Farley Weiss is the co-author, with Leonard Grunstein, of Because It’s Just and Right: The Untold Backstory of the U.S. Recognition of Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel and Moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, and a past president of the National Council of Young Israel.
(Oct. 16, 2026 / JNS)
It wasn’t surprising that the administration of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not provide a definition related to the announcement of a plan to fight antisemitism. He couldn’t say that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, as established in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition, adopted on May 26, 2016, and later by more than 40 countries, as well as U.S. cities and states.
He couldn’t say that because it would depict the mayor as antisemitic, which, time and again, he has proven to be.
His administration also could not adopt the concocted leftist Nexus definition of antisemitism that absurdly claimed that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism because you can’t list a definition not accepted by the bulk of the Jewish community while ignoring the one that is.
Therefore, the Mamdani administration decided not to adopt any definition.
The Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 was not an attack on the settlements or against settlers, but on Israel’s borders.
Even before Oct. 7, antisemites began to try to invalidate the consensus IHRA definition of antisemitism and come up with another one that says anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and try to get legitimization for that definition.
The Biden administration provided that foundation when it included the Nexus definition with the IHRA definition as part of the U.S. National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism in May 2023, leaving out the word “Zionist” in its inept plan to fight bigotry. In other words, that administration’s plan to fight Jew-hatred would not say whether anti-Zionism was antisemitism.
That’s why the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) endorsed the plan, and so, former President Joe Biden went on to list CAIR as a “partner” in its development. He booted them out after CAIR leaders made controversial remarks toward the Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 men, women and children in Israel. (It is quite extraordinary to support the beheading of babies by Hamas and then try to argue that you are on the side of human rights, as anti-Zionists have attempted to do.)
It was not surprising that the Biden administration’s plan failed miserably. And it wasn’t surprising that the college encampments—and the harassment of Jewish and pro-Israel students—escalated out of control during his term, as well as after their plan to fight antisemitism was released.
The next step in the efforts to fight the existence of Israel was for the Democratic Party to oppose the adoption of the IHRA definition. Senate Democrats obliged, blocking the adoption of the Antisemitism Awareness Act, despite its adoption in the U.S. House of Representatives by a vote of 320-91 in May 2024.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan was the first Congress member openly against the existence of the State of Israel. Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed has followed suit, as has Mamdani. Hypocritically, these same people are the first to cite international law against Israel in their attacks, and yet they oppose international law’s acceptance of the right of the Jewish state.
Part of their efforts to change public opinion was to claim that Israel was like the Nazis and had committed genocide against Palestinian Arabs in Gaza. The problem is that the facts say the opposite.
Experts like retired U.S. Army officer John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, wrote that no country has done more in history to limit civilian casualties. Retired U.S. Army Gen. Jack Keane said no country ever gave warnings to civilians in urban warfare, as Israel has done and continues to do, in order to prevent civilian casualties. Col. Richard Kemp, a retired British Army officer, said that the lowest level of civilian-to-military casualties in an urban war before Gaza was 4-1, and Israel achieved less than a 2-1 ratio in Gaza.
When El-Sayed was questioned with this information, he didn’t even attempt to rebut the arguments but answered in essence that, in his mind, it was genocide. This is not surprising from a candidate who considers Israel an enemy of the United States on par with Iran. El-Sayed’s position, as well as Mamdani’s, on genocide is not surprising since they both publicly accused Israel of committing genocide before it sent ground troops into Gaza three weeks after Oct. 7—on Oct. 27, to be exact. El-Sayed made the accusation on Oct. 21, and Mamdani accused Israel of genocide on Oct. 20.
Anti-Zionists now attack everyone who supports Israel as being a genocide supporter. Remember the slur: “Genocide Joe” for Biden, who tried to slow down Israel’s operations in Gaza while it was trying to get its hostages back after Oct. 7.
The original anti-Zionist was the leader of the Palestinian Arabs from 1921 until World War II: Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. He supported the Holocaust and spent the war in Berlin; there is a famous photo of his meeting with Adolf Hitler on Nov. 28, 1941.
The current head of the Palestinian Authority—Mahmoud Abbas, who will turn 91 in November and who has not been re-elected since his first four-year term in 2005, when Israel disengaged from the Gaza Strip—has been linked to terrorism, such as the murder of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the Olympic Summer Games in Munich in 1972. His academic thesis was a 1982 work titled The Connection Between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement 1933-1945. In it, he disputes that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust and asserts that Zionist leaders collaborated with Nazi Germany.
The Jewish community needs to fight against the rise in antisemitism as defined in the accepted IHRA definition. Unfortunately, for the most part, only one of the two major parties seems to be supporting this effort.