New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is lucky. Some mayors are cursed with early snowstorms that cloud their entire tenure. Mamdani’s New York has been blessed with a Knicks championship and July 4th tall ships, with one epic Taylor Swift wedding and endless World Cup parties.
John V. Lindsay called being New York’s mayor the “second toughest job in the world.” The mayor serves 8.5 million residents, managing a $125.8 billion municipal budget, coordinating 60 city agencies, and 330,000 city workers. New York’s government is larger than the governments of 12 states, combined. On a given workday, 10 million people fill the Big Apple. The job generates a never-ending to-do list.
Nevertheless, Mamdani keeps finding time to bash Israel obsessively – continuing the age-old reflex and prioritizing of antisemites. As usual, it works. Anti-Zionism is Mamdani’s go-to, get-out-of-jail-free card. Whenever his anti-capitalist campaign slows, he riles his minions by yelling “Gaza genocide,” or promising to arrest Israel’s duly-elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Alas, 12% of his constituents, New York’s 960,000 Jews, suffer from Mamdani’s anti-Zionist demagoguery. Can anyone claim to be surprised that in his first six months as mayor, antisemitic hate crimes jumped 71%, as Jews absorbed 60% of the city’s hate crimes? The fish stinks from the head down: leadership counts, tone matters.
Paranoid Jews aren’t connecting the dots; evil Jew-haters are. The Palestinian national movement has spent decades interweaving antisemitism into its anti-Zionism (and its anti-Americanism). That’s why, when leaders declare open season on Israel, haters declare open season on the Jews.
Predictably, Mamdani will mouth pieties and feign surprise if some Jew-beating spurs headlines. But he can’t help himself. It’s in his programming. Last week’s New York Times interview devoted a surprising amount of discussion to a tiny country 5,710 miles away.
“We’re speaking about the World Cup,” he said. “It’s a moment where the entire world is celebrating this tournament. And even in that moment, the genocide continues for Palestinians.”
Huh?
It's a familiar leap. Flipping from the world’s most popular sport – soccer – to Mamdani’s favorite pastime – Israel-bashing – is the tell of the bigot, revealing obsession. All roads lead back to your fixation. The persistent genocide accusation, 10 months into the Gaza ceasefire, when true genocides involved mass killings, remains astounding – even as more Americans buy this Big (oft-repeated) Lie.
The busy mayor also wasted time threatening to arrest the Big Bad Zionist Wolf, Benjamin Netanyahu. “I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague. He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court,” Mamdani said, ignoring the ICC prosecutor’s sexual misconduct scandal overshadowing the charge.
Frittering away city resources on his posturing, Mamdani admitted to “an active conversation with our legal department,” about trying to arrest Netanyahu when he arrives on official business to address the UN.
America’s Constitution explicitly repudiates such treasonous grandstanding. As the Supreme Court confirmed in 1936: the President is the “sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.” The rarely enforced Logan Act threatens up to three years imprisonment for citizens who try conducting their own, rogue, foreign policy.
Arresting Netanyahu would violate the concept of diplomatic immunity, mock America’s 1947 UN Headquarters agreement, and compel New York City cops to break the American Service-Members’ Protection Act. That federal law, 22 USC Section 7421, prohibits any American official from cooperating with the ICC, including executing warrants.
Imagine New York cops doing Mamdani’s bidding, confronting Secret Service agents doing their jobs to protect an honored American guest. Such anti-Zionist lawlessness would undermine every Democratic complaint about US President Donald Trump’s contempt for the law. It would, however, earn Mamdani the (admittedly fictional) Jefferson Davis Insurrectionist Prize.
When anti-Zionism becomes a litmus test
It’s not surprising that many pro-Israel Americans find Mamdani’s all-consuming vendetta unnerving. It resounds amid Vice President JD Vance’s anti-Israeli government rantings, Ro Khanna’s posturing, and Rahm Emanuel’s delusional claim that presidents have never handcuffed Israel.
Meanwhile, a cabal of Mamdani comrades, equally fixated on Israel-bashing, risks turning the Democratic Congressional Caucus into an outpatient clinic for pathological anti-Zionist, anti-Americans.
Rather than wringing our hands, it’s time to start drawing lines. By mainstreaming these anti-capitalist, anti-American, anti-Zionist (un)Democratic Socialists, the Democrats make it easy for Republicans to create litmus tests of their own.
They should run ads asking every Democrat: “In 2019, New York’s congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier tweeted: ‘I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.’ Do you agree? Do you also sully the flag? If not, why don’t you oppose her candidacy?”
Similarly, American Jews should learn from the Mamdani experience that fighting anti-Zionism doesn’t make them one-issue voters; just simply patriotic and self-protective. Just as Democratic candidates, no matter how anti-Trump, become toxic if they bait gays, demean blacks, or assault women, American Jews must demand zero tolerance for candidates from either party who are anti-Zionist in intent – which makes them antisemitic in effect.
In a time of rising antisemitism – and growing intolerance throughout America – the question isn’t political, it’s existential.
This, then, should become a moment of Jewish empowerment. Jews must learn the power of “no,” the art of dissent, the thrill of standing tall, even if alone.
And let all Americans learn from those Jews who take back the Zionist night. They should turn acts of defiance into expressions of affirmation, embracing Jewish tradition, Zionist ideology, and those two lands of liberal-democratic possibility – Israel and the United States of America.
The writer is an American presidential historian and a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. For America’s 250th, he published, with David Suissa, 250 Reasons to Thank America, and, with the JJPI, The Essential Guide to the US-Israel Partnership: The 250th Anniversary Edition.