NYC Mayor Race Shows Support for Israeli Policy Cost Votes Big Time
Dems better learn this lesson
The most remarkable thing about Zohran Mamdani’s unexpected win of the Democratic mayoral nomination isn’t just that a self-described socialist is now poised to run New York City.
It’s that he did it while loudly, unapologetically opposing Israel’s war in Gaza—and still won big in the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel.
What no one expected: that Mamdani’s outspoken views on Gaza—his refusal to denounce slogans like “Globalize the Intifada,” his call for Netanyahu’s arrest—would not tank his candidacy. “It was not supposed to happen this way,” Spaeth notes, “not in a city with nearly 1 million Jews... Mamdani’s opponents predicted that his positions on Israel... would sink him.” But it won him a majority of Jews under 40 and (with the help of his Jewish running mate Brad Lander) a large chunk of their elders, too.
Mamdani shattered the stereotype that the left’s base is limited to a narrow group of elite whites. He “outperformed expectations in nearly every demographic,” according to Spaeth.
Pew polling shows nearly 70 percent of Democrats now have an unfavorable view of Israel. Yet the party establishment behaves as if unwavering support for Israel remains untouchable orthodoxy. “An article in Politico about the lessons Democrats are drawing from Cuomo’s defeat did not contain a single mention of Gaza or Israel,” Spaeth notes.
This self-deafening is familiar. “Democrats have an odd habit of tuning out their own supporters even when those supporters are practically screaming at them to listen,” he writes. The same happened on crime and immigration. But Israel remains the third rail—untouchable, even as it bleeds support from the party's own base. (And Republicans, too!).
Nowhere was that hypocrisy more blatant than in the wake of Trump’s strike on Iran. “Many Democrats, including Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, refused to condemn [it],” Spaeth writes. “The consistent, principled thing to do would have been to oppose the strike outright, but Democrats... instead offered toothless criticisms... to please whom, you may ask? Nearly 80 percent of Democrats oppose them.” The answer: billionaire and millionaire donors taking direction from AIPAC.
With Mamdani the heavy favorite going into the general election, Israel’s defenders are frantically pushing back. High-profile Democrats—Schumer, Jeffries, Hochul—won’t endorse him. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who desperately needs to be primaried, slammed his rhetoric. (She apparently thinks he’s as terrible as ex-Senator Al Franken, whose expulsion from the Senate she organized.)
But the voters have spoken. “More loudly than ever, Democratic voters... have declared their opposition to the seemingly unbreakable bond between the Democratic political class and the current Israeli regime,” Spaeth writes. “When given an actual choice... Democratic voters broke hard for the alternative to the status quo... raising the possibility of primary debates over this issue throughout the country.”
Will the Democrats listen? That’s the question. Spaeth closes with a comparison to Obama, who once embodied the party’s ability to evolve, particularly after it supported the Iraq War.
“In its embrace of Obama, the party showed it had the capacity to adapt, to listen to reason, to recognize mistakes. He gave people a reason to believe in liberalism again, redeeming its sins. But the once clear-eyed and daring Obama, like so many others in his party, has lost his voice. He has been silent about Mamdani and the mayor’s race.” He’s been silent on Gaza, too.
But then Democrats, including Obama, do not exactly fight Trump’s plot against America with any energy either. Where is FDR when we need him?
Mamdani? AOC? Sherrod Brown? Jamie Raskin? Pramila Jaypal? Or Gavin Newsom, if he continues on his current path. I don’t know. But I do know this: fascism will not be defeated by moderate stand-for-nothing Democrats, mouthing lying pieties about “our democratic ally, Israel,” and pretty much everything else.
I was taken by this quote from Ezra Klein (not someone with whom I agree all that much):
One thing I have just appreciated about Mamdani and the Mamdani-Lander alliance as a Jewish person, it’s very important that it is possible and understood to be possible that you can be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic.
I’m not anti-Zionist in that way. I’m a kind of two-state solution person who doesn’t really believe that’s possible. I’m not sure what I think is plausible at this point. But putting my own politics aside, I very fundamentally believe Mamdani is anti-Zionist and not antisemitic.
In my view, he did a very good job making that clear in his responses. Lander acted as a very important cross-validator for him.
But in a world where Israel is going to be as brutal as it has been in Gaza — and is going to play much more of a role of a regional hegemon militarily, which is what it has stepped into — people are going to have very strong opinions — including strong negative opinions — on what it means for there to be roughly 7 million Palestinians who do not have equal rights and who are under Israeli control.
It’s very important. You just have to be able to be against what the Israeli state has become and not antisemitic.
I think it’s an incredibly dangerous game that pro-Zionist people have played trying to conflate those things. Because if you tell people enough times that opposing Israel is to be antisemitic, at some point they’re going to say: Then I guess I’m antisemitic.
I ask myself who are these New York Jews who everyone fears. Part of them must be on billionaire's row and many are the ultra orthodox. These people won't change their minds,but this still leaves a large group fighting against what Israel is doing, I hope.