by Jonathan S. Tobin
Groups like J Street and Jews who support New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani aren’t just criticizing Jerusalem. They are assisting a globalized intifada against their own people.
 |
| Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador
to the United States, speaks to the media after a meeting with U.S.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Nada Hamadeh, Lebanon’s ambassador to
the United States, outside the U.S. State Department in Washington,
D.C., April 14, 2026. Photo by Arie Leib Abrams/Flash90. |
It’s not the sort of language we’re used to hearing from
ambassadors, especially not from Israeli ambassadors to the United
States when speaking about American Jews. At a National Task Force to
Combat Antisemitism meeting at the Museum of the Bible in Washington,
Yechiel Leiter called the left-wing J Street lobby “a cancer within the Jewish community.”
That
sort of blunt talk about American Jews who band together to bash or
pressure the State of Israel has, up to now, generally been regarded as
divisive and unproductive by the Jewish establishment here in the United
States, as well as the diplomats and bureaucrats back at Israel’s
Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem.
Undiplomatic talk
But
as efforts to delegitimize Israel grow, alongside and as part of an
unprecedented surge of antisemitism in the United States, diplomatic
niceties and happy talk about a big tent is no longer appropriate to
cope with a real crisis.
Democrats are falling increasingly under
the sway of their intersectional base that regards Israel as a “white”
oppressor and an “apartheid” state. Antisemitism that operates under the
guise of hatred for Israel has become normative both on the political
left and the far right.
All of the instincts and past practices of
the organized Jewish community impel it, as well as Israeli diplomats,
to tread lightly when it comes to Jews who join the ranks of
anti-Zionists. However, in the current crisis, it is vital that the hard
truths like those spoken by Leiter be heard rather than the empty talk
about inclusion and a big Jewish tent. Under the current circumstances,
unity with J Street and openly anti-Zionist and antisemitic groups like
Jewish Voice for Peace means giving those who are actively aiding and
abetting others waging war on Israel and the Jewish people legitimacy
they don’t deserve.
Leiter’s undiplomatic comment was not a
one-line mic drop. He explained that “the worst thing about J Street is
it’s duplicitous.” Referring to the group’s stand favoring the attempts
of Democrats
to cut off arms sales to the Jewish state, he asked, “How can you be
pro-Israel and advocate for an arms embargo on a state that’s fighting a
seven-front war against Iranian proxies?”
While J Street and its defenders say they are just criticizing the Israeli government, Leiter says this stand is disingenuous.
“If
they said that they were pro-Palestinian, I wouldn’t have a problem
meeting with them,” Leiter said. “I meet with pro-Palestinian groups.”
“But
when you come and say in such a two-faced manner, ‘We’re pro-Israel,
we’re pro-democracy,’ there’s a democratically elected government in
Israel,” he said. “You don’t like Netanyahu, make aliyah, vote in the
next election and express yourself. Don’t say you’re ‘pro-democracy,’
and decry and defy the position of the democratic government of Israel.”
Where ‘pro-Israel’ merges with anti-Zionist
J
Street, which entered the political fray in Washington in 2008, was
criticized harshly in the past by two of Leiter’s predecessors, Michael
Oren and Ron Dermer, who also represented Israeli governments led by
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But they didn’t call the group a
“cancer.”
Michael Herzog, who was appointed by the short-lived
government led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid from 2021 to 2022,
stayed away from attacks on J Street, even if he was blunt about his
negative opinion about the organization’s ally in the Senate, Sen.
Bernie Sanders (I-Vt).
Leiter’s right about what J Street has been
up to. They back the efforts of congressional Democrats to cut off arms
sales to Israel in the midst of a war against Iran and its terrorist
proxies, which began with the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terrorist
attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Indeed, since its founding, J
Street has made it its sole purpose to aid efforts in pressuring the
Jewish state to make suicidal concessions rejected by its democratically
elected governments and the voters that put them into office.
Despite
their claims to be a nominally Zionist group, the difference between
its stands and those of openly anti-Zionist and antisemitic groups like
Jewish Voice for Peace is increasingly theoretical, rather than a matter
of actual policy and actions.
That was made evident when J Street
defended Zohran Mamdani, the virulently anti-Zionist and antisemitic
mayor of New York City. When the Anti-Defamation League, which was slow
to recognize the peril to the Jewish community from the left, began a
“Mamdani Monitor” to note his actions and statements, J Street condemned
it. The group claimed that it was wrong to “conflate” what they say is
“criticism of Israel’s government” with antisemitism. But Mamdani has
never made any effort to conceal his opposition to the existence of the
Jewish state and his desire to aid those working to destroy it.
From
his time as a student at Maine’s Bowdoin College, where he founded a
chapter of the openly antisemitic Students for Justice in Palestine, the
34-year-old mayor has been an ardent anti-Zionist, dedicated to
supporting the war on the one Jewish state on the planet.
That
takes various forms. It includes his longtime support for illegal BDS
discrimination against Israel and Jews, which J Street claims to oppose.
It also means falsely labeling Jews who support Israel as taking part
in violations of international law, even when that means egging on
antisemitic marches and demonstrations outside of synagogues. There is
also his consistent backing for mobs who target Jews for intimidation,
in addition to violence on college campuses and elsewhere, while
chanting for Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and terrorism
against Jews wherever they live (“Globalize the intifada”).
Mamdani’s hate for Israel was front and center this week, but so was his ability to rally support from left-wing Jews.
‘Nakba Day’ fraud
The
mayor has announced that he will be the first person holding his office
since the founding of the Jewish state to refuse to march in the annual
“Salute to Israel” parade down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. Instead of
making that token gesture of solidarity with the city’s Jewish
residents, he commemorated “Nakba Day,” or “Disaster Day,” referring to
the establishment of the modern-day State of Israel in 1948.
Mamdani did so by posting
a video and a statement on social media, including a four-minute,
documentary-style video created by his government-paid staff that
featured an interview with a woman named Inea Bushnaq. “Inea is a New
Yorker and a ‘Nakba’ survivor,” said Mamdani. In it, Bushnaq recounted
her family’s departure from Jerusalem during the 1948 War of
Independence, claiming that they were forced to flee because “the
Zionists were coming into Jerusalem.”
Hundreds of thousands of
Palestinian Arabs did, in fact, flee the British Mandate for Palestine
before May 1948. They did so because of the war that their leaders and
the surrounding Arab nations started, most often at the behest of those
who claimed they could come back after the Jews were pushed into the
sea. They had rejected the U.N. partition vote in November 1947 for an
Arab state alongside the new Jewish one, just as they would reject every
peace offer from Israel in the decades that followed.
The failure
of that effort to carry out a second Holocaust, only a few years after
the first one, which resulted in the slaughter of 6 million Jews in
Europe, left the Arabs disappointed. But they were still determined to
continue their war on the Jewish presence in the country, a
self-destructive belief that persists to this day, which has brought
nothing but suffering for Palestinian Arabs.
During this same
period, an even larger number of Jews were expelled or forced to flee
from their homes throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds—from North Africa
to the farthest stretches of the Middle East.
The plight of the
Palestinian refugees was hard, but unlike the Jews, who were resettled
in Israel and the West, they were deliberately kept homeless to serve as
props in the ongoing war on Israel that continues 78 years later.
What
was particularly egregious about Mamdani’s highlighting of one such
refugee lies in the fact that—contrary to the anti-Zionist mantra about
the Palestinian Arabs having been in the country from time
immemorial—her family were relatively recent immigrants. Bushnaq’s
relatives were Bosnian Muslims, who had arrived in what is now Israel in
the 1880s, after that country was no longer controlled by the Ottoman
Empire.
The Ottomans had ruled over parts of the Balkans for
centuries, tyrannizing its Christian inhabitants, and some Muslims fled,
fearing retribution from the new rulers. The Bushnaqs first went to
Syria and then settled in Jerusalem, which was already starting to grow
as a result of the initial wave of Jews returning to their ancient
homeland.
Yet far from Jews being new to Jerusalem, as Bushnaq
claimed, they had, of course, been there for thousands of years—long
before the Muslim conquest in the seventh century C.E. While Jews had
been the largest religious group in the city for many years before that,
the Ottoman census in 1875 showed that they formed an absolute majority
of the population.
And just to show how fake the claim that the
city and country she fled was wrongly stolen from her family and other
Muslims, Mamdani’s video contained one damning detail that his staff
missed. The “Visit Palestine” poster on the wall behind Bushnaq was
actually a work of a Zionist and Jewish artist, Franz Kraus, who saw it
as part of the effort to promote the burgeoning Jewish homeland prior to
1948. Indeed, as Liel Leibovitz noted in the New York Post, if you look closely in the video, you can see that Kraus signed his work in Hebrew.
Mamdani’s Jewish collaborators
That is, as he rightly pointed out, a graphic metaphor for the fraudulent nature of the entire nakba
narrative that Mamdani relentlessly promotes. Its purpose is not to
help Palestinians, but to build support for the dispossession of the
more than 7 million Jews of Israel. That is something that could only be
accomplished by genocide—like the one the Arabs of 1948 failed to
accomplish, and for which the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7 were merely a
trailer for what they wished to do to every Jew.
Yet Gotham’s Marxist mayor has had no trouble recruiting Jews to collaborate with his efforts to harm their own community.
One such person is Rabbi Miriam Grossman,
a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. That’s a group that not only shares
Mamdani’s desire to destroy Israel but is responsible for spreading blood libels against it. Yet she will serve in a paid government post as the mayor’s “faith liaison” with the Jewish community.
That’s
an outrage and an insult to the overwhelming majority of Jews who
rightly understand that Israel and support for Jewish rights to it
remain an integral part of their faith and identity as a people. The
events of the last 31 months testify to one basic fact: anti-Zionism
can’t be separated from antisemitism. The former is merely a variant of
the latter.
As much as a third of the city’s Jewish population
might have voted for Mamdani last November for a number of reasons,
including their blind loyalty to the Democratic Party and justified
disgust with disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who was the main
alternative. Still, Mamdani’s hostility to Jewish safety is no longer a
theoretical argument.
The good news, however, is that the leaders
of the organized Jewish world in New York have been forced by Mamdani’s
actions to show some spine. Their language wasn’t as blunt as Ambassador
Leiter’s about J Street. But by boycotting Mamdani’s pre-Shavuot Jewish
Heritage Day reception
at his Gracie Mansion official residence, they sent a message that the
city’s Jews aren’t going to go along with the pretense that the mayor is
anything but an open enemy of Jewish life.
Mamdani was
nevertheless able to recruit some Jews to show up for his shindig. And
they deserve the opprobrium not only of the Jewish community, but of all
decent people who realize we are at a tipping point when it comes to
the normalization of antisemitism.
Among them was the usual
contingent of ultra-Orthodox Jews from the Satmar sect, who proclaim
their opposition to Zionism and Israel for theological reasons that
treat Jewish powerlessness as a virtue to be embraced until the coming
of the Messiah. The far smaller and often violent Neturei Karta group is
another problem. Such sectors of the community are willing to do
business with anyone in power, regardless of whether or not they pose a
threat to Jews.
Far more prominent were the left-wing Jews like
Grossman and other JVP members, who see Mamdani’s hostility to Israel
and mainstream Judaism as reasons to support him.
Perhaps even
more significant were the comments of the man who gave the invocation at
Mamdani’s sham event—Rabbi Irwin Kula, president emeritus of CLAL: The
National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. CLAL became an
important focus of efforts to unify the Jewish community under its
founder, Rabbi Irving (“Yitz”) Greenberg. But under his successor, Kula,
it has become not merely irrelevant but arguably counterproductive.
For
Kula and others who seek to normalize Jewish antisemites, as well as
those working to undermine and attack Israel, inclusion is the most
important value. He mocked the absence of Jewish leaders as illustrative
of the collapse of “the liberal Zionist consensus.”
He blessed
Mamdani and urged him to “hold the complexity of this city, to parse and
nuance, with care and precision, the meanings of Zionism, of
antisemitism, and the inextricable connection of Jewish identity and
Palestinian dignity.” Such a meaningless word salad speaks to his
intellectual and moral bankruptcy. It also demonstrates that Jews,
including those who hold the title of rabbi, who won’t take a stand
against open Jew-hatred and delegitimization, aren’t merely harmless
idealists or starry-eyed dreamers of peace.
When they work to
isolate Israel—and strip it of its only ally and the means to defend
itself against genocidal regimes and their terrorist auxiliaries, and
treat those who seek to destroy it as praiseworthy—they have lost more
than the respect of their fellow Jews. They have instead taken on the
role of foot soldiers in a globalized intifada against their own people.
The
primary focus of Jewish activism must be combating those on the left
and the right who are normalizing antisemitism, along with publications
like The New York Times
that traffic in blood libels against Israel and the Jews. Yet we cannot
be silent about those Jews who aid and abet them. They are, like the
Satmar Chassidim, turning into a sect outside of normative Jewish life.
They have little in common with those who understand that, imperfect as
it may be, Israel deserves our love and support regardless of who leads
it or what measures of self-defense they choose to employ against
murderous enemies.
At a time when antisemitism is surging and
Jewish lives are in danger, those who stand with the Israel- and
Jew-haters do so outside of the Jewish community. What’s needed when
dealing with them is not diplomacy or dialogue, but harsh truths like
the ones spoken by Ambassador Leiter.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek
and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American
political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle
East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice”
podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily”
program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube.
Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief
political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger.
He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other
writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and
foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia
University.
Source: https://www.jns.org/opinion/column/jonathan-s-tobin/israels-ambassador-spoke-a-hard-truth-that-needed-to-be-said
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