The Jewish Establishment’s Attacks on Mamdani Aren’t Only Illogical

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

This week’s zoom call will be at a special time, Wednesday at 1pm ET. Our guest will be one of the foremost scholars of US policy towards Latin America, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian Greg Grandin, author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and America, América: A New History of the New World. We’ll talk about how the Trump administration’s abduction of Nicolas Maduro fits into the long-history of US imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, and the world.

Cited in Today’s Video

The attacks on Zohran Mamdani for repealing two orders by Eric Adams related to antisemitism and Israel.

The texts of the Israel-related orders Mamdani repealed.

A Philosopher for All Seasons, a film about Yeshayahu Leibowitz.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Aron Wander and Nathan Goldman discuss Jewish sources about rebuking other Jews.

Israel bans Doctors without Borders and other NGOs from operating in Gaza.

On January 6, I’ll be speaking on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan and on January 26 with Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina.

On January 27, I’ll be hosting a fundraiser near Asheville for the Gaza Soup Kitchen, a grassroots initiative, led by the people of Gaza, that serves hot meals to thousands daily across ten kitchen sites. Born from a vow to ensure no neighbor grows hungry, their mission continues in honor of founder Mahmoud Almadhoun, guided by his word, Mostamreen, “we will continue,” said right before he was killed by a drone strike. 99% of funds raised go directly to feeding and supporting the people of Gaza. Register here: https://givebutter.com/FairviewNC (donation amount is $100 and address to be provided after registration).

See you on Wednesday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, Zohran Mamdani has just been inaugurated as mayor of New York and, unsurprisingly, he’s already under attack from establishment Jewish organizations. And these attacks are really predictable and, honestly, they’re really brain-dead, and, in a way, just engaging with them at all is kind of depressing because I think they serve, in a lot of ways, not as good faith arguments, but just basically as a way to, you know, create a political headache and a kind of cloud over Mamdani, and basically make it harder for him to focus on the work that he actually wants to do. But I still think, despite that, it’s worth explaining why these arguments just don’t make any sense. And they’re all basically based on this fundamental incorrect conflation of Jews as a group of people with the state of Israel.

So, the first thing that Mamdani did was he repealed an order by his predecessor, Eric Adams, to kind of make the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, kind of encoded in New York City policy and law. And the IHRE definition of antisemitism has very little support from actual scholars of antisemitism, especially scholars who work on antisemitism and Israel-Palestine. Its major supporters are the Israeli government and its kind of allied pro-Israel organizations around the world. And you can see why it has so little scholarly support when you actually look at it, right? You can see why it makes so much sense that actually Mamdani would have repealed it, right?

So, it has these examples of antisemitism. So, basically, if you do these things, this is like prima facie evidence that you are antisemitic. One of them is denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination—I’m quoting—e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor. But the State of Israel is explicitly premised on the idea that, basically, that Jews should rule, right? That this is a state for Jews, in which Jews have superior rights to Palestinians.

This is not a secret, right? David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel, said, this country has to have an 80% Jewish majority, because otherwise Jews couldn’t be sure that Jews would rule. And it was because of this, in large measure, that for more than half of the Palestinians who lived in Palestine under the British Mandate were expelled when Israel was created in 1948 in order to create this large Jewish majority. Many of them were expelled before the Arab armies even attacked Israel in May 1948.

And then Israel created a very different set of laws for the Palestinians that remained vis-à-vis, versus those of Jews, right? So Palestinian citizens were under military law from 1948 to 1966. When Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, it took control of millions of Palestinians who didn’t have the right of citizenship and the right to vote. It’s for all these reasons that Israel has now been declared an apartheid state by the world’s leading human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and its own leading human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Yesh Din, right?

So, it’s not antisemitic to say that Israel has a racist character, that it treats non-Jews—Palestinians in particular—in a fundamentally different way any more than it would be, say, it was an anti-Afrikaner bigotry to say the South African government is based on racist principles. Or if you were to say that the Chinese state, as under the Communist Party, is fundamentally racist because it treats non-Han Chinese people, for instance, in Xinjiang—Uyghurs—in a fundamentally different way. Or if you said that the state of Iran is fundamentally racist because it treats non-Muslims differently than it treats Muslims.

Now, one might disagree with these claims, but there’s nothing bigoted about them. You’re not an anti-Chinese bigot if you say the Chinese state under the Communist Party is racist, or you’re not anti-Muslim if you say that the Islamic regime in Iran is bigoted in the way it treats non-Muslims, right? Attacks on the nature of a state are fundamentally different than bigotry towards a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group.

A second example in the IHRA definition is, quote, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, right? But again, why is there something antisemitic about comparing Israel to the Nazis? Why is it that we can compare the Trump administration all day and night to the Nazis, and lots of other governments that we think are doing bad things, right, but we can’t compare Israel to the Nazis? Again, the examples may be good, or they may not be, depending on the specific analogy you’re drawing, just as it could be with Trump or not. But why is it an act of anti-Jewish bigotry, right?

In fact, there’s a long, long history of Israelis invoking these very analogies. One of my heroes, Yeshayahu Leibowitz—I just watched this wonderful film about him a couple of nights ago—one of Israel’s most important kind of social critics and philosophers and theologians over many, many, many decades, literally was associated with the term, with using the term Judeo-Nazi to describe Israel’s behavior towards Palestinians. He used it all the time, right, as a way of trying to suggest, not that he said that Israel was setting up gas chambers, right, but that there were things that Israel was doing that had something in common with the way the Nazis behaved, just like fascist or authoritarian or racist governments often have certain things in common, right? Yeshayahu Leibowitz, to state the obvious, was not an antisemite, and the fact that he used the term Judeo-Nazi was not evidence that he was practicing antisemitism.

The other thing that Mamdani’s under attack for doing is by repealing this order that basically said that New York could not divest from or in any way sanction the state of Israel. And again, but you see in this order that Mamdani has now repealed exactly the same conflation of saying that there’s something anti-Jewish about basically taking policies that would divest city money from the state of Israel. So, the Adams administration order starts by saying: Whereas it is unlawful for an agency to deny our contract because of the actual or perceived race, creed, color, national origin, age, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or alien or citizenship status of the owners of the bidder or proposer. And then it goes on to say: whereas that, you can’t divest city funds from Israel.

But again, this makes no sense, right? If the state of New York were to say, we’re not going to invest anymore our pension funds in Sudan because they’re committing terrible human rights abuses, right? Would anyone say this was an anti-Black bigotry? Or if New York imposed sanctions and divested from China? From all I know, New York may be doing that already. Certainly, the U.S. government has lots of sanctions against countries like Sudan, China, many other countries that accuses of human rights abuses. Would anyone say this was an anti- act of Chinese bigotry? And if the Chinese organizations in New York said, this is anti-Chinese bigotry because you were divesting funds to protest and oppose what China was doing in Xinjiang or Hong Kong, or wherever, would anyone take that claim seriously? No, I don’t think they would make that claim because it’s so ridiculous. And in fact, it would put themselves at risk to associate themselves as an ethnic, racial group in New York City with the actions of this state.

Now, the idea of divesting from Israel is based on the idea that Israel is committing grave human rights violations against the Palestinians, and that this would be a tactic, a strategy, in order to try to get to stop doing that. Now, you can debate whether you think Israel is committing those human rights abuses, and whether you think this would be a good strategy to get it to stop. But it has nothing to do with your attitude towards Jewish people because Jews and Israel are not the same thing, right? This is why these debates are so painful, because this should be obvious, right? But the entire attack on Mamdani is based on this constant conflation of the two.

So, you know, the Anti-Defamation League, and the New York Board of Rabbis, and the UJA, they all basically attacked Mamdani and said, quote, singling Israel out for sanction, parenthetical—Mamdani’s not singling Israel out. Adams singled Israel out by basically saying that this was one country, as far as I know, the only country that under New York City law now you were not allowed to boycott, right? So, he was singling Israel out for an exemption against the idea that there could be any kind of boycott based on human rights concerns, right? So, Mamdani is just basically saying that no state should have an exemption. So, he’s not singling Israel out.

Anyway, they go on to say, singling Israel out for sanction is not the way to make Jewish New Yorkers feel included and safe. But again, the State of Israel is one thing. Jewish New Yorkers are another. There are a lot of Jewish New Yorkers. I’m one of them. Some of them hate Mamdani and really support Israel, and will be very angry at what he’s done, and will think this is antisemitism. But there are a lot of other Jewish New Yorkers who, like Mamdani, supported him, and actually agree with his views about Israel, right? So, it’s just nonsensical to equate Jewish New Yorkers as a group of people with the state of Israel.

And in fact, doing that again and again and again actually undermines Jewish safety because it sends the message that people who have a problem with the state of Israel, therefore, also should have a problem with Jewish New Yorkers because, essentially, they are one and the same. And then if someone actually, God forbid, does take out their hostility towards the state of Israel against Jewish New Yorkers, we rightly accuse them of bigotry because Jewish New Yorkers are not responsible for what the state of Israel does. And yet, it is exactly that conflation that you see in these attacks on Mamdani, which is the reason that they’re so nonsensical and so harmful, actually, not only to the effort to basically deal with Israel’s abuses of Palestinian human rights, but also to the effort to keep Jews in New York safe.

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