As Zohran Mamdani ascends New York politics, liberal Zionists are helping pave the way

When Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic nomination for NYC mayor last month, I thought it was the end of liberal Zionism—the faction that insists that Israel is a “democratic” Jewish state. Having long acted as gatekeepers to keep anti-Zionist ideas from entering the mainstream discourse, liberal Zionism was at last exposed and discredited by the emergence of a movement for equal rights that delivered at the polls. 

I was wrong: the Mamdani election is, in fact, a moment for liberal Zionists; they are more relevant in Democratic politics than ever. Mamdani’s victory is turning out to be a huge blow to the right-wing AIPAC/DMFI/ADL branch of the Israel lobby. But Mamdani still needs the Jewish community and the Jewish establishment if he is going to move into Gracie Mansion, and liberal Zionists are his consorts. 

Mamdani’s coalition includes liberal Zionists; NYC comptroller Brad Lander cross-endorsed Mamdani ahead of the June 24 primary, icing the insurgent’s victory; and Lander assured J Street last week that “there are going to be Zionists in City Hall.” 

“I think [my endorsement] opened people on the left to say…OK, we’re still not sure that we like liberal Zionists, but they see that there are going to be Zionists in City Hall.” 

Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street made a plea for triangulation: a “bridge” inside the Democratic coalition between “the center left Jews who care about Israel and the really progressive pro-Palestinian rights activists.”

“There is a very, very important bridge that needs to be built here if we are going to beat the forces that I think we’re all up against, the forces that are anti-democratic, that are ethno nationalist, that are against the rule of law. These are the forces that are behind the Trump movement here and behind the Ben-Gvir/Smotrich far right in Israel…This is a global struggle… You [Lander] have a very important role to play in this. I like to think J Street has an important role to play in this. Frankly, I think Zohran Mamdani has an important role to play in this. We need to stay together for the larger fight.”

Mamdani appears to accept some of that logic. Mamdani is a pro-Palestinian rights activist with complete integrity. He started the SJP chapter at his college, he has endorsed BDS, and he calls the Gaza slaughter by its correct name – genocide. He knows what Ben-Ami denies – that Israel is inherently ethnonationalist, it didn’t start with Ben-Gvir. 

But Mamdani is now doing a listening tour of the Jewish community in order to understand why Israel supporters feel threatened by these positions, and in a meeting with business execs (surely many of whom are Jewish), he reportedly distanced himself from rhetoric he once defended, the expression “globalize the intifada.”

Whatever you think of Mamdani’s bridge-building (give me a barf bag), it was politically inevitable. Those of us who believe in Mamdani – and the number is huge and growing because the 33-year-old democratic socialist is such a generational figure of hope and change– do not fear that he will sell out the movement that claims him. We know that he will stand up for equal rights, not the cruel charade of two states that has brought endless suffering to Palestinians. 

Thanks to Mamdani’s victory, the Israel lobby is today in complete disarray. Its liberal and right-wing branches are at each other’s throats. Just a year ago, the rightwing lobby was able to knock off progressive congresspeople Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush over their pro-Palestinian stances, spending a ton of money against them in Democratic primaries with liberal Zionists keeping their mouths shut. Those tactics won’t work in the Democratic base this time around. Andrew Cuomo spent $25 million to take down Mamdani, and went into synagogues to say that “anti-Israel” candidates who call Israel a racist apartheid state need to be “stopped”– and Cuomo was trounced by an army of volunteers mobilized by Mamdani’s brilliant social media posts and political vision. 

AIPAC and the ADL are now dirty words in the Democratic Party, and AIPAC-spinoff Democratic Majority for Israel issues daily furies about the party being captured by extremists. Yes, a dozen leading senators met the war criminal Netanyahu last week, and party leaders still refuse to endorse Mamdani as they try to hold on to the party’s donor base. But rank and file Dems have turned sharply against Israel in opinion polls, and it is hard to imagine any plausible Democratic candidate for president speaking at AIPAC, an absolute necessity for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. That’s progress. 

Fifteen years ago, Samantha Power needed koshering by a vicious right-winger, Shmuley Boteach, before she could get a position in the Obama administration.

Today, Mamdani needs koshering, but it’s by the likes of Jerrold Nadler and Brad Lander. Liberal Zionists. 

Liberal Zionists are themselves in flux. Lander, Mamdani’s wingman at the polls and on Colbert, spouts the usual nonsense about Israel being a Jewish and democratic state (in fact, the country assigns lesser rights or none at all to non-Jews). But Lander also says that his own daughter has lately explained Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide to him. I.e., Lander secretly believes what any person with any sense can see: Israel is committing a genocide. And Lander has taken a strong stand against the absurd IHRA definition of antisemitism that includes harsh criticism of Israel (a definition that even Columbia University has adopted).

J Street used to draw red lines against the use of the word genocide and against BDS. Now it recognizes that good Democrats are going to adopt such positions. Genocide denial is about to become very unpopular in the Democratic base. 

The establishment is always the last lot to find out about these things. But just in the last week, in the New York Times, Mandy Patinkin says Jews are behaving like Nazis, and Omer Bartov says Israel is committing genocide. 

On the J Street call with Brad Lander last week, Ilan Goldenberg, a former White House negotiator under Biden and Obama, said casually that the U.S. has a problem mediating between Israelis and Palestinians because ‘we’re really good at listening to the Israelis and exactly what they want,” and “were not nearly as good to listening to Palestinians.”

That’s pure racism, expressed by a leading liberal. And in the Mamdani era, it is about to become unacceptable, finally. 

So yes, there may be Zionists in City Hall, but they are going to be respectful of Palestinian human rights, for once. They will be forced to.

It’s tragic that it took Mamdani’s primary victory to foster a political crisis for Israel and its lobby. You’d think that a genocide might have done that long ago. Nope, Biden and Harris, and the Dem leadership denied such a thing. 

But that goes to the crux of Israel’s existence: It has never tried to get along with its neighbors. No, it bombs them, from Yemen to Lebanon to Syria to Iran to Paletstine. It depends ultimately and immediately on the support of a superpower, and has from Day 1. So a crack in that support is big news.