’s military and settlement activity. . . .
I have detailed how that state legislation is flagrantly antisemitic.
Second, there’s no reason to believe that he has changed, or would drop the issue as mayor. Just this week, he told Astead Herndon of the Times that Democrats should reject people who are “PEP” — or “progressive except Palestine”: “That exception is one that I believe we should not only take issue with because of what it means for Palestinians and Palestinian human rights . . . but also, whenever you are at peace with the making of an exception, you make it easier to make another exception — wherever, whenever.” He has repeated his contention that he would use NYPD resources to arrest Israel’s head of state. As our editorial summarized his responses in last night’s debate:
Mamdani accused Israel of engaging in either an “occupation” or a “siege” of Palestinian lands, which is a clever way of indicting Jerusalem for having the temerity to either defend itself inside Palestinian territories or exist alongside them. He denounced Israeli “apartheid” and assailed its Jewish identity as a “hierarchy on the basis of race and religion” — news, presumably, to Israel’s Arab citizens, some of whom are members of the Knesset who regularly protest Jerusalem’s policies.
Third, like it or not, the Mayor of New York has always been entangled in foreign affairs. Rudy Giuliani kicked Yasser Arafat out of a Lincoln Center concert; Eric Adams was indicted for taking Turkish bribes. The United Nations is here. The city is crammed with foreign diplomats, consulates, and embassies. It is full of freshly arrived immigrants and foreign tourists. Foreign oligarchs invest in its real estate and make it a second home. It has an international airport and a major cargo seaport. It has been the target of multiple international terrorist attacks within living memory. A massive statue donated by France sits in the harbor, symbolizing the city’s relationship with the outside world.
Fourth, perhaps most important, Mamdani’s message and governing attitudes — especially as the man in charge of the nation’s largest police force — have real consequences for the safety of Jewish New Yorkers on the city’s streets. Embracing the anti-Zionist cause is not just another opinion about foreign conflicts. As I have noted before of the “Palestinian cause”:
The cause itself is violence, and like the radical Islamist project more generally (of which it is a component), it manifests itself in violence that is both organized internationally and recurrent worldwide, such that even “lone wolf” nutjobs are doing more than overreacting to “globalize the intifada” rhetoric; they are imitating the central modus operandi of the movement. Put another way: The violence is not incidental to the rhetoric; the rhetoric is incidental to the violence. . . . Even to describe it as “the Palestinian cause” is misleading. While appeals to Western leftists (and, increasingly, to muddle-headed isolationists on the right) may emphasize the notion that the Palestinian people deserve a homeland, the real energy and activity has always been about eliminating the Jewish homeland and restoring the entirety of the Levant to Muslim rule. That this would require the annihilation of the Jewish population of Israel is a feature, not a bug. It has been proven over and over that this objective cannot be squared with the tactics of normal politics, and that its proponents do not desire to use the tools of normal politics. When the cause itself is bloodshed, one cannot excuse the outbursts of bloodshed as anomalies.
This is why, even aside from Mamdani praising convicted terrorist supporters, retailing lies about Israeli “genocide,” and blanching at any criticism of Hamas (which has quite rightly been on the State Department’s list of designated terrorist groups as long as that list has existed) it is so alarming to hear Mamdani talk about “apartheid” and an analogy to South Africa and objecting to Israel precisely for being a Jewish state. The point of such an analogy is to destroy Israel, by denouncing not the failure to give the Palestinians control over a homeland of their own but rather to delegitimize the concept that Jews should have any homeland they control. To call Israel an apartheid state, on the grounds of how it treats people outside of its own national borders, makes sense only if you think those borders must be erased. All of which is a precondition to the destruction not only of the Israeli polity, but the citizens who seek its protection. Now, think of how a man with that mindset and rhetoric sets the tone both for street violence against New York’s large, historic Jewish population and for how law enforcement responds to it.