In the days before the New York City mayoral election, a group of rabbis issued a ‘A Call to Action’, attacking public figures like Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani whom they say ‘refuse to condemn violent slogans, deny Israel’s legitimacy, and accuse the Jewish state of genocide’.
The rabbis’ letter then leaps to the unfounded conclusion that Mamdani’s support for Palestinian human rights and his critique of Israeli behaviour is acting to ‘delegitimise the Jewish community and encouraging and exacerbating hostility toward Judaism and Jews’.
In addition to this logical fallacy, there is an inherent danger in conflating Israel with the religion of Judaism and, by extension, conflating criticism of Israel or Political Zionism with antisemitism.
This has been pushed since the 1970s by leaders of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a group that had long been in the vanguard of defending Jews against bigotry.
It was decades, however, before this dangerous conflation took hold.
Efforts by the powerful pro-Israel lobby to pass legislation in Congress equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism were repeatedly stymied by both Republicans and Democrats.
When the arena shifted to the states, the pro-Israel forces were more successful. To date, more than three dozen states have passed such controversial bills, threatening protected speech.
In the wake of the public outrage that followed Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, the ADL and its allies in the US government and media saw the opportunity to press hard to make the case that the student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza were threatening to the identity of Jewish Americans.
It did not matter to them that the protests were against Israeli actions not Jews, nor that many leaders of the protest movement were Jewish and that polls were showing that Jewish Americans were deeply divided over Israeli policies.
Instead, the pro-Israel groups supported efforts by Republicans to have the protests banned and pushed universities to punish students who engaged in criticism of Israel.
Thousands of students were arrested; many were suspended from their universities and had their degrees withheld. Faculty who supported the students were silenced or terminated, and some foreign students were held for deportation because they had been critical of Israel.
Despite the fact that, during this period, attacks against both Arab American and Jewish American students increased, the ADL and Republicans in Congress deployed a weaponised definition of antisemitism that slighted Arab concerns or judged them as extremism worthy of criminalisation while Jewish concerns were prioritised as legitimate and worthy of full-throated support and action.
Enter Mamdani. He is an elected member of the New York State legislature whose entry into the mayoral contest electrified voters.
His charisma and agenda to make New York more affordable has won support from young voters, the city’s working class, recent immigrants and liberals.
After decisively winning the Democratic primary, New York’s financial elites and political establishment mobilised to defeat Mamdani in the general election.
Billionaire donors poured tens of millions of dollars into advertisements that ironically used anti-Muslim tropes to defame and smear the candidate and his community.
While there were many issues at play in this contest, the dominant media narrative was that Mamdani’s criticism of Israel was making the city unsafe for Jews.
This was easily disproven by the most recent poll of Jewish voters showing Mamdani tied with his nearest competitor and leading by two to one among Jews between the ages of 18 to 45.
Mamdani’s support of Palestinians or his agreement with almost all US and international human right groups (including Israeli organisations) that Israel is committing genocide is not antisemitic. This shouldn’t threaten Jews.
In fact, the threat to Jews comes from those, like the ADL, who falsely equate all Jews with Israel’s deplorable behaviours.
Or the rabbis who use false charges to incite against a candidate whose one crime has been to tell the truth.
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