Daily, anti-Israel protestors are justifying their hate-filled speech and violence against Israel and Jews by saying that Israel is committing genocide, it’s a colonized state, and it’s practicing apartheid. A number of Democratic candidates won primaries on that platform. And in leadership of this onslaught of hatred has been NYC mayor Mamdani.
Just as importantly, the Democrat Party must condemn the antisemitic rhetoric of a growing number of its candidates.
Mamdani points to Israel’s national law that privileges Jews worldwide who can immigrate without restrictions. However, he ignores the privileging of Islam in virtually every Arab country and the needs of Jews worldwide for a safe haven from antisemitism. He had no trouble publicly embracing the Egyptian soccer team even though it had no Catholic Coptics — who comprise 15 percent of the population — as members, continuation of their second-class treatment.
Just look at his own city: antisemitism incidents are up nearly 70 percent year-over-year. Recently, a Jewish woman was violently attacked on the C train while her attacker choked her, kicked her, pulled out her hair, and ranted that, “Jews are eating kids!”
Israel was established after six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. In the early 1950s, after a decade of persistent harassment and restrictive laws, over 800,000 Jews living in Arab countries had to leave as well, and Israel was their savior. In the 1980s, hundreds of thousand Ethiopian Jews had to escape the conflict there and emigrate to the Jewish state. And in the 2000s, almost one million Russian Jews fled Russian antisemitism through migration to Israel.
Mamdani has annually celebrated the Nakba, which we are told commemorates the expulsion of 700,000 Arabs during the 1948 war. This claim is wrong for two reasons. First, most refugees left voluntarily to flee the war or because they were unwilling to live in cities, including Jaffa and Haifa, conquered by Zionist forces. More importantly, the Nakba was originally considered the catastrophe of having any Jewish state on Arab lands. Only in the 1990s, when PLO Chair Arafat wanted to make the right-of-return a nonnegotiable demand, was the meaning shifted to the refugee problem.
This need to revise meaning extends to the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” In the Arab world, the slogan has always been, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.” However, it has been reframed so that its U.S. supporters, like Mamdani, can claim it to be consistent with a two-state solution.
The mayor and his supporters claim, “Globalize the Intifada” only applies to confronting Zionists. However, they broadly legitimize actions against any Jewish organization that supports the right of Israel to exist, who sell Israeli merchandise, and any Jewish Israeli citizen. Indeed, anyone can be confronted on the street or in the trains for simply being Jewish — and Mamdani won’t be there to protect them, considering he used the first veto of his career against a City Council bill that would have created security buffer zones around educational facilities being targeted by protestors.
The proponents of these antisemitic beliefs never compare the actual situation of Arab citizens of Israel with Palestinians in Lebanon and Jordan. In those countries, more than a million stateless Palestinians face severe restrictions on where they can live and what jobs they can obtain. The head of the Jordanian Human Rights Committee was rebuffed when she sought to change this situation. She was told that to better integrate Palestinians would undermine the right-of-return.
By contrast, in Israel, 20 years of sustained, robust affirmative action initiatives, exemplified by consecutive five-year plans, have dramatically increased the funding of Arab towns and provided for Arab educational and occupational advancements. Arab Nazareth became a hi-tech center, doctors became directors at the nation’s top hospitals, and many government agencies, like the police force, employ Arab citizens in senior positions. The employment rates of Arab women jumped from 18 percent in 2008 to 49 percent in 2025. Arab enrollment is over 20 percent at Technion, Israel’s MIT.
Today, many East Jerusalem Palestinians favor being citizens of Israel rather than part of a Palestinian state — likely due to massive upgrades to their educational system and quality of life. More than a thousand Palestinians there go to Israeli universities, and Silicon Wadi is now a hub for hi-tech companies. In 2023, the Netanyahu government passed a five-year plan for East Jerusalem. Its confirmation resolution stated, “The development and prosperity of Jerusalem … for the benefit of all its citizens … is based on the integration of East Jerusalem residents into the fabric of urban life and Israeli society.”
Yes, there is a modest share of anti-Arab extremists that have been causing havoc in the West Bank. However, their efforts to foment conflict within Israel have been strongly repelled. Despite provocations, due to coordinated efforts between Jewish and Muslim organizations, there was no violence in the mixed cities as happened after the 2021 war. And when these anti-Arab elements tried to freeze implementation of approved spending for Arab communities and East Jerusalem, they were decisively rebuffed.
Positive Zionist attitudes and behaviors have their origins in the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Zev Jabotinsky, the inspirational leader of the dominant right-of-center parties. His words were chosen as the preamble of the first five-year plan.
After the formation of a Jewish majority, a considerable Arab population will always remain in Palestine. If things fare badly for this group of inhabitants, then things will fare badly for the entire country. The political, economic and cultural welfare of the Arabs will thus always remain one of the main conditions for the well-being of the Land of Israel.
Here in New York City, Mamdani must be condemned for promoting false narratives concerning Israel and its treatment of its Arab citizens, and for putting his Jewish constituents at risk. Just as importantly, the Democrat Party must condemn the antisemitic rhetoric of a growing number of its candidates.
READ MORE from Robert Cherry:
Halftime Hype and Cultural Blind Spots
New York City Policing at a Crossroads
The Gaza Famine Myth: Refuting NYT’s Kristof’s Libelous Claims
Robert Cherry is an American Institute affiliate and author of Arab Citizens of Israel: How Far Have They Come?(Wicked Son, 2026).
