Zohran Mamdani’s antisemitism plan is political warfare, not protection of Jews - opinion

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani responded three times after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him “the antisemitic mayor of New York” from the podium of the UN General Assembly on September 24.

First came the planting of olive trees for Gaza. Then came a statement dismissing the prime minister’s speech as baseless lies meant to sanitize a “genocide.” Then came money: a plan to raise the budget of the city’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes from $3 million to $29 million a year.

The sequence matters. The plan is more than a budget line. It is a political-warfare maneuver, and Jews on both sides of the Atlantic should read it that way. The money is real. So is the maneuver.

Let us be fair. Security for synagogues, Holocaust education, and support for victims of hate crimes are worth funding. Jews comprise roughly 10% of New York’s population, yet according to New York City Police Department data, they were the target of 57% of reported hate crimes in 2025. Any mayor who ignored that would deserve condemnation.

But note what the plan leaves out. It fails to adopt a working definition of antisemitism. On taking office in January, Mamdani revoked the prior Adams administration’s order adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism along with its restrictions on New York City boycotts of Israel. The new plan does not mention Israel at all.

The Anti-Defamation League emphasized the point in its harsh criticism of Mamdani, noting:

“He [Mamdani] turned a blind eye when flags glorifying terrorist organizations were flown outside synagogues – a deliberate act intended to intimidate families walking inside to pray – and when crowds gathered outside houses of worship and expressed support for those same organizations.

“At the same time, he continues to prioritize his anti-Israel agenda over the basic promises he made to Jewish New Yorkers.”

That omission of Israel is the point. The plan protects Jews as a religious minority while sidelining the Jewish people’s connection to the Jewish state, leaving it outside the definition of what counts as hatred and antisemitism.

Mamdani has labeled Israel’s war on the Iranian regime-backed Hamas in Gaza “genocide,” has backed BDS, and supported legislation targeting nonprofits linked to pro-Israel causes. The same mayor now offers to protect the city’s Jews from harassment and violence provided nobody asks whether demonizing the Jewish state is itself part of the problem.

A wedge strategy

This is the classic new antisemitism’s “3D” architecture of delegitimization, demonization and double standards against Jews, and the Jewish state, as former Israeli deputy prime minister and prisoner of Zion Natan Sharansky labeled it:

Separate “good” Jews from “bad” Zionists. Fund the former. Treat the latter as a legitimate political target. Recast a national debate, whether the Jewish people may have a state, as an issue on which Jews may “disagree,” so that the dispute between Jews and their critics becomes a conflict between Jews. Drive a wedge between Diaspora Jews in New York and sovereign Jews in Israel.

For most Jews, Zionism is not a policy position. It is the historically rooted national sovereignty movement of the Jewish people grounded in the doctrine that Jews have the right to self-determination in their 3,600-year-old ancestral homeland.

A line drawn between antisemitism and anti-Zionism therefore slices through the Jewish community itself. The city’s message amounts to this: you are safe to the extent that you disown a central part of who you are.

The impulse to divide the Jewish community was visible in its reaction to the mayor’s cunning offer. Some Jewish leaders welcomed the funding; others insisted that Zionist Jews must also be free to speak without fear. That is exactly the right demand, and the plan as written does not meet it.

Not a local story

The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs has tracked this divide-and-conquer pattern for more than 25 years.

PLO founder, chairman, and 20th-century arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat first employed Mamdani’s strategy in the early 1970s, when he embraced progressive leaders of the Jewish community in New York. Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, pursued the same strategy, openly embracing the far-left J Street while nazifying the Jewish state.

Mamdani’s victory similarly reflects the convergence of a revolutionary Left worldview and Islamist anti-Western currents, a “Red-Green” assault that reshapes the language of civil rights to serve an anti-Israel, anti-Western agenda.

Commentators favorable to the Islamic Republic’s regime in Tehran celebrated his election as a crack in pro-Israel hegemony. His campaign’s populist economic message also recalls Hamas’s 2006 campaign against the ruling Fatah faction of the Palestinian Authority, which paired economic grievance with radical Islamic themes.

Political warfare works through institutions. It wins not by frontal attack but by redefining terms, controlling the moral vocabulary, and offering concessions that cost the adversary nothing while advancing its long-term aim. A large budget announcement, issued days after a global confrontation, is a very efficient instrument of that kind.

What New York’s Jews, and Israel, should do

First, accept the funding and demand the IHRA definition. Security money should come with a clear statement that targeting Jews for their connection to Israel is antisemitism in line with the IHRA standard the mayor discarded.

Second, refuse the wedge. Jewish communal leaders must openly declare that the differentiation between “protected Jews” and “Zionist Jews” is false and should be labeled another form of warfare. Jewish unity on this point is essential.

Third, recognize that Israel’s critics cannot be fended off by rebuttal alone. The contest here is a classic example of what is known as the “eighth front” in Israel – the non-military yet equally existentially dangerous political warfare front over narrative and legitimacy.

This war must be fought with the same seriousness, aggressiveness, and determination as any other counterterrorism strategy.

Given his statements, it may be hard to believe that Mamdani is sincere about protecting Jewish New Yorkers from antisemitism. But a mayor who seeks credit for fighting antisemitism cannot exempt the most common form it takes today - the multidimensional, multi-front war against the existence of the only nation-state of the Jewish people.

Until the plan includes the IHRA definition of and commits to fighting this new genocidal antisemitism targeting the Jewish state, Mamdani’s $29m. is best understood as a down payment on a political platform, not a solution to metastasizing Jew hatred.

The writer is president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs and, since 2010, has directed its Counter-Political Warfare Initiative.