Lev Radin/Sipa USA via AP Images
Mayoral candidate Andrew Yang visits Muslim-owned businesses on the first day of Ramadan, in the Jackson Heights area of Queens, New York, April 13, 2021.
The outbreak of violence in Israel and the occupied territories has upended the New York City mayoral election. Toeing a hawkish, pro-Israel line was once the safe choice for New York politicians, but now mainstream Democrats face backlash from progressives for endorsing Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza.
That reaction, and the ideological and demographic shifts that led to it, may indicate more nuanced stances on Middle East politics from local elected officials in the future. This year, however, the likely winners in the Democratic mayoral primary are sticking with Israel—right or wrong.
Mayoral front-runners Andrew Yang and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams both issued unequivocally supportive statements on Israel’s actions in Gaza. Yang tweeted, “I’m standing with the people of Israel who are coming under bombardment attacks, and condemn the Hamas terrorists,” while Adams said, “Israelis live under the constant threat of terrorism and war and New York City’s bond with Israel remains unbreakable.”
Early Friday, a negotiated cease-fire between Israel and Hamas took effect, after more than ten days of fighting that killed more than 230 people in Gaza and 12 in Israel, many of them civilians.
Both Yang and Adams have courted Orthodox Jewish power brokers in Brooklyn, so their position comes as no surprise. But what is surprising is the counterreaction from some elected officials on the left, namely that there was any. Yang was disinvited to an event in Queens marking the beginning of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which triggered a tweet from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in whose district the event occurred, condemning Yang’s “chest-thumping statement.”
Liberal legislators from New York, home to the nation’s largest Jewish population, have traditionally followed a pro-Israel line. Prominent New York Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries still do. (Jeffries signed a letter in April opposing placing conditions on aid to Israel.)
Despite the mayor having no control over U.S. foreign policy, New York City mayors, including liberal legends such as Fiorello La Guardia and John Lindsay, have been ardent Zionists. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was swept into office on a wave of progressive energy in 2013, is such a reliable supporter of Israel hawks that he spoke to the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC’s annual meeting in 2019. De Blasio even criticized other Democrats for skipping the confab.
Now mainstream Democrats face backlash from progressives for endorsing Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza.
“There used to be three I’s in New York politics: If you’re running for office, you had to go to Italy, Israel, and Ireland,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran New York political operative.
That was before white flight. Jews remain in New York City more than Irish and Italians, but that’s not because many of the assimilated, typically center-left Jews didn’t move to the suburbs and Florida, so much as it is because Orthodox Jews stayed and multiplied and Russian Jews immigrated to New York. But while these groups lean conservative, secular Jews are well represented among the professional-class progressives who increasingly dominate politics in gentrified parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. New York’s Israel-Palestine politics are becoming polarized between candidates who are trying to appeal to one or the other of these divergent groups.
On top of that, newer immigrant groups are redrawing the electoral map. Muslims are now 9 percent of New York’s population, compared to Jews’ 13 percent. “The ethnic mix has changed a lot in New York,” said Sheinkopf. “You have a very different city. In Queens alone, you have 160 different languages spoken. You have an increasing minority population, some of which is increasingly Muslim.”
And so now the Israeli-Palestinian conflict divides New York Democrats: Moderates are sticking with the Netanyahu government, while some in a rising generation of progressives are criticizing Israel and calling for justice for Palestinians.
“This is the first war in the Middle East in a long time, and it comes as the left’s influence in Democratic politics is growing,” noted George Arzt, another longtime New York political consultant. The left’s growing influence has been particularly pronounced in New York, where Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidates such as Ocasio-Cortez and freshman Rep. Jamaal Bowman recently unseated pro-Israel, center-left incumbents Eliot Engel and Joe Crowley. Bowman’s district, which includes parts of the Bronx and Westchester, has a large Jewish population. Engel is Jewish and emphasized his reliable backing for Israel in his pitch to Jewish activists, but many progressive Jews backed Bowman.
The mayoral candidates favored by the left are challenging the pro-Israel consensus. Dianne Morales, the former nonprofit executive with the farthest-left platform and the backing of progressive groups such as the Working Families Party, issued a statement declaring, “What is and has been happening in Palestine is apartheid.”
This year, however, the likely winners in the Democratic mayoral primary are sticking with Israel—right or wrong.
No one else has gone nearly that far, but more mainstream candidates with more plausible chances of winning have cautiously tempered their support for Israel’s actions. New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, who had been the WFP’s preferred candidate before a former campaign volunteer accused him of sexual misconduct, offered talking points to both sides. He noted “horrific acts of terrorism against innocent Israelis” and “wrongful evictions of Palestinian families.” Former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, who has been endorsed by both the liberal New York Times and moderate Daily News, provided an even more milquetoast statement. “Clearly the State of Israel needs to exist … But this escalation of violence is incredibly sad to see,” she said.
Still, some young elected officials are sticking with Israel. Rep. Ritchie Torres, a freshman congressmember from the Bronx whom The New Yorker referred to as a progressive in a headline when he launched his congressional campaign, wrote an op-ed for the New York Post last week to condemn “a lie that deceptively reframes the terrorism of Hamas as self-defense and deceptively reframes the self-defense of Israel as terrorism.” That earned him a rebuke on Twitter from Bowman, who is considered a new member of the Squad. “The Palestinians are an occupied people,” Bowman tweeted. “They are an oppressed people. Innocent people and children are suffering as America supports the occupation and denies Palestinians freedom.” Such words from a representative of an 11 percent Jewish New York district would once—approximately a year ago—have been unthinkable.
Even some establishment Democrats are adjusting slightly. Rep. Greg Meeks, who is chair of both the Queens Democratic Party and House Foreign Affairs Committee, considered asking the White House to delay an arms sale to Israel, although he ultimately backed off the request. Axios took note of Schumer’s relative silence on recent events in Israel and attributed it in part to fear that Ocasio-Cortez might challenge him in the 2022 New York Senate primary.
Fear of losing one’s job is a great motivator, and so the future may see more New York politicians re-evaluating their once-automatic endorsement of the Israeli government’s agenda.
