“How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?”: What’s Really Behind the “Backlash” to Zohran Mamdani

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Libby Lenkinski was walking toward Union Square in New York City last week on the evening of Oct. 7, when she first encountered a sea of Palestinian flags. Lenkinski is an Israeli American who has spent more than two decades working against Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and helping lead organizations that pushed for democracy and equality there. She also lost friends in Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

She had come that night to read a eulogy for an Israeli killed in Gaza at a vigil that would also remember Palestinians killed, an event organized by Israelis for Peace, a group of left-wing Israeli expatriates. She wasn’t expecting to find herself on the opposite side of a barricade from people she had spent much of her adult life marching alongside.

“I couldn’t quite hear what was happening. I couldn’t quite decipher what I was seeing. I was like, is this part of it or is this something else?” she recalled. Then she noticed someone wearing what appeared to be a Hamas headband. When Mayor Zohran Mamdani appeared at the vigil, the protesters began to shout at him:

“Zohran, you can’t hide, you support genocide.”

“Traitor, traitor, come on out, you sold all your people out.”

“Mamdani, what do you say? How many kids did you kill today?”

What exactly was this about? For Lenkinski, the disruption was painful on several levels. “What happened that night at the vigil was brutal,” she said. “It was megaphones from before we started until after we left. You couldn’t get through a single testimony—including from families in Gaza—without being disrupted by these chants.”

When video of the incident began to spread, it was also confounding far beyond New York. Conservatives reacted with glee; many liberals scratched their heads. Had the left flank already turned on Mamdani, not even a year in?

It’s clear that the majority of the New York City voters who brought Mamdani into office have not, in fact, turned on him. In a Suffolk University poll in September, some 56 percent of voters said he was doing an “excellent” or “good” job, and another 17 percent rated him “fair.” More than 6 in 10 voters said he was performing better than they expected. But those numbers may not reflect some discontent in the left-most movement where the future mayor earned the early enthusiasm that helped vault him into office.

It wasn’t just one rally, either. There had been rumblings of frustration in criminal justice circles over policing, for which Mamdani has largely retained the status quo in New York. After Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot a man several times in a vehicle while a 5-year-old child sat in the back seat, Mamdani’s self-described “political home,” the Democratic Socialists of America, demanded the removal of NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch if she did not “end NYPD complicity with ICE.” Even one of Mamdani’s handpicked congressional candidates joined the call. When a reporter asked Mamdani about that this week, he replied flatly, “Jessica Tisch is the police commissioner. I have no plans to change that.” (Mamdani has demanded ICE leave New York City.)

If Mamdani has so far shown a pragmatic streak in how he governs that can feel at odds with the loftier promises of his campaign, some friction with his most hard-line voters might be inevitable. But I wondered specifically what motived the protestors on Oct. 7, who managed to make international headlines.

A City University of New York law student who helped organize the march agreed to speak with me on the condition I not publish his name. He said the demonstration began as a student walkout, with protesters converging on City Hall to demand action on Palestinian rights. They marched to Union Square after learning Mamdani would be attending the vigil. The law student objected in particular to Mamdani’s response to protests against West Bank property sales he said were promoted at New York synagogues, arguing that the mayor had defended policing those demonstrations without doing enough to stop the sales, along with similar protests against CUNY’s investments in Israel. He was also unhappy with the mayor’s Strategy to Combat Antisemitism, announced in September, which he said conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism in some pro-Palestinian groups.

“Why are we targeting Mamdani? Because Mamdani won on Palestine. The only reason he won this election is because of Palestine. If it were not for Palestine, he would not have won. And now that he is mayor, it’s our job to pressure him,” the organizer told me. “He’s going to make mistakes. He’s going to fall for a lot of pressure where he’s going to accept Zionist demands. And when he does do that, which he has done repeatedly, it’s up to us, the people, to pressure him to choose his principles over his position.”

He had no regrets about pursuing Mamdani to the vigil. “I think it was a victory,” he said. I asked whether he knew the vigil had included testimonies from families in Gaza, which Lenkinski said the protesters had drowned out. “I—I did not hear that,” he replied.

I noted Mamdani’s explanation that the vigil had mourned both Israeli and Palestinian deaths. “That just shows that he’s appealing to both sides and he’s not taking a principled stance,” he said.

The law student told me Mamdani had never gone far enough to earn his vote, but protesters with him that day included an ex-Mamdani intern.

Nerdeen Kiswani, the Palestinian American co-founder of Within Our Lifetime, one of New York’s most confrontational pro-Palestinian organizations, applauded the protest and said more should be on the way. “I was critical of him from when he first announced his campaign, and I don’t think I shifted,” she told me. “I have been consistent.” Many supporters, she said, voted for Mamdani expecting to hold him accountable once he took office. “He has executive power, so rhetoric is not enough. He has to take action to make material change.”

“I’m glad that he’s in this position,” she said. “It’s precisely why we need to keep protesting him and people like him.”

Kiswani said unease over Mamdani’s handling of the NYPD was also fomenting some of the pushback, at least in her slice of the political spectrum. “No mayor has retained the same police commissioner from the administration prior to theirs since 1964,” she said, referring to Tisch, who was elevated under the previous mayor, Eric Adams. “All of these frustrations that people have had for a while exploded.”

It is fair to say not everyone saw Oct. 7’s events in New York the same way. Rania Batrice, a Palestinian American political strategist who was a deputy campaign manager for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, was disturbed. She knew some of the Jewish activists at the vigil and considered them among the most committed opponents of Israel’s occupation.

“My first reaction was: This is absolutely ridiculous,” she told me. She described the attacks on Mamdani as “wildly unhelpful.”

“This whole idea that people aren’t allowed to mourn or remember is really troubling to me,” she said. Mourning Israeli civilians, she argued, did not negate the suffering of Palestinians or diminish the struggle against Israel’s government.

For Batrice, the danger wasn’t simply that the confrontation looked terrible. It was that years of political marginalization could make activists so sensitive to perceived betrayal that they might fail to recognize the gains they had achieved.

“The reality is, you have to look at the totality here, not a single moment,” she said. “You can have feelings about a single moment, but that doesn’t negate everything else he’s done and said. He’s shown up in the toughest circumstances. I think it fractures the movement, honestly. And that’s not something any of us need right now.”

Debbie Almontaser, a longtime Muslim community organizer who helped elect Mamdani, wasn’t surprised by the confrontation. She has spent decades fighting for the kind of political influence New York’s Muslim communities now have. (In 2007, she was pushed out as the founding principal of the city’s first Arabic-language public school amid a campaign of anti-Muslim attacks; a federal agency later found that the city had discriminated against her.) But even while she understood it, she didn’t necessarily see its wisdom.

“This happens with every elected official who ran on specific promises that, in some shape or form, did not quickly materialize,” Almontaser said. “He is the mayor of over 8 million people in New York City, and he is accountable for their safety, security, and well-being. And there needs to be room for him to be able to be true to his role and his position.”

Almontaser had a measured perspective on criticism the mayor has received, not just from pro-Palestinian activists but from pro-Israel critics as well: “For decades, people who’ve been in political positions—whether it’s in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party—have always had one-sided position to support Israel in a way that has alienated, isolated, and marginalized the Palestinian people, the Palestinian cause.” She remembered a time when Arab and Muslim New Yorkers struggled to find elected officials willing to acknowledge their experiences at all. Now one of their own had become mayor, and some Jewish New Yorkers were experiencing a sense of alienation that she recognized. “Nobody should feel that way,” she said.

Just eight days before the vigil, Almontaser had publicly endorsed Mamdani’s new strategy to combat antisemitism—the same initiative that had helped provoke the student protest. Lenkinski had welcomed it, too. Both women had spent years advocating for Palestinian rights while maintaining relationships with Jewish organizations. What some activists saw as a concession to Zionist political pressure they considered part of the difficult work of building a city in which different communities could feel safe.

Mamdani, for his part, has been steadfast in his response to the criticism. Asked about being called a traitor and worse, he told reporters, “I am the mayor of New York City, and this is what I signed up for.”