That’s Yiddish for enough already.
Let’s all take a deep breath and cut people some slack.
The hyperbolic outrage on the part of Israeli diplomats at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s most recent comments regarding Israel camouflages an unwillingness to acknowledge what he actually said. Speaking with ABC’s Jonathan Karl this past Sunday, Mamdani stated that (a) “I support the State of Israel as a state with equal rights,” and (b) “I think any state that privileges one religion over the other is one that I cannot support, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.” This happens to be consistent with what Mamdani has said in the past.
Specifically, he did not call for the eradication of Israel as a nation state but emphasised affirmatively that he supported it “as a state with equal rights,” a concept firmly ingrained in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, even though right-wing Israeli governments and politicians have sought to undermine it in recent years.
In an article I wrote some weeks ago after the Salute to Israel parade on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, I criticized Mamdani for singling out Israel as a country with a religious identity and that “to the best of my knowledge Mamdani has not come out publicly in opposition to some 24 countries in the Middle East, North Africa, Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa that have Islam as their official state religion.”
I have no reason to believe that Mamdani ever read that article, but regardless, he has addressed my concern in this regard.
This doesn’t mean that Mamdani has suddenly become eligible for membership in the American Zionist Movement, not that he’d want to be. But it does mean that he is decidedly not emulating Hamas, Iran, or Hezbollah in calling for Israel’s destruction.
Moreover, let’s bear in mind that Mamdani’s position is not unprecedented. In 1942, a group of leading Jewish personalities in what was the British Mandatory Palestine, including the philosopher Martin Buber, Rabbi Judah Magnes, the president of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, and Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah, the women’s Zionist movement in the United States, formed Ichud (Union), a political party that called for “the establishment of the Jewish National Home for the Jewish people in Palestine” whose government would be “based upon equal political rights” for the Jewish and Arab peoples.
Fast forward to the recent creation of a new Israeli political party Makom Lekulanu (A Place for All of Us) to provide a “political home for Jews and Arabs who work toward peace, equality, social justice, and the fight against violence and crime.”
In the words of Alon-Lee Green¸ one of the founders of Makom Lekulanu and a leader of the Israeli Arab-Jewish movement, Standing Together, “It’s time to have a truly equal Jewish-Arab partnership. I don’t think this means an Arab representative in a Jewish party or a Jewish representative in an Arab party. Jewish-Arab partnership can start in the same political party.”
I am not suggesting that Makom Lekulanu’s views are representative of a broad cross-section of present-day Israeli society. On the contrary, I sincerely doubt that it will pass the threshold for membership in the next Knesset. But both Makom Lekulanu and Ichud before it are within the diverse, often contradictory ideologies that are integral parts of Israel’s identity and legitimacy.
My point here is that Mamdani seems to identify with the core beliefs of Ichud and Makom Lekulanu. This does not bring him any closer to tolerating, let alone supporting, the policies of the Netanyahu government, but, in my opinion, it certainly justifies treating him as an ideological adversary rather than a sworn enemy. And it could be – should be, in my opinion – the basis for dialogue.
But wait. What about his analogising the pro-Israel lobbying organisation AIPAC to “monsters”? Here, I fully subscribe to the open letter in which more than 700 rabbis and cantors from across the U.S. called this particular reference by Mamdani “dangerous, unacceptable and beneath the office he holds” and demanded an apology.
I, for one, am not persuaded, let alone satisfied, by his explanation that he was quoting an Italian Marxist philosopher jailed by Mussolini and that he “used the term to describe all those who are preventing the birth of a new world, not solely AIPAC, but frankly, Super PACs at large who are spending millions of dollars in deceptive and misleading ads that are blanketing airwaves.”
To be sure, words can be, often are, dangerous cudgels, and Mamdani’s use of the term “monster” with respect to AIPAC is one such cudgel.
“Swap ‘AIPAC’ for ‘Jews’ and it’s the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theory in the books,” Representative Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) pointed out on X. “That’s not criticizing a lobby. That’s laundering antisemitism from your podium as Mayor of a city with more than a million Jews.”
Still, it is unwise, not to say hypocritical, to castigate Mamdani alone for use of excessive – in this instance, grossly inappropriate – language.
Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter’s reference to the dovish, anti-Netanyahu but decidedly pro-Israel J-Street as a “cancer within the Jewish community” was just as bad.
And then there are the vitriolic references by a host of far-right Israeli politicians, some of them government ministers, to Reform and Conservative Jews.
The list goes on.
What I’m trying to get across is that we cannot, we should not engage in a scorched earth approach to Mamdani who, I believe, is genuinely trying to fight antisemitism in New York City and with whom we need to work in this regard for at least the next three-and-half years. Any more than we should condemn Israel qua Israel for Leichter’s equally offensive comment about J-Street.
A bit of nuance, a willingness to listen to someone else’s explanations, even if we do not find them satisfactory, and a readiness to dedemonize our political and ideological adversaries and engage with them in dialogue is essential.
As I noted at the outset of this piece, genug shoyn.