An Effective Movement for Palestine Needs Allies Like Zohran Mamdani

“October 7 is a day that is immensely painful for our city and is a day of mourning,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani explained at a press conference last week. “We know that it brings up the most horrific memories for so many in this city. And also for others it is a day that is continuing in the Israeli government’s use of it as a justification for a genocide.”

It came as no surprise that New York City’s first Muslim mayor, and a fierce defender of Palestinian rights, would come under fire by conservative pundits, Zionist organizations, and leaders of the Jewish establishment for “mourning terrorists” or “hijacking” a day meant to honor Israeli victims.

The mayor’s statement on the anniversary of October 7, 2023, was an eloquent defense of all human lives taken that day: more than 1,100 Israelis and 251 abducted by Hamas, and the 74,000 Palestinians, among them over 21,000 children killed by the Israeli military. “Three years later,” the statement read, “we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment. To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.”

It’s hard to imagine a statement from an American mayor that so unequivocally calls out genocide and apartheid, and along with it our responsibility to end the government’s financial and military support of these war crimes. Yet with equal measure from the right came criticism of the mayor from some corners of the Palestine movement. At the October 7 vigil hosted by Israelis for Peace, protesters chanted things like: “Mayor Mamdani, what do you say, how many kids did you kill today?” and called the mayor a genocide apologist.

But the politics of those protesters are those of purity tests, not of building an effective mass movement capable of encouraging policy change. Those protesters alienate not only allies for a Palestine movement in office but also many more regular people who sympathize with the scores of Palestinians killed in this war that could have made up a broad coalition to affect real change. As Palestinian analyst and writer Muhammad Shehada argued recently on X, “Saying ‘I would only work with comrades who fully agree with me’ is the recipe for dooming your movement to [remain] a tiny ineffective minority. The goal is to unite the many against the few, not the few against the many.”

Social-media activist Abier Khatib, too, sounded off on the platform: “You’re attacking one of the very few politicians actually bringing Palestine into the mainstream and you’re making other politicians who might even consider speaking up think twice.” She continued, “You’re not helping Palestine. You’re fucking scaring people away from it.”

For years in the United States—and particularly so since 2023—popular sentiments regarding Israel and Palestine have undergone a sea change in the right direction. The outpouring of mass outrage to the genocide in Gaza fueled thousands of protests in support of Palestine in every state in the country and many cities outside the country in the months that followed October 7. According to information obtained from the Crowd Counting Consortium, more than a million people participated—from Mennonites occupying congressional buildings to Jewish activists in New York City taking over bridges, to Mothers for Ceasefire gathering weekly on a street corner of Durham, North Carolina, to a wave of student encampments on over 125 college campuses. At those schools, students courageously put their degrees and their bodies on the line to speak up for Palestine. In the early months of this new phase in the movement, echoes of the Vietnam anti-war movement reverberated across the country.

The campaign has since suffered repression and setbacks, as the situation in Gaza has grown ever more dire, and the sea change in consciousness has not resulted in concrete policy outcomes stopping the genocide. But the basis for a mass movement still exists, alongside a growing bloc of pro-Palestine elected officials like Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander, and hopefully Abdul El-Sayed who can help push legislation to block munitions shipments and to cut military aid to Israel. To turn sympathy into an effective, sustained movement requires ongoing organizing work, political discipline, and strategic alliances.

Mamdani, by virtue of being a longtime champion of Palestinian rights—he organized a hunger strike for Gaza in 2023, and sponsored legislation targeting nonprofits who fund the Israeli military—cannot be above criticism now that he is our leader. There are concrete demands to push for, including stopping the facilitation by some New York synagogues of Palestinian land in illegal settlements, and Mamdani’s own “Not on Our Dime!” Act to prohibit New York–registered charities from financially supporting displacement and war crimes.

But to say Mamdani is complicit in genocide is both factually inaccurate and perpetuates a self-defeating practice by some on the left to prove who is the most radical, at the exclusion of many more entrants to the movement.

The problem for the pro-Palestine campaign was never about mourning the dead of October 7. In fact, the issue for many of us was that we were not allowed time nor space to grieve, because the tragedy was just as soon manipulated into justifying untold horrors in Gaza. To mourn all the lives lost does not equate the power imbalance between the colonizing force and the colonized, nor the scale of the resulting tragedies, which have been completely disproportionate. But the politics of liberation flow from our humanity and the idea that every life is to be cherished.

The mayor’s commitment to mourning the loss of human life, sits alongside  his commitment to challenging antisemitism at home while opposing genocide abroad. Days before participating in the October 7 vigil, Mamdani launched a municipal Strategy to Combat Antisemitism. Both commitments are morally and strategically necessary. This is not only because he is the city’s first Muslim mayor and an outspoken supporter of Palestine in a city in which Jews make up approximately 12 percent of the population. More broadly, it also threads a critical needle for the movement: making explicit the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Doing so helps to convince Jewish New Yorkers that our safety need not come at the expense of any other people, and weakens the hold of mainstream Jewish institutions that have insisted on tying Jewish identity to Israel. On the other hand, protesting a vigil for lives lost on October 7 risks undoing so much hard work that the pro-Palestine movement has done for years in disentangling antisemitism from anti-Zionism, and rebuffing accusations from the right and liberal Zionists that the movement is antisemitic.

In the wake of October 7, crimes committed against millions of innocent Palestinians were time and time again perpetrated in the name of world Jewry. Meanwhile at home, pro-Palestine students and protesters were doxed, harassed, and suspended from their schools in the name of fighting antisemitism. College administrators organized task forces to “combat antisemitism,” but instead condemned protest chants like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

The Israeli state’s claim to be acting on behalf of world Jewry has sown confusion and only aided in the rise of antisemitism worldwide. Rather than making Jews safe, every instance in which Israel and its supporters have used the charge of antisemitism to build support for war crimes has made us less so. As so many of us have argued for years, weaponizing antisemitism to shut down criticism of Israel has actually fueled anti-Jewish sentiments. We’ve seen rare but rising cases of vandalism and physical assaults at synagogues (including twice this summer in New York), more commonly the spread of antisemitic tropes in mainstream consciousness, and of course the often-corrosive corners of social media. A Yale Youth poll recently reported, for instance, that about a third of Americans surveyed held at least one belief associated with antisemitic tropes or general antisemitism, including that Jewish people have too much power in the United States. That Israel’s actions have only fueled these ideas does not absolve us from having to address them.

In contrast to bogus task forces who challenged protests rather than antisemitism, the thoughtful call by New York City’s mayor for us to cherish Jewish New Yorkers, and not to do so at the expense of Palestinians abroad, is deeply reassuring.

Most importantly, mourning the dead as well as combating antisemitism can lay the basis for a broader and stronger movement for Palestine. American Jews today are still largely divided on the question of Israel and Palestine, with overall sentiments shifting in favor of Palestinians—and this is particularly so among younger Jews. In 2025, a Washington Post poll found that 61 percent of Jewish adults said Israel had committed war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and 39 percent said it was guilty of genocide. Another poll conducted last month found that a majority of Jews back cuts to US aid to Israel. At a moment in which increasing numbers of Jewish Americans are critical of Israel, but many are still unsure about whether the Palestine movement has a place for them in it, Mamdani’s approach can do so much to build an ethos of mutual caring, respect, and solidarity on the left. An inclusive movement for Palestine, one in which we debate out our differences in a comradely way, is an effective one. And one that is still possible to build.