View / How the pro-Israel lobby got New York wrong

As a campaign reporter, you dream for this kind of luck. It was early June. I showed up to the first Zohran Mamdani event of my trip, a forum on affordability and anti-monopoly policy with Lina Khan and Zephyr Teachout, at a Methodist church decked out in pride banners.

It started right on time, with a substantive discussion of the mayor’s executive power to help small businesses compete with behemoths. Suddenly, a protester stood up to demand he stop defending Israel’s “right to exist.” Then another. Then another. It was the primary campaign in miniature — the candidate trying to talk economics, and a very loud voice demanding he talk about the Holy Land.

Most of the Israel discourse in New York’s election came from the other direction. Mamdani supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement to push Israel out of its West Bank settlements, said that he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu over the “genocide” in Gaza, and did not defend Israel’s “right to exist as a Jewish state,” as the question was put to him at a critical debate. Asked if he would condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” he didn’t, and was drawn into a final-week fight with the Holocaust Museum.

The conventional wisdom was that this could put a ceiling on the only mayoral campaign with momentum. We now know that it didn’t. Polling during the campaign found that few Democrats were voting on Israel, and most were voting on affordability.

It is very easy to over-interpret one primary. The story in big city elections this year, until 9 p.m. on Tuesday, was that progressives were getting rinsed. And Andrew Cuomo’s hubris and unpopularity probably won’t be replicated in many establishment vs. insurgent primaries this year. But Democratic leaders are living very far from Democratic voters, who are less supportive of the Jewish state’s military and foreign policy than at any time since its creation, 77 years ago.

“If Democrats keep running in fear of AIPAC, they will continue to do badly,” Bernie Sanders told Politico in an interview after Mamdani’s win.

In 2022 and 2024, when AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups spent to beat pro-Palestinian leftists in primaries, it had the intended effect: Progressives campaigned more carefully, to avoid being smashed by PAC money. Pro-Israel Democrats would continue to lead the party.

“There’s going to be a whole class of progressives and Democrats that are pro-Israel, and they’ll become empowered,” then-AIPAC CEO Howard Kohr told me in 2022.

That was true, and it stayed true through the 2024 election, when Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris refused to meet the demands of pro-Palestinian Democrats, despite their threat to withhold votes in swing states. But most Democratic voters did want Biden and Harris to change.

Those voters have since watched the Trump administration pull grants away from universities on the premise of fighting anti-Semitism, which has infuriated them: “Do not claim that your authoritarian power-grabs are about combatting antisemitism,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said in a speech to New Hampshire Democrats this year. Like AIPAC, they’ve also watched new media elevate criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza, without being “canceled,” because no one really has the power to cancel it. (Theo Von doesn’t run on NIH grants.)

Mamdani is not going to make his Israel views the focus of his November campaign, which will continue to focus on affordability. But negative polarization is powerful. Democrats have already recoiled at the anti-Muslim attacks he’s faced since Tuesday, and the nervous backroom meetings of wealthy people who want to stop him. Jumping onto Andrew Cuomo’s leaky ship was a devastating mistake for the pro-Israel movement.