New York Has a Mayor Who Mourns Jewish Survival

On May 15, Zohran Mamdani produced a tribute video for the day Arab armies failed to annihilate Israel. This is who runs New York City now.

The mayor of New York City is now officially mourning the fact that Arab armies failed to commit genocide against the Jews of the Middle East. That is what Nakba Day is. That is what his office celebrated on May 15.

“Nakba” means catastrophe in Arabic. The catastrophe, to those who observe it, is that Israel survived. In 1948, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon invaded the newly declared Jewish state with a declared intention of annihilating it. They failed. The Jews lived. To the Arab world that launched the war, that outcome was the catastrophe. That is the event Zohran Mamdani, using the official @NYCMayor account, produced a video to commemorate.

This is not a matter of disputed history or competing narratives. The Arab leaders of 1948 were explicit about their goals. Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, promised a “war of extermination and momentous massacres” to rival the Mongol conquests. The war was launched. It failed. The Jews of the Middle East were not annihilated. And every year on May 15, a growing chorus in the West marks that failure as a day of mourning, and now the mayor of New York City has joined them with a professionally produced video on the city’s official account.

Mamdani framed his post in the language of memory and human suffering, speaking of displaced families and lost homes. The suffering of civilians in any war is real. But the displacement that followed 1948 was the direct consequence of a war of extermination that the Arab states chose to launch and lost. You do not get to start a war aimed at wiping out a people, lose it, and then have the mayor of the world’s most prominent city produce a tribute video to your defeat.

This did not come out of nowhere. On his first day in office, Mamdani revoked executive orders his predecessor had put in place to combat antisemitism and the boycott of Israel. He did it within hours of being sworn in. The Nakba Day post is not a stumble. It is a statement of ideology, consistent and deliberate, from a man who has made clear since before he took office that he views Israel’s founding not as the survival of a persecuted people but as an injustice to be relitigated forever.

New York City has the largest Jewish population of any city outside Israel. Those residents now have a mayor who uses the machinery of city government to validate a narrative that casts Jewish survival as a catastrophe. At a moment when antisemitism is rising on the city’s streets and campuses, when Jewish institutions require armed guards to hold Shabbat services, the mayor’s office is not fighting that tide. It is feeding it.

There is a version of this story in which Mamdani is simply naive, captured by the ideological currents of his movement without fully reckoning with what the Nakba narrative actually means. That version is too generous. He is an intelligent man. He knows what he is doing. He knows that “Nakba Day” is not a humanitarian observance. It is a political claim, and the claim is that Israel should not exist, that its founding was a crime, and that the proper response to that crime is not coexistence but undoing.

The Democratic Party once understood that this kind of politics had no place in a city like New York. That understanding is gone. What replaced it is a mayor who mourns the survival of the Jews and calls it remembrance.