What Zohran Mamdani Wanted to Say

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 16, 2025

 

In outgoing New York Times reporter Astead Herndon’s “perceptive” (read: unctuous) profile of Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, the reporter chronicles the “subtle shifts, even the rhetorical ones” that have presented the city’s voters with a “more mature left.” Indeed, Herndon seems to have failed to find a single New Yorker with a bad word to say about a candidate who won just 43 percent of the vote in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary and whose polling today among all voters languishes in the mid-40s — enough to eke out a victory in a three-way race, but hardly supporting the notion that his movement is an electoral juggernaut.

 

Mamdani’s finessed rhetorical élan betrayed all the subtlety of a car bomb this week when the candidate sat down with Fox News Channel host Martha MacCallum. There, the candidate muscled his way through a question about whether Mamdani believed Hamas should follow through with its obligations in the fragile peace deal that put an end to Israeli combat operations inside the Gaza Strip. For some reason, a figure who has never had an unexpressed thought when it came to issues relating to Israel or the Palestinian territories — a record that dates back to his founding of posh Bowdoin College’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter — couldn’t muster an opinion on the matter.

 

Would you believe that a candidate who has accused Israel of being a genocidaire, who has endorsed boycotting Israeli businesses and defended the phrase “globalize the intifada,” and who tacitly justified the 10/7 massacre on October 8, 2023, by contending that “a just and lasting peace can only begin by ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid” doesn’t “have any opinions on the future of Hamas”? If you do, there’s a spot opening up for you at the Times.

 

Mamdani’s evasion might have been ungainly, but it was reflective of the candidate’s perfectly sound appraisal of his own noxious views. If he were to articulate them honestly, it would be, at the very least, politically inadvisable. Fortunately for us, the candidate’s fans have been more forthcoming with their frustrations over the breakout of the very peace they’ve spent the last two years demanding. Take, for example, reliable Israel critic Peter Beinart.

 

In an October 14 piece for Jewish Currents, Beinart lamented the terms of the deal, endorsed by eight Muslim-dominated governments, which ratifies Israel’s permanent strategic interests in Gaza and legitimizes an indefinite IDF presence in the Strip. The columnist noted that this presence won’t disappear until Hamas disarms and the Strip is demilitarized — a condition he seems to think is so wildly fanciful, perhaps even undesirable, that it functionally licenses Israel’s reoccupation of outer Gaza.

 

“Israel’s defenders might argue that Israeli forces would willingly leave much of Gaza if Hamas laid down its arms,” Beinart wrote. “But resistance organizations rarely disarm before gaining some assurance that their people’s oppression will end.” Indeed, “while it may be tempting to believe that Hamas’s disarmament would halt Israel’s takeover of Gaza, it’s more plausible that Israel’s land seizures are part of a historic pattern of dispossession that began long before Hamas was born.”

 

Hamas and the various terrorist factions in the Strip, therefore, cannot disarm lest they sacrifice themselves to Israeli perfidy — the record of which begins, according to Beinart, at the state’s founding in 1948. That is the logic of permanent war and the sort of “resistance” that manifests in suicide bombings of commuter buses and pizza parlors, the slaughter of concertgoers, the decapitation of migrant workers, and the wholesale extermination of entire neighborhoods. In other words, the war must go on until Israel is pushed into the Mediterranean.

 

No wonder Mamdani sidestepped MacCallum’s question. Answering it forthrightly, as Beinart has, might occasion a less-than-flattering line or two in the Times‘ otherwise effusive coverage of the city’s likely next mayor. Ideally, the city’s voters wouldn’t know what they’re signing themselves up for until it’s too late.