By Philip Klein
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
To his defenders, Zohran Mamdani, the frontrunner to be
the next mayor of New York City, is laser-focused on Gotham’s problems while
his opponents are obsessively trying to get him to take a position on a foreign
government.
In reality, there is a large body of evidence suggesting
that his opposition to Israel is not just one among many views that are
irrelevant to the kitchen-table concerns of New Yorkers, but in fact central to
his politics. He has said this explicitly and repeatedly.
In a virtual
talk to the Young Democratic Socialists of America conference in 2021 that
has gained attention because of his declaration that he was working with
socialists toward “the end goal of seizing the means of production,” he talked
about how his hatred for Israel is how he got involved in politics. He talked
about an academic boycott campaign he helped lead as an undergraduate at
Bowdoin College against study-abroad programs to Israeli universities. It was a
way of “bringing the issue of Israel, Palestine, apartheid to Bowdoin,” he
said, to make it “harder to ignore.”
He went on to state, “For me it was Palestine that
brought me into this movement.” His “journey of organizing . . . began on
college campus with Students for Justice in Palestine.”
In another
interview in 2021, he picked up this theme of linking local issues to
Israel: “There is the argument of connectedness in a kind of straightforward,
as a New Yorker, how much of your money is going over there, and how much of
your needs are unmet over here,” he explained. “In the same way when we talk
about defund the NYPD, the entirety of the push is defund the NYPD and re-fund
these different social services and things that actually create safety. And I
think we need to connect the struggles against austerity with the struggle
against the funding of Israeli apartheid.”
In 2023, he also argued
in favor of connecting the “hyper-local and international.” He said, “We have
to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced
by the IDF.”
These videos are not being dug up from his high school
days. They are all from the past few years — a time when he was an elected
member of the New York State Assembly laying out his political philosophy.
During his campaign, when challenged on his litany of
statements about Israel and Hamas, he has tried to make the opposite argument —
that all he really cares about is affordability rather than controversies about
a foreign country.
This is highly disingenuous. His opposition to Israel has
played a central role in his rise. And it has been the animating issue for his
most energetic supporters.
The left has been deeply frustrated because, even as the
Democratic Party has drifted away from Israel in recent years, most elected
Democrats are not yet quite where they are. For a group of people who have felt
helpless about their ability to change U.S. foreign policy, Mamdani is an
outlet — a way for them to strike a blow against Zionism that is within their
grasp.
Additionally, being opposed to Israel is a broader litmus
test. The assumption is that somebody who is willing to run for mayor of a city
with one of the highest concentrations of Jews in the world and to denounce
Israel must be the “real deal” on other issues of importance to progressives
and socialists.
Over the course of the campaign, Mamdani has stood by his
pledges to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and divest the
city’s pension funds from Israeli bonds while stating that he does not believe
in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
He is seeking to have it both ways, by benefiting from
all the energy being generated by his opposition to Israel while claiming it’s
a nonissue to New Yorkers whenever he is asked a question he wants to deflect.
To portray anti-Israel activism as ancillary to Mamdani
rather than the central animating force of his life in politics is an act of
gaslighting.
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