Israel's Far Right Did Mamdani a Favor
The far-right ministers who crashed the parade handed Israel's critics a gift and its friends a reason to stop showing up.
There’s nothing my almost-three-year-old loves more than waving a flag, especially an Israeli one. Around Independence Day he sings “HaDegel Sheli” (“my flag”), the little blue-and-white flag song on repeat, stopping in his tracks at every flag he passes to sing to it, like he’s wishing it happy birthday.
We live in Tel Aviv now. Before he was born, I lived in New York, where I marched in the Israel Day Parade up Fifth Avenue. The city is home to the largest Jewish community of any single city in the world, larger than the total population of Tel Aviv proper, and about equal to the combined Jewish-Arab population of Jerusalem. To me, the parade never felt like a statement. It felt like part of the city, a street fair you went to because it was a nice way to spend a late spring weekend day and because everyone went. Nobody stood at the barricade checking your politics first.
When I think about that parade, I think about how much I want to take my kids to it.
What was different this year? The people who run it know. Eric Goldstein, who heads the UJA-Federation, one of the sponsors of the parade, told the crowd from the stage that the parade “used to be a simpler time,” when you could march apolitically and just celebrate the country.
Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana led the largest delegation of Israeli lawmakers the parade had ever drawn, up Fifth Avenue under a banner that read “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists.” It was billed as a show of strength, Israel turning out for the one American city where its name has taken the worst beating.
Two particularly extreme government officials, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, weren’t part of what the organizers had arranged. The JCRC, which runs the parade, said it didn’t know who from the Israeli government would be coming.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu walked at the front anyway.
Smotrich, who said the West Bank village of Huwara should be wiped off the map, has spent his term turning annexation into a matter of paperwork and looking away from rising settler violence (insisting, contrary to any reasonable standard, that settler attacks aren’t terrorism and giving the Greater Israel crowd an enthusiastic spokesman in the cabinet).
Amichai Eliyahu went on the radio in the first weeks of the war and named a nuclear bomb on Gaza as one of the options.
Another official who joined the parade was Minister for Development of the Periphery, Negev, and Galilee Yitzhak Wasserlauf, a leading member of Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power). Otzma is a Kahanist party, and believe it or not, Israel itself once outlawed its predecessor, Kach, banishing it from politics for its virulent racism. Now its heirs wield considerable influence in the government. You could not pick three figures more precisely tuned to make a liberal American Jew flinch, and there they were, in the front rows.
The only protest along the route came from a handful of left-wing Israelis, holding signs about a shared Israeli-Palestinian future, objecting to the ministers’ very presence.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani skipped the parade, the first mayor to do so in the six decades it’s been held, and his absence was the story of the week. He'd said during his campaign that he wouldn't march, and he repeated it the week before. So whatever Mamdani was protesting, it wasn’t them. He was refusing to celebrate Israel, and he would have refused no matter who marched. Then the ministers walked to the front and gave his boycott a new face. What was a rejection of the country now looked like a principled refusal to stand with its worst ministers, a far easier thing to defend. They handed him a cover story he hadn’t earned.
If this were only the parade, I’d write it off as a bad Sunday and move on. But it isn’t. A week earlier, Channel 12 reported that Netanyahu wants Caroline Glick as Israel’s next consul general in New York. That posting is Israel’s ambassador to the heart of the Jewish diaspora. It’s the closest thing Israel has to an embassy to American Jews, the office that handles the federations and the donors and the campuses and the synagogues, where the whole relationship gets managed day to day.
Glick has spent a career telling most of those synagogues they’re doing Judaism wrong. She’s said the Reform and Conservative movements, with which the majority of American Jews are affiliated, should be cut off from Israeli state funding. She’s accused them of sliding into anti-Zionism. She wrote a whole book arguing for the annexation of the West Bank. And Haaretz’s sources say that as Netanyahu’s adviser, she worked the plans to push Palestinians out of Gaza. This is who he wants speaking for the State of Israel to American Jewry.
So I return to the banner raised ahead of the official Israeli delegation at the parade: “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists.” That’s a real constituency, and a significant one. It’s also the one that got treated worst on Sunday. These are the people who put up the buildings and write the checks for the American Jewish community, who’ve spent over two years now making Israel’s case in rooms that empty out a little more each month, taking the professional hit, losing the friendships over it. Tens of thousands of them turned out. Now they’re met—on Fifth Avenue, at the Israeli consulate—by extremists who tell them their kind of Zionism is the wrong kind.
That’s the part that should worry us Israelis. A country can survive without hardline critics, people like Mayor Mamdani who would never support it under any circumstance. Israel’s been losing them for years and it’s still here. But wear down the people who are still willing to argue our case, and that is much harder to win back. A friend who feels used doesn’t say so. At a certain point, they just get exhausted and stop being a friend.
I know that we can never solve antisemitism of antizionism, I know there's no good way to fight a war. I know were all tired of hearing about "PR." But its irksome when people tell me that Israel can't possibly do better at it when they consistently don't even try and, in fact, make such bone headed moves all the time.
It seems like they have just given up on communicating with liberals altogether, have given up on being at least somewhat apolitical. It is a horrendous choice given the very liberal demographics of the diaspora.
Where is our generation's Abba Eban?
Thank you for so articulately putting my thoughts into words. Marching with university faculty against antisemitism was so exhilarating. When I found out later that Smotrich was at the head of the parade, I was instantly deflated. What a slap in the face. Exactly as you described.