Palestinians Deserve More: On Mamdani’s Strategy to Combat Antisemitism and R22

On Tuesday, September 29, Mayor Zohran Mamdani's office released New York City's Strategy to Combat Antisemitism, a 35-page plan that City Hall billed as the first of its kind from any U.S. municipality. The divided reactions came swiftly on its heels. Bend the Arc, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, New Jewish Narrative, and J Street's New York chapter all backed the rollout. Brad Lander, the mayor's most prominent Jewish ally, called it common ground for Jews who disagree about nearly everything else, Israel included. UJA-Federation, the Jewish Community Relations Council, the local American Jewish Committee, and the New York Board of Rabbis signed a joint statement faulting the plan for sidestepping the mayor's own criticism of Israel. The ADL accused him of refusing to treat anti-Jewish hate as a state of emergency.

Neither of these narratives is correct. Although Mamdani's office went to pains to ensure "Zionism" itself does not appear in the plan, it remains central to this issue due to the long history of the Israeli government and its supporters weaponizing antisemitism as a way to discredit critics. Mamdani has become the whipping boy of Zionists worldwide, with accusations of hating Jews linked, directly and indirectly, to his Muslim faith. It is impossible not to interpret Mamdani's plan as an attempt to defang these attacks, an appeasement of enemies rather than a popularly demanded policy.

But the response of the ADL, AJC, et al. illustrates that they will not and cannot be so appeased; they have no interest in conciliation with anything other than full-throated support for Israel–much like how a Palestinian who refuses to denounce Hamas is instantly regarded as invalid. If you are the "right" kind of critic of Israel, then you are allowed to speak, and there are many who see Mamdani's plan as an effort to be that "right" kind of critic. By being the “right” kind of critic, they argue, his political options will open and he will have broader support. If he punts on Palestine, think about all the other wonderful things he can accomplish!

This view is unfair to the thousands of socialists who canvassed tirelessly for Mamdani and his program precisely based on his commitment to Palestine. In this time of ongoing genocide, his opposition to Zionism and Israel was a central pillar of his populist appeal, a key part of what separated him from the Democratic establishment. It’s what energized millions compared to the milquetoast social democrats that otherwise fail at achieving broad appeal.

But this view is even more unfair to the Palestinian people who expect U.S. opponents of Zionism to practice what they preach. For too long, the marginalized and oppressed of the world have looked to Western leftists, who, in the words of Leila Khaled, only offered "beards, long hair, and toy guns." While Palestinians fought and died resisting Zionist repression, from 1948 to October 7, 2023, Western socialists "smiled, they reflected, they inhaled and passed their joints on in universal wonder." Perhaps today they also wear a keffiyeh. Palestinians deserve more.

Naturally, we cannot expect one radical politician, surrounded by hostile interests and bureaucratic inertia, to fulfill every promise; in the absence of a large paramilitary force or a superhero vigilante like Batman, arresting Netanyahu was always a pipe dream. Nevertheless, socialists must ask ourselves: at what point do we tighten the leash on our elected officials? At what point do we stop prioritizing their comfort and insist on the change we demand? If DSA truly wants to commit to those people who are on the right side of history, who acknowledge the ongoing genocide in Gaza, how can DSA also endorse those candidates who are seemingly tolerant of that genocide's executioners?

What are the problems with Mamdani’s Strategy to Combat Antisemitism?

The strategy document is 35 pages long. Its contents are divided into seven objectives, ranging from prevention and security to education and "the celebration of Jewish New Yorkers." Funding comes first, with City Hall committing $1 million to security improvements for vulnerable non-profit organizations, synagogues, and other places of worship, plus $6.4 million to community groups that aim to prevent hate and support survivors. These grants are part of the Partners Against the Hate program, which is doubling its previous level of funding. Both amounts represent the initial phase of a $26 million increase for the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes.

Spending on culture is even greater than that on security. The Center for New Jewish Culture is receiving $2.5 million, and a previously announced $2 million capital investment will be used for a Holocaust memorial at Queens Borough Hall. More public school classes will visit the Museum of Jewish Heritage. The LinkNYC kiosks will feature a campaign recognizing the contributions of Jewish New Yorkers to the city in addition to a campaign about how to report discrimination under the city's Human Rights Law.

Next come the definitions. The strategy recognizes three—namely, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, and the Nexus Document—but accepts none of them. The authors of the strategy argue that the city can use all the tools at its disposal to combat antisemitism without the need to establish a formal definition for this kind of hatred. The document does not accept the IHRA assertion that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, but it does not reject it either, giving up more ground to those who would see the two conflated. But there is more here than might appear on the surface.

The strategy draws in part on the national plan Joe Biden released in May 2023. That plan had adopted IHRA as the most prominent definition while also welcoming Nexus as a supplementary option. Five months after it was published, the Biden administration started shipping Israel the weapons it would use in Gaza over the following two years. IHRA's working definition opens with a vague sentence that few people would dispute: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” The trouble lies in the examples attached to it. One lists denying the Jewish people's right to self-determination "by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor" as a form of antisemitism. Another calls out "applying double standards" to Israel, a phrase that can cover almost any campaign singling out one state for boycott and which clearly derives from recent Zionist talking points. The examples come with a caveat about context, but, in practice, universities, police departments and state legislatures have used them as a checklist. Under that checklist, DSA's Resolution R22, titled "For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA" (which establishes the organization as an explicit anti-Zionist entity), is hate speech. So would be the "Not on Our Dime! Act" introduced by then-New York State Assemblymember Mamdani in 2023, a proposal aiming to prohibit New York-registered not-for-profit corporations from providing unauthorized financial support to Israeli settlement activities.

Mamdani understood this when he revoked Adams's IHRA order on his first day in office, and his new combating antisemitism strategy does not reverse that revocation. It does something far more subtle and more damaging. By listing IHRA as one of three reference points, the city has certified it as a reasonable reading of antisemitism that a careful government should keep in view. A definition that was thrown out in January because of its role in maintaining Zionism has come back in September with an official seal by the very politician elected on a platform that included opposing it.

Further, it is clear that this concession will not win the Mayor many actual political points. UJA-Federation, the JCRC, the American Jewish Committee and the Board of Rabbis answered the strategy with a statement insisting that rhetoric delegitimizing Israel leads to attacks on Jews, and that the mayor's own rhetoric was the problem the plan ignored. Rabbi Rick Jacobs of the Union for Reform Judaism said the effort could only work if Mamdani stopped criticizing Israel. The ADL had demanded that city contracts and pensions be kept free of "ideological boycotts," which is a demand to abandon divestment by another name. Netanyahu, for his part, still calls Mamdani the antisemitic mayor of New York.

To his opponents, Mamdani's original sin is his criticizing Israel and Zionism at all, and the charges of antisemitism will only stop when Mamdani's criticism of Israel and Zionism does. Antonio Gramsci described hegemony as the work of making one class's interests feel like common sense, and the struggle for it as a war of position fought over the terrain on which every argument takes place. The Zionist establishment does not need Mamdani to adopt IHRA. It needs him to treat the question of whether anti-Zionism is antisemitic as an open one, settled case-by-case not by Mamdani or the New York City government, but by firm Zionists and Israel cheerleaders like the ADL. Once a socialist government accepts that terrain, every future fight over divestment, Not On Our Dime, or a ceasefire resolution begins on ground we as socialists have already ceded to the opposition.

When AOC declared that "Woke 1 was crazy" and Mamdani followed by distancing himself from abolition, E. Day and J. Ryder called it deliverism: the belief that proving competence to a hostile establishment will earn a socialist room to govern. The antisemitism strategy is the same move applied to Palestine. It offers grants, memorials and security to those who have shown that only silence about Israel will satisfy them.

None of this makes Mamdani an enemy. He made a strategic error in a city where the pressure on him is enormous and constant. But the cost of the error falls on people who had no say in it. Palestinian New Yorkers and the students who organize alongside them will now face administrators and prosecutors who can point to the mayor's own strategy when they reach for IHRA. Other DSA electeds will read the episode as proof that retreat is the safe path. And the movement that put Mamdani in office will learn that its victories can be traded away to the very opponents they rallied together to defeat.

Antisemitism does exist in New York, and Mamdani has pointed out that Jews are the victims of about half of the city's hate crimes. A religious community which requests a guard to be stationed outside its synagogue on Yom Kippur is making a reasonable request, and a socialist administration should readily pay for it. The left has a history on this issue. In March 1919, when the White armies were carrying out mass killings of Jews in Ukraine, Lenin made a speech for distribution on gramophone which condemned pogroms as a tool that the owning classes used to divide the workers against one another. Socialists who take that legacy seriously have no justification for leaving the struggle against antisemitism to the ADL. There is no "good" ethnic hatred.

But the problem remains that antisemitism is treated as an exceptional case of ethnic hatred, tied to existing Zionist institutions, and not dealt with independently. New York does require safety for its minorities–but it requires safety for all of its minorities. There is no plan to provide security for New York City mosques or a public campaign to inform people about the contributions of Muslim New Yorkers, despite the city’s rapidly growing Islamophobia. In 2025, the Council on American-Islamic Relations logged 8,683 complaints of anti-Muslim discrimination, more than in any year since it began tracking them in 1996. Anti-Muslim discrimination has now held at record levels for three years running. Public attitudes have hardened along the same line. A Pew survey from earlier this year found that 51% of American adults believe Islam encourages violence more than other religions, double the 25% who said so six months after September 11.

New York City has no standalone office for Islamophobia. A Muslim New Yorker who is assaulted, harassed, or turned away from a job goes to the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes or the Commission on Human Rights, the general channels that serve every community in the city. Jewish New Yorkers can use those same channels, but now they also have a dedicated mayoral office, an executive director with a staff of her own and, as of this week, a 35-page strategy backed by millions in new spending. It is fine if some socialists think Jewish New Yorkers need these things, but they should ask why it is that Muslim New Yorkers are not getting the same protections from a Muslim mayor. The salient element here is the power of political lobbies tied to larger political objectives, namely, support for Israel–and bending to pressure groups distorts our democracy and leads to the unequal and inefficient application of justice.

What Next?

Last December, after a Palestinian student at Brown was doxxed and threatened by conspiracy theorists who falsely tied him to a shooting, Mamdani promised to fight Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism in every corner of the city. Ten months later, the bigotry has only grown bolder. In March, a crowd led by pardoned January 6 rioter Jake Lang rallied outside Gracie Mansion against what it called an Islamic takeover of New York. A sitting congressman, Randy Fine, has said the country needs more Islamophobia. Yet the city's response has been the general machinery it already had.

Poulantzas warned that the capitalist state is a material condensation of the balance of forces in society. A socialist who wins City Hall inherits that balance along with the key to the city. Jewish safety has organized institutional backers with money, access, and an interest in tying that safety to Israel. Muslim safety has spent a quarter century as a chief target of the national security state and right-wing cultural warriors.

In their response to AOC's "Woke 1" remarks, E. Day and J. Ryder listed the fascists' declared enemies, Muslims among them, and argued that the left must take up the demands of every group on that list as distinct groups with their own needs. A municipal government that writes a strategy for one targeted community and offers the others its general hotline has broken that coalition at the point where the right is pushing hardest.

The fix is straightforward. Mamdani should immediately commission a parallel strategy on Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, with its own office and its own budget line, and he should have Muslim and Palestinian New Yorkers write it. It should cover the street harassment and job discrimination CAIR documents, and it should cover the repression of Palestine organizing that IHRA-style definitions make possible, from campus discipline to police surveillance of protests. Not only would he be keeping promises that he made back in December, but, as one of our most prominent elected officials, he'd help put the "progressive except for Palestine" phenomenon to bed.

The most well-known case of the “progressive except for Palestine” phenomenon is that of Jamaal Bowman. In September 2021, the DSA-endorsed congressman voted for an extra $1 billion to replenish Israel's Iron Dome. Two months later, he flew to Israel on a trip sponsored by J Street and met with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of the far-right religious Zionist party. DSA's BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group spent months trying to move him, and then asked the National Political Committee to begin expulsion proceedings unless he committed to the platform he had run on. On December 2, the NPC announced it would not expel him, citing "considerable movement" on his part. In March 2022, Bowman announced he would vote for Iron Dome funding again. Nine days later, the NPC voted 9-8 to dissolve the working group. An enormous backlash from chapters and Palestinian organizations forced the NPC to reinstate the group, but its leaders stayed barred from national positions for a year. DSA disciplined the members who defended Palestine and kept the congressman who funded the interceptors and shook hands with Bennett.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has followed a similar arc on a larger stage. She voted present on Iron Dome money in 2021 and wept on the House floor afterward. In July 2024, DSA withdrew its endorsement after she hosted a panel on antisemitism that the organization said treated anti-Zionism as antisemitism and condemned boycotts of Zionist institutions. Socialists should study that panel case closely, because Mamdani's strategy follows its template. A progressive under fire from pro-Israel institutions answers by staging an official reckoning with antisemitism, and the framing of that reckoning does the institutions' work for them.

A year later, AOC joined a 422-6 majority against an amendment to cut $500 million from Israeli missile defense. Then something changed. Members of NYC-DSA pressed her directly, and she told them she would vote against any spending on arms for Israel, defensive systems included. She did not reach that position through private reflection or the counsel of her colleagues. Organized members confronted her, refused to accept her explanation, and kept confronting her until she moved. Every elected official with or seeking a coveted DSA endorsement is open to the same pressure, but only if we are willing to apply it.

Nithya Raman is the next test. Raman says she supports Israel's right to exist and opposes BDS. After October 7, she criticized the national DSA's statement for ignoring Hamas's violence, and in February 2024 DSA-LA censured her for seeking and accepting the endorsement of Democrats for Israel-Los Angeles. The chapter kept its endorsement in the hope that she would realign with the socialist program. That realignment has not happened. DSA-LA endorsed her for mayor anyway, after a debate in which multiple of Geese's editors argued for the endorsement and celebrated her endorsement.

R22 is explicit on this point. Its candidate standards apply to every candidate endorsed by national DSA or by a chapter, and candidates who cannot commit to them are to be deemed ineligible by chapter-level bodies as well as national ones. By the resolution's own terms, the Raman endorsement should never have happened without public commitments on Palestine that were recently shown by the DSA’s NPC to not have been secured, namely, on political support for BDS. Geese's T. E. Moon has argued that an endorsement can become the most effective means of transmitting our criticism to the public. If that is true, then DSA-LA and the Geese editors who made the case for Raman owe DSA and Palestinians that criticism now, in public.

The pattern across these cases is consistent. Bowman reached for J Street. AOC reached for an antisemitism panel. Raman reached for Democrats for Israel. Mamdani rolled out his strategy with J Street's New York chapter standing beside him. Under Zionist pressure, our electeds look for cover from the antisemitism frame or from a liberal Zionist validator, and the cover always costs Palestinians something. If we are to end this, we must have the courage to confront our electeds, not blindly support them.

T. E. Moon's "Say the Magic Words" makes the strongest case against what Geese calls DSA's purity problem. Moon argues that DSA has failed to discipline its electeds on Israel, and that restricting endorsements will cut the organization off from the left-populist wave. Behind both claims sits a simpler one: no form of words can purify a candidate seeking power. On that last point, he is right. Socialists in office bend under the weight of capitalist governance, and no questionnaire answer will stop them.

R22 was written with that in mind. Its text says endorsed candidates lose their endorsements only after receiving "fair and ample opportunity for education about the Palestinian struggle." The resolution assumes electeds will fall short and builds in a stage of political work before any consequence arrives. The convention also softened the expulsion clause. The proposal said members credibly shown to violate its standards "shall be expelled." The adopted text says they "may be expelled," leaving the NPC discretion and the membership the job of persuasion. A purity test would fire automatically. R22 sets a standard and then hands members the work of holding electeds to it, precisely the very organized relationship Moon says DSA lacks.

Moon's essay admits the reasoning behind R22. Among the slogans he says will actually move the masses, he names driving Zionist demons from power, and he counts the movement against the genocide in Palestine among the struggles the left must unite. Palestine is not a tertiary or optional issue for socialists, but for R22 to be anything but words on a page, socialists must actually attempt to enforce its consequences.

Moon argues that hard lines will isolate DSA from the masses it needs. On this issue, the numbers run the other way. Pew found this spring that 60% of American adults view Israel unfavorably, up from 53% a year earlier and roughly twenty points higher than in 2022. Eight in ten Democrats share that view, compared with 53% four years ago. Majorities of adults under 50 in both parties now rate Israel and Netanyahu negatively, Republicans included. Opposition to Israel increasingly cuts across ideological lines because no ideology endorses the blatant torture, starvation, or murder of a people purely because of their identity. The cleavage over Israel runs not between left and right but between ordinary people with basic decency and a depraved Epstein class that knows no shame.

The primary electorate has moved even further. In August, the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project released YouGov surveys of more than 4,000 likely Democratic primary voters in six early states. Between 65 and 75% in each state said they would rather support a presidential candidate who cuts off weapons to Israel, and no more than 7% preferred one who keeps sending them. While some might claim the IMEU is biased in favor of Palestinians, it was YouGov that ran the fieldwork, and margins that lopsided leave little room for confounding variables to explain them away. Moon closes his essay with the mass line, the principle that socialists should act in ways whose immediate effect advances socialist hegemony and should lead the movement on the terms of the masses who make it up. On Palestine, the masses have already moved. A left-populism that hedges on arms to Israel retreats from its own base to chase voters who are already abandoning that position.

Pushing AOC toward a full arms embargo is the mass line in practice. Geese has already published the case for a presidential campaign built around exactly that demand, written by DSA’s Carnation Program, in "A Socialist Campaign for the Presidency to Win an Arms Embargo and Advance the Movement for Medicare for All." The editors should hold the rest of the left-populist wave to their own magazine's argument. This week, rescue crews in Gaza's al-Yarmouk neighborhood pulled 105 bodies from beneath the rubble of a single residential block that Israeli strikes destroyed three years ago, and mourners carried them through the street in a mass funeral. Two days earlier, more than 100 settlers attacked the West Bank village of Jalud and blocked a Palestinian family from returning home. A year after the so-called "ceasefire" in Gaza, the dead are still being pulled out of the ruins and the illegal settlements keep pushing outward. Unapologetic defense of the Palestinian cause is the mass line applied here.

DSA tells U.S. workers that they deserve more than the scraps this system offers them. Palestinians deserve more as well. They deserve a socialist movement that names their oppression without first clearing its throat. Too many of us open every sentence about Gaza with a paragraph about antisemitism, as though solidarity with Palestinians were a confession that needs mitigating. That reflex capitulates to our opponents' premise that our politics are suspect until proven innocent. Socialists should oppose antisemitism because Jewish workers are our comrades and because the far right that hunts Muslims in the U.S. and Europe hunts Jews too. We should do it on our own schedule, in our own words, and never as the price of admission to a conversation about Palestine.

In 1982, the UN General Assembly's Resolution 37/43 reaffirmed the legitimacy of peoples' struggle against colonial domination and foreign occupation by all available means, armed struggle among them. R22 commits DSA to the Thawabit, the principles the Palestinian National Council set out in 1977, which affirm the right of resistance alongside the right of refugees to return home. The American left defended the ANC's right to resist apartheid while Washington kept Nelson Mandela on a terrorism watch list. Palestinians are owed the same defense. It is almost criminal not to provide it.

That defense entails demands, and our elected officials can act on them now. Every socialist in Congress should vote against every weapon bound for Israel, defensive systems included, and should back a full arms embargo. AOC has already made that pledge to NYC-DSA. If she runs in 2028, the embargo belongs at the center of her platform, and the polling says the primary electorate will reward her for it. Mamdani has the most room to move. He can put City Hall's full weight behind Not On Our Dime in Albany, the bill he wrote and endorsed this May again. He can use the mayor's seats on the city's pension boards to push R22's divestment program, moving public money out of Israeli bonds and companies that profit from the occupation. He can also keep the promise he made in December and commission a strategy on Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, written by those communities.

Individual DSA chapters must not shrink from the challenge. Every endorsement, Raman's included, should come with public commitments on Palestine, pursued through the education process R22 lays out. Where an elected official refuses after that process runs its course, the membership should decide what comes next in the open.

Mamdani won because tens of thousands of New Yorkers knocked doors for a candidate who refused to apologize for Palestine. Many of them were young Muslims and Arab New Yorkers who had never seen a politician take their side, and many were anti-Zionist Jews who had spent years being told they did not exist. Together, they proved a socialist could call the slaughter in Gaza a genocide and still win the largest city in the country–even win because of it, because of a sense of mass justice around the horrors in Palestine.

They are owed a mayor who keeps saying it, and the Palestinians whose cause they carried into City Hall are owed a movement that will press him whenever he forgets.