Why Is Zohran Mamdani More Interested in Israel Than New York?

Zohran Mamdani’s views on Israel have become a flashpoint in the race for New York’s mayoralty. Currently polling second to frontrunner Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani has sought to appeal to the center on affordability issues. But during the first mayoral primary debate, he found himself out of step when asked whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. “I believe Israel has the right to exist as a state with equal rights,” he said. As Andrew Cuomo noted, “Not as a Jewish state.”

That view likely puts him at odds with many Democratic primary voters, including the hundreds of thousands of Jewish New Yorkers Cuomo is actively courting. But Mamdani is unlikely to change his mind on the issue. His antagonism toward Israel is long-standing, ideological, and far more radical than even that of moderate critics of the Jewish state. It’s been front-and-center in his political career—unlike, for example, getting work done in Albany.

Years ago, as a student at Bowdoin, Mamdani co-founded the school chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group that has since come under fire for creating a campus environment of “pressure and tension, where dissenting opinions [on Israel] are silenced or dismissed as immoral.” As a student, Mamdani was an ardent supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, even admonishing Bowdoin for not boycotting Israeli academics. In an editorial in 2014, Mamdani described Israel as having maintained 60 years of “colonial occupation of Palestine”—a phrase that, by dating Israel’s “occupation” to the 1950s, implies that the nation has been illegitimate for most of its history.

Mamdani has described the BDS movement as “legitimate,” but his treatment of Jewish organizations during his time at Bowdoin reveals his hardline views. Initially, he permitted Students for Justice in Palestine to meet with J Street U, a progressive pro-Israel student group, in what one alumnus described as a “productive discussion.” That openness proved short-lived. As The Free Press has reported, Mamdani and his co-founder soon instituted a policy of “non-normalization,” cutting off all contact with pro-Israel groups.

Mamdani has carried his Israel animus into public office. In 2021, he falsely parroted a claim that taxpayer dollars fund trips of New York politicians to Israel and proposed that “the only solution is BDS,” before leading a chant in support of the movement.

In 2021, Mamdani openly identified himself as part of an “anti-Zionist movement.” It’s not surprising, then, that this year, he declined to sign a resolution affirming Israel’s right to exist. Mamdani has since walked back his overt anti-Zionist statements, but he continues to dance around the issue, unwilling unequivocally to confirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre, Mamdani released a carefully worded statement mourning the deaths of Israelis but conspicuously failing to mention Hamas. Instead of condemning the perpetrators, he pivoted to attacking the Israeli government, criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for declaring war against Hamas. According to Mamdani, the true “path to peace” lies not in confronting terrorism, but in “ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid.” Since then, he has publicly stated that he would work to see Netanyahu jailed.

Mamdani has at times used his opposition to Israel as a political crutch, focusing more on the Jewish state than on the needs of New Yorkers. In 2023, he championed the “Not On Our Dime Act,” aimed at penalizing New York-based nonprofits that provide charitable support to Israeli organizations—on the dubious premise that such donations promote illegal settlements. Meantime, Mamdani has failed to pass any meaningful legislation in New York.

Even when discussing actual terrorists, Mamdani finds ways to invert the moral lens. Responding to reports that Israel had used pagers to target Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, Mamdani described the hyper-targeted operation as a strike on civilians: “Israel’s blowing up of thousands of pagers across Lebanon and killing scores of Lebanese civilians including a young girl by the name of Fatima, who picked up her father’s pager in an act of love and lost her life.”

Mamdani’s “anti-Zionism” does not stop with Israel, however. He refused this year to sign a State Assembly resolution condemning the Holocaust, citing his mayoral campaign as the reason. He failed to sign a nearly identical resolution in 2024, before his run.

Most notably, he sat down for a friendly interview with Hasan Piker, a far-left commentator who has referred to Orthodox Jews as “inbred” and called Jews “bloodthirsty pig dogs.” In the interview, Mamdani referred to Israel’s war as “genocide”—a charge both morally reckless and empirically false—called Netanyahu a “war criminal,” and defended Mahmoud Khalil, telling Piker, “you have a government imprisoning people for no apparent crime.”

When talking about the campus protests generally—which have sometimes spilled into anti-Semitic violence—Mamdani stated: “I will not be sending the police in to respond to an encampment of the like that we saw in the previous school year. Because the act of doing so actually made students far less safe than they were even prior to that.” All this even as more than 70 percent of New Yorkers believe that the campus protests went too far.

On the debate stage, Mamdani didn’t make a gaffe—he revealed a worldview he’s held for years. Behind the rhetoric of progressivism is a candidate seemingly more preoccupied with international ideological battles than with the everyday concerns of New Yorkers.

Photo by VINCENT ALBAN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images