Zohran Mamdani Is Right About Israel

Edited by Sam Thielman

AS A BORN and raised Brooklynite, and frankly as a Brooklyn Jew in this season of anguish, I eagerly awaited Wednesday night's mayoral debate. (The politician who gave the best performance, I thought, was former Assemblyman Michael Blake, whom I don't plan to rank.) Municipal questions don't really concern this newsletter, much as they interest me, so I'm going to sidestep them for this edition. Instead I want to focus on a moment at the tail end of the debate, when State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani was asked a question about Israel. That question was fueled by the politics of the War on Terror in their post-October 7 incarnation, and that very much concerns this newsletter. 

The moderators asked the nine candidates for the Democratic nomination where they'd go on their first foreign trip, a weird question considering that the current mayor was indicted for taking bribes from a foreign country. But it provided an opportunity for Andrew Cuomo and a hedge-fund vampire named Whitney Tilson to say they'd go to Israel—and to see if Mamdani would risk the presumed votes of Jewish New Yorkers like myself by not saying he'd visit Israel. 

By this point in the debate, I was listening on my phone while taking my evening walk, so I didn't see how this appeared visually, and debates are performances, not essay questions, so grant me some leeway here. But first, Mamdani dodged, saying that he'd stay in New York and get to work, which is the answer I personally want to hear from my next mayor. When that drew derision from Cuomo and Tilson, Mamdani, understanding the trap within the question, attempted to speak to the root of it on his terms. Mamdani said he'd continue to meet with Jewish New Yorkers whenever and wherever. Also an answer I prefer. 

But then he and only he—the only Muslim in the race—was asked "yes or no, do you believe in a Jewish State of Israel." Mamdani answered that he "believe[s] Israel has a right to exist." The moderator asked, "As a Jewish state?" Mamdani replied: "As a state with equal rights."

Immediately Cuomo and Tilson pounced: Mamdani had not said he supported Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state!

That was supposed to be a game-over moment, consigning Mamdani to the fringes, after his people-powered democratic socialist campaign has skyrocketed the Queens state assemblyman from obscurity to within striking distance of the man whose name every New Yorker under 50 has known their entire lives. NBC 4, which hosted the debate, called Mamdani's answer "a controversial statement to say the least in New York City."

Tilson in particular fears Mamdani, and called his ideas "dangerous." In this, at least, Tilson is being rational. Mamdani's ascent to his impressive position in the race comes from championing a vision of improving the lives of the city's working class financed by taxing the obscene wealth of people like Tilson.

But Tilson, Cuomo and all the other critics can't articulate why Mamdani's answer is wrong, because they don't wish to air the ugly premises their criticisms rest upon. Their problem is that Mamdani's position is fundamentally humane—and, in my view, correct on the merits. And it's extremely important to recognize that now, while Israel is engaged in a U.S.-supported genocide in Gaza and annexation of the West Bank, and while Jewish pain and fear is being exploited as a justification engine for mass deportation in the United States, which includes snatching supporters of Palestinian rights off the streets of New York. 

LET'S BE CLEAR about our terms, because the demagoguery here relies on imprecision. NBC's write-up criticizing his answer didn't even quote it, only summarizing it as Mamdani's "perceived weakness… that he is unable to say that Israel should [be] a Jewish homeland." That isn't even what Mamdani said. But NBC provided an example of the conflation underlying the scandalization of his real answer: that a state giving equal rights to all its citizens, Palestinian and Jewish, can't be a "Jewish homeland." Incorrect. 

A state is not a country. A state is the governing structure of that country. And the only way that governing structure can exist legitimately is through consent of its citizenry under conditions of political equality. (And no funny business restricting the conditions of citizenry in order to hoard sovereignty atop an ethnic, religious, racial or economic hierarchy.) I hold these truths to be self-evident. And so if we're talking about Israel as a Jewish state, meaning one in which power and even sovereignty resides only among the Jews within its borders, then that is an unambiguously supremacist state of affairs. From the moment of its founding, Israel has sought to obscure the fundamental and irreconcilable conflict between being a Jewish state and being a democratic state. Its 2018 basic law settled the conflict in favor of Jewish supremacy. 

Notice that a Jewish state is not the same thing as a Jewish country. A country is not made Jewish by the exclusive Jewish exercise of sovereignty. A country is made Jewish by the presence of Jews. New York City is a Jewish city. It's a Jewish city because a whole lot of Jews live here. It's also not only a Jewish city. Similarly, the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea will be Jewish because a whole lot of Jews live there, and will continue to live there. It just won't, and can't, only be Jewish. It must, can, and will always also be Palestinian. 

If you ask me, Jews have the right to live between the river and the sea, because we undeniably have heritage there, and because migration is a human right, to say nothing of the obvious fact that it's where millions of Jews currently live. We just do not have the right to displace that land's other occupants, which is the project of the State of Israel. Jews lived in Palestine before the first wave of Zionist settlement (which looked down on such Jews for being Arabs, but that's a story for another time). Some of the most unbearable stories you will read in An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba come from Palestinians who acknowledge the distinction: "The thuwwar defended the city until May 1948, when the Jews—not our neighbors, but those who came from outside—surrounded Tiberias on three sides…"

But having a right to live somewhere is not the same thing as having the right to dominate somewhere that other peoples also live. Jews have no right to enjoy exclusive sovereignty between the river and the sea.  Everyone who lives between the river and the sea has an equal claim on sovereignty, freedom and safety. In such conditions can sane political coalitions and social relations begin to reconstitute. Such work will be heroic, after so much horror. But as you can read in this free e-book I contributed to, that's what a Free Palestine means. As long as Jews live there in great numbers, that place, whatever its inhabitants choose to call it, will be Jewish. 

I would be lying if I said my faith in a democratic binational state living in civic harmony was strong at the moment. But I don't need faith in it. I need only the urgency created by all the lives jeopardized by the current conditions of Israeli apartheid and genocide; and all the lives jeopardized by violent resistence to it; and all the lives jeopardized by paroxysms of rage directed at Jewish or Muslim or Arab or indeed American communities across the world in the name of vengeance for it. 

Many if not most American Jews, myself included, had Zionism laundered into our Jewish educations. We were taught that the end of exclusive Jewish sovereignty between the river and the sea will herald a second Holocaust. That is what lurks at the heart of the panic about Israel as "a state with equal rights." But what we must instead recognize is that the actual and not hypothetical ethnic cleansing existing between the river and the sea is and has been perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians. Right now, polls are finding four out of five Israeli Jews support that ethnic cleansing. This is not an abstract issue. It is an urgent one. 

As I once told Peter Beinart in a video interview for his newsletter, I'm a Brooklynite. I don't for a second actually believe I have any right to tell those who live between the river and the sea, of any background, how they should manage their political affairs. I say these things first and foremost as an expression of my own values and solidarity, and because the State of Israel presumes to act on my behalf as a Jew.

When Cuomo and Tilson, neither of whom are Jewish, try to scandalize remarks like Mamdani's, they will always have to speak in euphemism, because they have no way of explaining why a state of all its equal citizens is bad. They will not acknowledge the irreconcilable contradiction in claiming to support democracy in America against Trump's assaults and opposing democracy in historic Palestine—an opposition, by the way, materially and diplomatically supported by the United States. I doubt they've thought very hard about it, because in the style of politics they practice, they've never needed to. No editor at CNN made Edward-Isaac Dovere actually cash out what he thinks is substantively wrong with Mamdani's position.

This is the politics of the War on Terror. (Tilson got my attention when he said that after Israel he would visit Ukraine, calling them our "great allies in the Global War on Terror." It was surprising enough that he used the GWOT construction; but Ukraine?) They boil down a censorious exploitation of fear that empowers nativism and, indeed, oligarchy at the expense of democracy. They build on groundwork laid not only by the most shameful aspects of American history but also by the most shameful aspects of the suppression of Palestine. Those politics unleashed an assault on the lives, livelihoods and freedoms of Muslim New York. They did it all with the support, acquiescence or silence of the politically respectable. Twenty years after 9/11, a community activist who fought that persecution gave me a quote that I will never forget: "We expected some voice to support us. We did not see solidarity here. That impacted the community." Is that who we will be again, as ICE kidnaps our neighbors out of courthouses? As it cages and seeks to deport students for the crime of supporting the survival of Palestine? 

But 9/11 Politics—10/7 Politics, I guess we should say now as well—are not inevitable. They can be defeated, if people and their leaders are willing to confront them. And as someone who, I suppose, has never truly been able to move on from 9/11, it is important to me that these politics be confronted and defeated in New York City. 

THE MUSLIM BAN IS BACK, only this time it's Muslim-Plus, befitting the 2025 incarnation of MAGA. "Fully restrict[ed]" from entering the U.S. are nationals of Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Partially restricted are nations from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela. FOREVER WARS warned you on January 21, based on President Trump's first wave of executive orders, that Muslim Ban 3.0 was on the way. While no longer does Trump feel the need to predicate the ban on combatting "radical Islamic terror," there can be no doubt over the War on Terror provenance of this act: "[I]t is the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology, or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes." [Trump also appears to have sanctioned the wrong Congo. Congo-Brazzaville, or the Republic of Congo, has a population of six million people. The Democratic Republic of Congo, next door, has a population of 111 million and is probably what Stephen Miller meant when he or one of his staff drafted the order. But these people, in addition to being almost cartoonishly racist, are extremely stupid.—Sam]

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS CALLING THIS A TROOP DRAWDOWN IN SYRIA, but it seems to me more like a consolidation of a permanent (sorry, "enduring") U.S. military presence in the Syrian northeast. I have more questions than answers here, including whether the interim Syrian government led by Ahmed al-Sharaa will accept that in exchange for sanctions relief. Reports Stars and Stripes, "the Pentagon said it will reduce the American troop level in the country from 2,000 to less than 1,000 in the coming months." While "less than 1,000" can mean a lot of different things, remember that the officially-stated U.S. troop presence in Syria was (officially; there was dubious accounting factoring out short rotations to keep the official number smaller than the real number) 900 before the post-October 7 regional war.