I spent a short stretch in New York this week. Yesterday I was walking the Upper West Side with a friend when we passed a window with a Zohran Mamdani campaign poster, likely from the mayoral election, above Hanukkah stickers. I’m a big fan of Hanukkah (who isn’t?), but even for me, it feels a bit premature to have decorations up so early in the fall. Given how sun-bleached the stickers were, I figure they’ve been up through at least last holiday season.
We looked at the menorah sticker and the Mamdani poster one above the other. I wondered how the family felt about Mamdani on that day in particular.
That morning—on the anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attacks, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—the mayor released a statement. It runs about 200 words. It mentions Hamas, Israelis, New Yorkers, Palestinians, and “friends and neighbors.” It never says Jews. Roughly three-quarters of Israelis are Jewish, and so were most of the people Hamas killed that day.
After three sentences of fairly dispassionate criticism of Hamas, the statement switches tack. Now it’s about Israel. Mamdani calls the war a genocide, describes bombs dropped on ambulances and drone strikes on journalists, says New Yorkers’ tax dollars fund war crimes, and closes on occupation, apartheid, and American arms shipments, with one last line about honoring the dead. The section condemning Israel’s conduct in the war is more than twice as long as the section on the unprovoked attack that kicked off the conflict. The dead of October 7 are just the opening for an argument against Israel.
Now, I think this is a slap in the face to the Jewish community. If you read The Middle Ground often, you’ll know how critical I am of this Israeli government, both its statements and its conduct of this war, and Mamdani is entitled to his view of Gaza. My objection is to the day he chose. The mayor of the largest Jewish city outside Israel had a chance to write one statement about the Israeli dead on a day of significance.
Other Democrats managed both. Governor Hochul called it the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Hakeem Jeffries went further on Gaza than he has in past years, calling the killing of Palestinian civilians reprehensible and saying American policy must change dramatically, and Chuck Schumer also mentioned the devastation there. Jeffries and Schumer both still built their statements around the Israelis Hamas killed on October 7.
It’s very obvious that in the three years since the attack, the Democratic Party has shifted on Gaza, and Israel’s government has played a part in spurring on that shift. Despite their criticisms of Israel, there is comfort in knowing that their rebukes are grounded in a belief—which Hochul, Jeffries, and Schumer all share—in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. Mamdani does not have the credibility to make these criticisms because he does not believe that Israel should exist.
None of this is new. In his first statement, 36 hours after the attack in 2023, then-State Assemblyman Mamdani turned to Netanyahu and the occupation, paying lip service to Hamas’s crimes. Thirteen days later, he was calling Israel’s war a genocide.
Darializa Avila Chevalier, now the Democratic nominee in New York’s 13th District, was in Times Square the day after the attack at a rally where signs read “Resistance is Justified when People are Occupied.” Mamdani condemned that rally at the time, but he’s since endorsed Darializa.
But for all of Mamdani’s anti-Israel bona fides, for all of his equivocating in his October 7 statements, there’s always a more radical radical.
What surprised me yesterday was the reaction when the mayor went to a vigil in Union Square, organized by Israelis for Peace, a group of Israeli anti-occupation activists, to mark the victims on both sides. A protest that began outside City Hall, endorsed by Young DSA chapters and other leftist groups, marched to the vigil.
Protesters sat in seats meant for mourners, some carried signs showing Yahya Sinwar, and they chanted “traitor” at the mayor, who stood through the ceremony without speaking. One organizer, who said she campaigned for Mamdani, told Haaretz he is already losing supporters. Their stated demands were about his policies, and the groups behind the protest have accused him of capitulating to “Zionist pressure,” pointing to his antisemitism strategy among other things.
Hasan Piker, one of the left’s biggest streamers and a close political ally of the mayor, watched the footage on his livestream and called it “disastrous.” He said Mamdani “did such a good job” with his statement earlier that day, and that by trying to please both sides he’d “please neither.”
This is where the goalposts have moved: recognition of Jewish suffering, and any engagement with Jews who might support Israel’s right to exist, is unacceptable to them. He is experiencing now just a taste of what he’s helped make mainstream.
Two-thirds of Jewish New Yorkers opposed Zohran Mamdani in last year’s election. The mayor’s statement left them on the outside once again.
You are absolutely right here about his callousness towards Jewish suffering and his inability to refrain from trotting out his usual slander against Israel even on a day of mourning. The only line I take issue with in your piece is this: “Mamdani is entitled to his view of Gaza”.
He is entitled to oppose the war in Gaza (although what he would have liked Israel to do in response to a brutal terrorist attack remains a mystery) but he is NOT entitled to call it a genocide. That is a term with a very specific meaning and Israel’s conduct, while far from perfect, does not meet it. He is also not allowed to call a democracy, even one run by a leader he disapproves of, an apartheid state when Israeli Arabs have full rights in the country.
He is entitled to his opinions, but not his own facts.
Israel was bombing Gaza in September 2023 while holding thousands of Palestinians hostage in administrative detention.
To call the October 7th attack unprovoked is not accurate.
It was the overwhelming consensus of human rights experts that Israel was enacting an apartheid occupation against Palestinians before October 7th.
Mamdani is also right to condemn Israel's actions in Gaza much more severely than the October 7th attack because Israel's conduct is substantially worse.