The pro-Israel establishment couldn't tarnish Zohran Mamdani. Will this time be different from all other times?

Two weeks ago in New York City, 33-year-old democratic socialist assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, whose redistributive politics are as famous as his Palestine solidarity, won the Democratic Party primary for mayor. By defeating disgraced ex-governor Andrew Cuomo, who attacked both his credentials and his hostility toward the Jewish state, Mamdani didn’t just beat the odds: he beat a river of venom accusing him, falsely, of Jew-hatred.

Led by Cuomo — who launched a pro-Israel advocacy organisation as his springboard back into politics and then joined Benjamin Netanyahu’s ICC legal team to defend the Israeli prime minister against an arrest warrant — establishment Democrats and their allies had a tried and true playbook to defeat Mamdani. Suggest he’s an antisemite or at best indifferent to anti-Jewish animus and constantly remind the voting public that he doesn’t like Israel. Repeat that he said “globalize the intifada” and press him on it on casual late night talk show interviews. Take all the help you can get from the right — like the Murdoch-owned New York Post that constantly accused him of antisemitism.

In the city with the largest Jewish population in the diaspora, Cuomo received the endorsement of major Haredi sects and Jewish voting organizations, winning many Jewish neighborhoods across the five boroughs. Mamdani received endorsements from progressive Jewish organizations like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and JVP, while cutting into Cuomo’s presumed popularity in Reform communities and on the historically Jewish Upper West Side. 

Ultimately, the attacks on Mamdani weren't enough to tarnish his reputation around the city. But why not? Why didn’t it work?

Part of the problem for New York’s Democratic establishment is that it still relies on the tired political tricks that were fully discredited in the 2024 presidential election. Raise a lot of money from rich donors. Secure support from other party leaders and union chiefs. Buy a huge number of television ads and send direct mailers vilifying your opponent. Show up to community events and parades, shaking hands. Rinse and repeat.

Mamdani, with his charisma, personable humor, and universal economic messaging on housing, groceries, and buses, understood the power of the internet to spread his message and built a grassroots campaign with thousands of volunteers and small donors. Editorials in the Post virtually equating Mamdani with the second coming of young Yasser Arafat would only keep his vote down in districts where his left-wing economic platform was already unpopular.

Mamdani is popular with voters his age and younger who are energised by his campaign focusing on affordability. These voters have never known an Israel supposedly on a path to peace, only a garrison state that wages war on a besieged population. A state whose liberal and left parties are marginalized by the governing right wing. A 30-year-old who can barely pay rent isn’t scandalised that Mamdani, who vows a rent freeze, would protest such a state.

And certainly, when voters see Jews getting arrested for demonstrating against the genocide week after week, they understand that condemning Israel is not antisemitic. 

It was also significant that Mamdani ran with the backing of Brad Lander, a Jewish progressive and the city’s top financial officer (he is thought to be Mamdani’s first deputy mayor if elected). As the results came in, Lander left his own election night party - where he celebrated Mamdani’s lead by saying “Good fucking riddance” to Cuomo -and joined his friend accross the city at his victory speech.

Mamdani listened to voters rather than proselytising the virtues of socialism à la Dennis the peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He tried to find common ground with people who voted for Trump, trying to understand their anxieties about the status quo. “We, as politicians, need to lecture less and listen more,” he told the liberal news outlet MSNBC.

As the cause of Israel seemingly loses resonance in the New York City political arena, the pro-Israel movement has become confused, unable to accept that people of various backgrounds are appalled at the death and destruction in Gaza. And so it lashes out. It calls anti-genocide protesters Jew-haters. After years of the right and center accusing the left of woke censorship, these factions have created a laundry list of pro-Palestine phrases and words that are allegedly too extreme to be protected by the right of free speech.

Everyone from climate activist Greta Thunberg to children’s entertainer Rachel Griffin Accurso are accused of Jew-hatred, not even necessarily for espousing anti-Zionism but for simply caring about Palestinian civilians. 

In reality, these attacks against Palestine solidarity say more about the accuser than about Mamdani or his supporters.

Equating the movement against the genocide of Palestinians with antisemitism, especially in the context of Mamdani’s campaign, essentialises Jewish politics in an offensive way, as if no Jewish voter might care about the rent, public transit, public education and the everyday cost of living — that the only thing that matters to “the Jews” is fealty to Israel. It’s a dehumanising and othering kind of politics that is, of course, antisemitic.

With fewer and fewer people buying the antisemitism charge against Mamdani, more see something else in his accusers: Islamophobia. The state’s junior senator, Democrat Kristen Gillibrand, has already had to apologise for making Islamophobic comments about Mamdani.

The importance of all this spreads far beyond New York City. Worldwide, the false invocation of “antisemitism” to throttle pro-Palestine voices as well as the left generally has put the entire notion of free speech in crisis. The scandal in the UK around Bob Vylan’s anti-Israel chants at Glastonbury and the criminal investigation into the Irish republican hip-hop group Kneecap have the political right, formerly advocates of “free speech” against so-called left-wing cancel culture, tellingly silent or proudly contradictory. “British police arrested over 20 people on suspicion of terrorism offences after they showed support for the newly banned Palestine Action group,” reads a 5 July Reuters dispatch that should have aroused more outcry from the democratic world.

Germany’s intense crackdown on pro-Palestine speech, allegedly to protect the country’s Jews, has put Germany’s Jewish leftists in the crosshairs, a disturbing reminder of the 1930s. Under the right-wing presidency of Javier Milei, Argentina–home to 200,000 Jews–is shifting away from the country’s historic support for Palestine. Milei’s advocacy for Israel has won him the hearts and grant money of the Israeli government. According to the Associated Press, he was awarded $1 million from the Genesis Prize because ​​the award’s “organizers say they recognized Milei for reversing Argentina’s long history of anti-Israel votes at the United Nations.”

If Mamdani can break the stranglehold false accusations of antisemitism have had on politics in New York City, then others can break this stifling political environment in Europe and South America as well. Mamdani’s breakthrough victory is scary to so many people because of this international potential.

Mamdani should be ready for the tidal wave of aggression coming his way but stop short of panicking. The general election looks favorable for him. It remains to be seen if he’ll again face Cuomo, who is still deciding whether to continue his campaign. There will also be the incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, who is scandal ridden, attached to the Trump administration and wildly unpopular. The Republicans are running Curtis Sliwa, who as head of the vigilante group Guardian Angels looks more like a 1970s mean-streets cosplayer than a political contender. Mamdani looks to be the pragmatic choice in a sea of clowns and has-beens.

The attacks have already started with frightening intensity. President Trump falsely accused Mamdani of being in the country illegally and threatened to arrest him if he blocked the federal deportation agenda, even raising the idea of stripping him of citizenship. Billionaire Zionist Bill Ackman is working to stop Mamdani by throwing money behind Eric Adams. The liberal New York Times, which officially announced its fear of Mamdani’s New Deal-like- economic approach to inequality, is now looking through his college applications in search of some shocking racial scandal.

How best to counter the next few months of abuse – and, of course, the backlash  if he becomes mayor – is less a question of  what he will do than what his supporters will do. A mayoral candidate is but one person. If his supporters are to change the political landscape in the city they must make attacks on Mamdani an attack on us all. At the ballot box and in the streets, we need to show that in New York City the power truly does belong to the people.▼

Ari Paul is a contributing writer at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and has written for The Nation, the Guardian, Haaretz, the Forward, the Battleground, Jacobin and many other outlets.