On today’s two-year anniversary of the horrid Hamas Oct. 7 pogrom against Israel, there will be protests in New York both against and in support of Israel.
It’s not hard to guess which protests will have the sympathy of mayoral contender Zohran Mamdani, whose deep animosity towards Israel is a problem for hundreds of thousands of Jewish New Yorkers. While Mamdani says he respects all New Yorkers of all faiths, his stance that Israel does not have the right to exist as a Jewish state strikes at a core belief for many Jews. It is a position that smacks of antisemitism in its rejection of an article of faith held so dearly by so many.
Don’t let his rhetoric about what’s going on in Gaza right now fool you: This is not about Bibi Netanyahu and the current policies of the incumbent Israeli government. It’s not about Gaza or the West Bank or the IDF or Jewish settlers.
Many Israelis, in fact, oppose Netanyahu and his hard-right coalition. Americans like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer want Netanyahu out of office. But those foes of Netanyahu, Israeli or American, are not opposed to the existence of any Jewish Israeli government, like Mamdani is.
Mamdani conflates political disagreement with a stance anathema to many New Yorkers. Those who he supports, who call opposition to a government’s policies “anti-Zionism,” willfully ignore the historical arc that led to the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in the 20th century.
Mamdani himself endorses the antisemitic Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, to cut off all economic relations with the Jewish state. He has said he discourages use of the phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” but refuses to condemn those who use it — even as it is used as a rallying cry to harm Jews.
This is what he said when asked before the June primary about a Jewish state: “I’m not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else…. Equality should be enshrined in every country in the world. That’s my belief.”
However, with the exception of the United States and maybe France, just about every country in the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe is based on ethnicity or religion or both: Ireland for the Irish, Poland for the Poles, Vietnam for the Vietnamese, Kuwait for Kuwaitis.
The Jews are certainly a people, an ethnicity, as well as a faith. So should the Jews have a country? That is what Zionism is, national liberation for the Jewish people in their historic homeland.
And that was the decision of the United Nations in 1947, that there be a Jewish state in the British Mandate of Palestine, along with an Arab state.
Israel as a Jewish state, the world’s only Jewish state, is accepted by its Arab neighbors, Egypt, Jordan, UAE and Saudi Arabia. Even the PLO accepts Israel (that was the core of the 1993 Oslo Accords). Israel is accepted by Russia, by India, by China and just about the whole world. But Israel is not accepted by Hamas, not by Hezbollah, not by the ayatollahs in Iran, and seemingly, not by Mamdani. To them, Dizengoff St. in downtown Tel Aviv is occupied territory, so is Ben Gurion Airport and the Knesset in West Jerusalem. To them, there can be no Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East or anywhere.
The Jews, and only the Jews, are not entitled to a state, alone among the people of the earth. That is anti-Jewish. That is antisemitic. And it is a shameful affront to those killed and taken hostage on Oct. 7.
Mamdani stresses that Israel is not part of his mayoral campaign, and its four planks of free buses, rent freezes, free child care and five grocery stores, but he clearly has Israel on the brain.
He says that he first got involved politically when he cofounded a chapter of the anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin College. When he was the campaign manager for a state Senate campaign in Brooklyn, as the candidate later wrote, “Zohran and I talked issues. Palestine was most important to him.”
As an assemblyman, Mamdani is the prime sponsor of a bill in Albany to forbid state tax deductions by New York State charities that are involved in what the UN considers occupied territory.
But to the UN, and Mamdani, even the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem is occupied territory. Even the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, is viewed as occupied territory, so a New York State charity could not support historical or educational or archaeological programs at the Western Wall.
Mamdani can repeat as much as he wants that Israel is not part of his mayoral campaign (always focusing on the four planks) but it is absolutely part of his politics. As New Yorkers mark the Oct. 7 atrocity, the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, they should remember where Mamdani stands.
