Mamdani Isn’t Moderating His Views on Israel
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji, played host this past week to another young married couple, who came to Gracie Mansion to break their Ramadan fast. A photograph taken of the dinner was softly lit and sweet, smiles all around.
The mayor posted the photo on social media the next day, along with a tribute to his guest, Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student and anti-Israel activist who is fighting a deportation order. “This past year has been marked by profound hardship—and by profound courage,” Mamdani wrote, describing Khalil’s detention by ICE last March. “All of this for exercising his First Amendment rights in protesting the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”
Mamdani’s decision to speak up for Khalil is certainly consistent with his past support for Palestine. It might register as an act of kindness. Khalil has had a very rough year indeed; ICE separated him from his wife right before she gave birth, and held him for 104 days. The Trump administration accused him of leading demonstrations at Columbia that it deemed anti-Semitic, seemingly targeting him for his speech.
But Mamdani’s publicized dinner party reinforces the extent to which opposition to Israel is central to his worldview—it’s not just another item on his ideological list; it’s at the very top. A few years ago, he said that the struggle for Palestinian liberation lies at “the core” of his politics and that it was the issue that drew him to the Democratic Socialists of America, which describes Israel as an apartheid, settler-colonialist state with fascist aspirations. During his mayoral campaign, Mamdani refused to recognize Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, saying that he supports its right to exist “as a state with equal rights,” which would end Israel’s role as a refuge for Jews worldwide. “I’m not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else,” he told a local Fox television affiliate. He has supported a boycott of Israel and promised to honor an international warrant to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he sets foot in New York City. Evidently, he will soft-pedal none of those views as mayor.
In his first months in office, Mamdani has moderated or compromised on several issues: He has praised the New York Police Department, chatted with Donald Trump, and persuaded the DSA not to endorse a challenger for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s seat. But the question of Israel and Palestine appears to be different.
[Michael Powell: The question-mark mayoralty]
New York City’s history is filled with mayors who voiced strong opinions on all manner of international issues and rarely hesitated to give voice to them. John Lindsay opposed the Vietnam War; Ed Koch heaped abuse on the Palestine Liberation Organization; David Dinkins spoke out in favor of dismantling South African apartheid; Rudy Giuliani ejected Yasser Arafat from a concert at Lincoln Center. For decades, New York mayors made a point to visit what were called the Three I’s—Ireland, Italy, and Israel—with a nod to three of the city’s dominant ethnic groups.
But those mayors were taking politically popular stances. Mamdani presides over a city that has both the largest Jewish and the largest Muslim population of any city in America. And although he has drawn significant support from liberal and leftist Jews, many Jewish New Yorkers, not least some prominent rabbis, remain leery of him, particularly at a time of rising anti-Semitism. His own police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, represents three things that the mayor claims not to care for: She is a Zionist, a political centrist, and a billionaire. The extent to which Mamdani can balance those tensions is very much an open question.
Mamdani didn’t just champion Khalil’s right to speak; he chose to lionize the man and his cause. For the mayor of New York to unequivocally use the term genocide to describe Israel’s counterattack was notable; Israel faces credible charges of war crimes, but no international court has ruled that it committed genocide. (Hamas itself broke a cease-fire agreement when its fighters attacked Israel.) And saluting Khalil for “exercising his First Amendment rights” was a rather anodyne way of talking about an activist who served as a spokesperson for a group of protesters, some of whom handed out leaflets celebrating the Al-Aqsa Flood—the name that Hamas gave to the October 7, 2023, attacks, in which its militants killed 1,200 people in Israel. (Mamdani himself has called October 7 a “horrific war crime.”)
In a podcast interview with The New York Times in August, Khalil danced around the precise degree of his sympathy for Hamas. The killing of civilians is never right, he said. But then: “We cannot ask Palestinians to be perfect victims.” He called October 7 Hamas’s “desperate attempt to tell the world that Palestinians are here.” Asked about the allegations of anti-Semitism at Columbia, he replied that much of that was “manufactured hysteria.” A task force at Columbia came to a sharply different conclusion, finding evidence that Jewish and Israeli members of the campus had “been the object of racist epithets and graffiti, antisemitic tropes, and confrontational and unwelcome questions.”
[Charlie Warzel: The opposite of slop politics]
Another intriguing data point emerged last week when Jewish Insider reported that Duwaji, Mamdani’s wife, had “liked” Instagram posts that celebrated October 7. One of the posts showed a bulldozer tearing a hole in a fence between Gaza and Israel, a move that allowed Hamas fighters to attack; another showed an Israeli-army jeep filled with Palestinian fighters, the soldiers presumably dead or taken captive. She also liked a post about an October 8 rally in Times Square that celebrated the Hamas attacks as a necessary resistance. The Times’ account of these posts stood out as painfully demure; it described them as “supportive of the Palestinian cause.” (Duwaji and Mamdani were in a relationship at the time but not yet married.)
More recently, The Washington Free Beacon reported that Duwaji, an artist, had drawn the illustration for an essay by the writer Susan Abulhawa in the magazine Everything Is Political. Abulhawa has previously expressed repellent views, describing Israelis as “rootless, soulless ghouls” and October 7 as a “spectacular moment.” (A Mamdani spokesperson told the Free Beacon that Duwaji “has never engaged with or met” Abulhawa, who is a well-known Palestinian American novelist and activist, “nor had she seen the tweets in question.”)
Add to this another event. Earlier this month, Mamdani attended a Ramadan prayer service at the Muslim American Society Staten Island Center. The imam who welcomed him that night, Abdullah Akl, is an activist for Palestine who in 2024 led crowds in chants of “Strike, strike Tel Aviv!” At a rally last fall, Akl led a crowd in chanting: “We will show up stronger than we did the first October 7!”
Caveats are warranted here. Mamdani has denounced overt acts of anti-Semitism, before and after his election, and he has reached out to Jewish leaders. Duwaji, who has not commented publicly about her social-media posts, is entitled to her own political expression, however objectionable, and people should not assume that her every “like” is representative of the views of her husband. In a city as fractious as New York, mayors not infrequently find themselves standing shoulder to shoulder with men and women with whom they disagree on a large number of topics. Yet because Mamdani has said that Palestinian liberation defines him, it strains credulity that his views are much different from his wife’s. Asked by the press about the posts, he said that he loves Duwaji deeply and that she is a private citizen, and left it at that.
That the mayor has chosen to turn Gracie Mansion into a stage upon which to project his views about Israel and Palestine is perhaps not surprising. In 2023, Mamdani told a DSA convention that, before joining the organization, he had “struggled to find a home in New York City” where he could marry his views on Palestinian liberation with his socialist politics. His membership in DSA, and now his mayoralty, have given him a way to do so.