They Lost New York — And They KNOW It

Right, so New York didn’t just elect Zohran Mamdani — it also triggered an absolute meltdown in Tel Aviv. The city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel just chose a mayor who called for a ceasefire in Gaza and opposed NYPD–Israel police exchange programmes, and did it without apology. And the moment that result hit, the reaction in Israel was not calm, not measured, not diplomatic — it was panic. Netanyahu flapping because Mamdani said ICC warrants should apply to everyone. Itamar Ben-Gvir — a man with a documented conviction for incitement — called the election a disgrace. Meanwhile, the likes of Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow and Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, the JFREJ had been openly campaigning for him in full daylight.
They weren’t crying in Tel Aviv because New York changed.
They were crying because the narrative did. And its finally turned against them in NYC.
Right, so New York didn’t just elect a mayor — it broke a story that was never supposed to break. Zohran Mamdani won, emphatically and cleanly. There has been no dispute, no recount theatre, no quiet backroom reassurance to the people who usually get reassured. And here’s the thing that matters: he won exactly as he is. No distancing. No coded language. No “of course I support Israel’s security” throat-clearing. He went in with a ceasefire demand in public view, with his opposition to NYPD-Israel training exchanges on record, and he didn’t apologise for any of it. That’s the point. There was no retreat.
And this isn’t some rural backwater or a city council ward. It’s New York. The largest Jewish population outside Israel. The city that has been treated like a satellite capital for Israeli messaging. The place where political consultants have spent decades telling every candidate the same thing: you don’t cross that line. And Mamdani crossed it. Stepped over it like it wasn’t there. And the city voted him in anyway.
This wasn’t a boutique left coalition. It wasn’t a grad-seminar activist bloc. This was tenants’ unions, nurses, subway riders, restaurant workers, people paying rent to hedge funds, people being policed like a problem instead of a public. It was the class that actually lives in the city, not the class that owns pieces of it. And that class did not flinch when the smear started.
Because let’s be clear: the smear was the test. Claims pushed online that he “supports Hamas,” that he’s some kind of threat to Jewish safety, that he was in the country illegally because he was born in Uganda, that somehow he was linked to 9/11 even though he was only ten years old at the time, that he is antisemitic despite never having said anything of the kind, that he is an Islamist extremist who wants to globalise the intifada when all he wants is equality and has spoken aloud of the rights for the people of Palestine to exist. That he’s a communist, when all he actually wants is rent controls and to expand child care and demand a $30 minimum wage, as well as taxes on the 1%. There was no evidence. Not a misinterpreted speech, not a buried quote, not a private recording dragged out of context. Nothing. The accusations had to be invented because the man’s record doesn’t supply them. The smear wasn’t about what he did. It was about who he is allowed to be.
And that’s where the machine normally kicks in. The Islamophobia pipeline. The one Columbia Journalism Review has been mapping for years. The one the Center for American Progress documented the funding architecture for. That pipeline tells the public the Muslim candidate is risky. That the Muslim candidate is suspect. That the Muslim candidate must prove innocence before being allowed to serve. The system is old. It’s well-oiled. It usually works.
But not this time.
Because the coalition didn’t split. And the coalition didn’t split because Jewish New Yorkers didn’t leave the room. Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, JFREJ, the DSA Jewish caucus — all present, all active, all organising publicly for Mamdani. And here’s the thing nobody in the old system can say out loud: that’s the part that broke their game. The smear cannot land if the group it claims to protect refuses to play along.
So when the result came in, the reaction in Israel wasn’t analytical. It was emotional. It was panic dressed up as outrage. Netanyahu had called Mamdani “antisemitic” because he supports enforcing an ICC warrant — that’s not debate. That’s a government frightened that the language it relies on has stopped working. Ben-Gvir calling the election a disgrace — this is a man whose own conviction for incitement is a matter of public record. When he says the word antisemitism, it’s not an argument. It’s the script. It’s the script they all learned to run.
And in New York — it didn’t work.
And once something like that doesn’t work once, the machine knows it might not work again.
The smear was the move. It always is. You wait for the Muslim candidate to step forward, and the machine starts humming, like it has a script already open. Claims he “supports Hamas.” Claims he is “dangerous” to Jewish people in the city. No citations. No sourcing. Just the algorithm pushing the oldest suspicion in America. But there was nothing to it. Not a remark, not a vote, not a connection. The smear wasn’t built from evidence. It was built from the expectation that the accusation alone would be enough.
That was the play.
They ran with it as they always do.
And it didn’t land.
Because the coalition didn’t split.
Because the people who were meant to panic didn’t panic.
The old assumption was always that Jewish New Yorkers could be turned against a candidate the moment Israel was mentioned. But JVP didn’t flinch. IfNotNow didn’t flinch. JFREJ didn’t flinch. The DSA Jewish caucus didn’t flinch. They were visible. They were loud. They were organised. They were backing Mamdani. They said what they have been saying for years: Jewish safety does not require Palestinian death.
The smear campaign had nowhere to go because the community it claims to defend refused to be used as a weapon.
Those in charge of that machine know exactly what that means.
The old threat didn’t work.
The old fear didn’t activate.
The old discipline didn’t hold.
It fell apart instead.
Look at how fast the reaction came from Israel via their loyal commentators across social media or the likes of Ben Gvir. Not careful, not diplomatic, not measured. Immediate. Personal. You don’t get that kind of speed unless someone recognises the danger before they finish the headline.
Netanyahu didn’t debate policy. He didn’t disagree with Mamdani’s transit plan or the housing agenda. He called him “antisemitic” because Mamdani said the International Criminal Court’s warrant should be enforced and its on his head. That’s not ideology. That’s fear of law. The accusation wasn’t about Jewish people. It was about immunity.
But here’s what actually happened in New York: Jewish voters supported Mamdani. Jewish organisers campaigned for him. Jewish communities rejected the idea that Israel speaks for them.
So when Israeli officials screamed “danger,” it had nothing to do with safety.
It was about losing the ability to define Jewish identity from a government office in Tel Aviv.
They lost the narrative.
And they felt it hit.
That’s why the response from so many of these spokespeople sounds like panic.
Because it is.
And they know it.
The important thing isn’t even that Mamdani won in this sense. The important thing is that the enforcement method finally failed and so it can fail again and again now.
For decades, the accusation of antisemitism has been deployed not as a shield for Jewish life, but as a weapon to protect the Israeli state from accountability. They wrote the strategy. They circulated the playbook: label any criticism of the state as delegitimisation; collapse the distinction between opposition to Israeli policy and hatred of Jews; isolate dissidents; flood the discourse until the target breaks.
It works only if opponents stand alone.
It works only if people are afraid to be seen standing with them.
It works only if Jewish identity is treated as property held by the state.
Mamdani’s campaign cut through that because solidarity was already material.
Housing. Policing. Wages. Transit. Landlords. Debt.
The same systems that grind Palestinians grind working-class New Yorkers.
Jewish and Muslim and Palestinian communities in that city do not live in separate worlds. They share rent burdens. They share neighbourhoods. They share NYPD presence. They share the reality of being governed by real estate capital.
Once solidarity stops being theoretical, the smear loses oxygen.
And once the smear loses oxygen, the state loses the ability to decide who gets to speak.
So the consequence of this election is simple.
The fear stopped working in New York City. Here’s hoping that proves contagious.
A Muslim mayor in New York supporting Palestinian liberation — and winning — means the old enforcement mechanism is a busted flush.
Unreliable systems cannot be used as threats.
Threats that no longer work turn into signals of weakness.
Other organisers will see this.
Other candidates will stop apologising.
Other coalitions will stop backing down when the smear begins.
This is not a cultural shift.
This is not a vibe or a trend.
This is a break in the machinery of political control.
They said a pro-Palestine candidate could not win in New York.
And he did.
They said Jewish communities would not stand with him.
But they did.
They said the smear would finish him.
But it didn’t.
And if it can happen there, then it can surely now happen anywhere.
The place it needs to happen most of all frankly is Israel itself, the question mark there is whether as a society it can ever actually progress given the foundations it is built on – perhaps that is the one place such a shift is actually impossible – and certainly for as long as it treats whistleblowers like criminals and arrests them, whilst letting literal criminals committing depraved acts against Palestinians in prison who had the whistle blown on them can go on camera and plead victimhood, you certainly feel they are a long way from the shift needed. Get all the details of that story here.
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