Mamdani's Big Apple Intifada

And: Did Iran Attack Fail? GOP-Israel Estrangement; Bethel And 'Wonder'

Well, he did it. Zohran Mamdani is likely to become the next mayor of America’s largest city. It wasn’t even close:

If you look at the NYT map, you’ll see that the parts of the city that voted Mamdani are the whitest, those that voted Cuomo are, for the most part, the most non-white — except Long Island, which is suburban white (and went Cuomo), and the parts of Staten Island that are closest to Manhattan. Note too that the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side — the wealthiest and, in the case of the West Side, the most Jewish, neighborhoods — also went Cuomo.

Otherwise, it was a rout for the socialist Muslim Mamdani, who will sail to victory in the November general election in the overwhelmingly Democratic city. Mamdani’s platform could hardly have been more radical, at least for an American politician. The Times writes:

At a moment when Democrats are searching for an answer to President Trump, Mr. Mamdani ran on an unabashedly progressive agenda, promising to make buses free, freeze the rent on rent-stabilized apartments and raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers. His promise of generational change appears to have resonated with large numbers of voters.

The Democratic nominee will become the front-runner in the general election to lead a city at an inflection point and gain a prominent national platform as his party tries to find a path back to power. New York is confronting a cost-of-living crisis and Mr. Trump’s increasingly aggressive tactics to impose his agenda on immigration and transportation, issues that dominated the race.

New York City is home to about one million Jews, one of the largest concentrations of Jews on the planet. And the city has now, in effect, elected a mayor who embraces the slogan “globalize the intifada.” Jonathan Chait explains why this is a problem:

But when Miller asked Mamdani about the pro-Palestine slogan “Globalize the intifada,” the candidate’s pragmatism and intellectual humility evaporated. “To me, ultimately, what I hear in so many is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights,” he said.

Mamdani may sincerely believe this, as do some of his supporters. But he then delved into the semantics of intifada, citing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s use of the word as the translation of “uprising” in an Arabic version of an article the museum published about the Warsaw Ghetto. This comparison, to a Jewish armed rebellion against the Nazis, hardly dispels concern about the incendiary implications of the slogan. If the intifada is akin to the ghetto uprising, then it is a call for violence. If its theater of operations is global, then it is necessarily directed against civilians. Days before the Democratic primary, when Mamdani appeared to be gaining momentum, the controversy about his comments on Miller’s show dragged the race’s focus back to the Middle East, a subject that Mamdani has not emphasized in his campaign. Yet this debate has largely missed the significance. What makes the slogan so disturbing in an American context is not the intifada bit. It’s the globalize part.

An unfortunate spillover effect of the war between Israel and Hamas is its extension into U.S. politics. If we are heading toward a future in which even candidates for local office in the United States run on their position toward the Middle East, American politics will come to resemble that intractable conflict. The pluralist alternative is to confine conflict over Palestine and Israel to any national elected office that could have actual influence on U.S. foreign policy. Everybody needs to be willing to live with a mayor who does not share their personal solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Mamdani’s defense of globalizing the intifada has spurred more commentary about his left-wing views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But his beliefs about Israel are not the concern. The intifada is taking place inside Israel and the occupied territories. Globalizing the intifada definitionally involves events outside that region.

Even if globalizing the intifada doesn’t have to mean global violence, that interpretation is plausible. Indeed, some people inspired by the free-Palestine movement do take the slogan literally. Supporters of the movement have engaged in harassment, graffiti, and violence and terrorism against Zionists worldwide. In recent months, pro-Palestine activists have carried out homicidal or potentially homicidal attacks in Pennsylvania; Washington, D.C.; and Colorado.

The ambiguity of the slogan is not a point in its defense but a point against it. The dual meanings allow the movement to contain both peaceful and militant wings, without the former having to take responsibility for the latter. If activists refused to employ slogans that double as a form of violent incitement, it would insulate them from any association with the harassment and violence that has tainted their protests. Their failure to do so reveals an unwillingness to draw lines, as does Mamdani’s reluctance to allow any daylight between him and their rhetoric.

Imagine being a New York City Jew right now, knowing that after November, your city will be governed by a man who says he wants to “globalize the intifada.”

Note well that Jews make up about 11 percent of the city’s population. The number of Muslims? About nine percent. So, rough parity. Per Chait, NYC is now experiencing what British cities are experiencing: the internationalization of local politics vis-à-vis the importation of global Islamic concerns. If you don’t understand what business a politician in New York City, or Birmingham, England, has taking a position on the fight between Israelis and Palestinians, well, my dear, you are living in the past. As Sam Bidwell wrote in The Critic:

Last November, Labour MP Tahir Ali urged Keir Starmer to institute new laws which would criminalise criticism of the Qur’an or the Prophet Muhammad. Just last week, a group of twenty Labour MPs petitioned the Prime Minister of Pakistan to build a new airport in Mirpur, the ancestral homeland of a majority of Britain’s Pakistani population.

… Like it or not, Britain is now a country in which national parties compete with explicitly sectarian candidates for the support of particular religious and ethnic groups.

This should not come as a surprise. In many diverse democracies around the world, this is the norm. Rather than voting on the basis of material interests or ideological priors, individuals vote in accordance with their perceived group interests, seeking power and resources in a zero-sum competition.

Of course Mamdani could not have won without the support of progressive non-Muslim New Yorkers, many of whom — the young, especially — embrace globalizing the intifada. But the more pressing concern for voters was the increasing unaffordability of life in the city. Why they believe that a politician whose economic platform, when not crazy (government-owned grocery stores, for example), would do nothing to make life more affordable — well, it’s magical thinking. But it worked.

At a time when subway violence and other crime-related concerns are a significant issue, most NYC voters chose a candidate who once endorsed “defund the police” calls (he later backtracked), but who still believes that the crime issue can best be met by creating a new social-work bureaucracy called “The Department of Community Safety”. Again, Mamdani moderated his position when he launched his campaign, but this is what he believed not all that long ago:

Now a man who was fit to be student body president at Oberlin will now, barring some kind of miracle, be elected in November to run America’s largest city. Between now and then, people with money who have the means to move out of the city will, before its San Francisco-ization begins. But the stunning Mamdani victory is part of the overall Trumpening of American politics — and not just because Mamdani ran on an explicitly anti-Trump platform (e.g., he promised to defy Trump by having NYC declared a “sanctuary city” for illegal migrants; yeah, that’ll work).

Here’s what I mean: one of the most significant aspects of his win is the utter repudiation of the Democratic Party establishment. You cannot get more Democratic in New York than to be a Cuomo. And the Cuomo dynasty ended last night. This is a savvy tweet from last week:

Left-wing voters in New York City, like their MAGA peers nationally nine years ago, lashed out against what they regard as a failed liberal establishment, electing a charismatic populist who promised a clear break with the past. We on the Right can shake our heads and laugh at how dumb New York liberals and progressives were to choose a candidate as politically inexperienced and radical as Mamdani, but don’t miss that this was also a referendum on the Democratic Party itself, and the party’s style of politics.

The other day in the NYT, Galen Druke, a progressive podcaster, wrote that the Democratic Party needs its own Donald Trump. His point was that Trump defeated the GOP establishment by taking positions both further left and further right than the normie candidates:

The message was clear: No matter where you stood on the political spectrum, if you had a grievance with the status quo G.O.P., Mr. Trump was your guy.

Granted, the lesson of Mamdani’s win for Democrats nationally is strictly limited. It is impossible to imagine that an intifada-globalizing Muslim socialist will have much appeal to Americans living outside of liberal coastal cities. Nevertheless, the charismatic Mamdani’s success shows at least that when voters are given a clear choice, they are likely to vote for the candidate that disrupts the status quo, not reinforces it. This might also signal a further long-term destabilizing of US politics, as voters on both sides move to extremes.

Whatever the outcome, as a former New Yorker who watched the Twin Towers fall with his own eyes, and who lived through the heroic response to that crisis of the city’s Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, if you had told me that fewer than 25 years later, the city’s voters would elect a far-left Muslim who wants to globalize the intifada, I would have thought you a crackpot. Yet here we are.

I had not thought about this possible blowback on the Right from the Mamdani victory. But, you know, this answer to the question of why the Right suddenly harbors anti-war folks, Oilfield Rando might have a point: