The results of the New York House primaries that took place on Tuesday were an alarming wake-up call for supporters of Israel and any Jewish Democrats concerned about the future of their party.
Three candidates with bona fide animosity toward Israel, backed and endorsed by New York City’s Israel-hating Mayor Zohran Mamdani, won their primaries.
Former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander defeated Rep. Dan Goldman in a Lower Manhattan-area district, Assembly member Claire Valdez beat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in an open seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez, and activist Darializa Avila Chevalier took out five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat.
“I will continue to call for Palestinian liberation,” Valdez said during her victory speech, to cheers. “We will stand up to the genocide. We will refuse to abide by apartheid. And we will use our money to improve lives here instead of destroying them abroad.”
Chevalier has unequivocally condemned Israel as an “apartheid state,” accused it of committing a “genocide” against Gazans, and has denied Israel’s right to exist.
Lander, who is Jewish and describes himself as a “liberal Zionist,” frequently and publicly uses the term “genocide” to describe the post-war situation in Gaza.
Mamdani's candidates favor ending US support for Israel
All three of Mamdani’s candidates, who are pegged to win their races in November, have ties to the Democratic Socialists of America and favor ending US support for Israel. The future of the Democratic Party’s relationship with Israel has never been more in question.
Mamdani, at a rally last week backing his preferred candidates, compared pro-Israel lobbyists AIPAC to “monsters,” a statement that organizations such as the Union for Reform Judaism and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) criticized.
Mamdani’s statement preceded a much-publicized outrage last week when a Brooklyn cafe rejected the business of Lander’s opponent, the Jewish incumbent Goldman, on the grounds that his money for a cup of coffee was “probably coming from AIPAC,” since it had endorsed Goldman.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, warned about the immediate and physical dangers posed to Jews in New York as a result, calling out Mamdani’s “monsters” statement as crossing “the line into antisemitic tropes about sinister Jewish political influence.”
The takeaway from Tuesday’s results is that in the biggest concentration of Jews in the world aside from Israel, candidates, including Jews, are winning elections by taking a page out of Mamdani’s playbook and demonizing Israel.
Of course, denouncing Israel is only one of many issues that the primaries’ winners agree on. And it may be low – or not even appear – on the list of voters’ priorities, trailing the socialist, anti-establishment, economic reform planks that directly affect them and have propelled these candidates and their ilk to the mainstream of the Democratic Party.
It goes hand-in-hand with that most American term, “intersectionality,” that has infected US culture, which dictates that if you believe in liberal, humanist values, then you think Israel is evil.
Those Democrats – Jewish or otherwise – who voted for Mamdani’s candidates either buy into that philosophy or don’t care one way or the other about Israel.
Jewish Democrats must choose between anti-Israel, Republican candidates
Jewish Democrats who support Israel in general, even if they might have issues with some of its policies, have an impossible choice in November: voting for anti-Israel Democratic candidates whom they agree with on most issues or Republican candidates whom they agree with on only one issue: Israel.
Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, expressed the sense of frustration, saying after Tuesday’s results, “We know that Jewish voters feel very conflicted about the issue of Israel and the role that it’s now playing in Democratic politics.”
What happened in New York is being played out in other areas of the United States, providing evidence that the anti-Israel tremors in the Democratic Party extend beyond the biggest US city.
In Denver, Colorado, a virulently anti-Israel candidate, Melat Kiros, is poised to win in a primary against 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette. And in Maine, Graham Platner, the genocide-calling, Nazi-tattoo-wearing, Democratic senatorial candidate, handily won the party’s nomination earlier this month. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and negates the claim of some Democrats who say the results in New York are an anomaly.
Taken together, it doesn’t augur well for the short-term US-Israel relationship, the future of the Democratic Party, or long-term support for Israel in the halls of power in Washington.