Enough With The "Do You Love Israel" Issue -- M.J. Rosenberg
Sid Shniad
As a Jew, it makes me cringe
MJ Rosenberg
Oct 17
I tried to watch the New York City mayoral debate last night. I made it maybe five minutes in—until the moderators started asking about Israel. That was enough. I turned it off. What on earth does Israel have to do with who runs New York? Nothing. But in this city, nothing is allowed to stay separate from Israel. Every candidate for anything—from Congress down to community board—has to pass the same loyalty test: do you “love” Israel? Not support, not respect—love. Fail that test, and AIPAC’s donor network comes for you, no matter what office you’re running for or what issues you actually care about. That’s what this is really about. Not Israel itself, but control. Zohran Mamdani is the target right now because he refuses to bow to that system. He’s anti-Zionist, yes, and he’s been one since college. But his position is simple: he wants Israel to become a democracy, not an ethno-theocracy. That’s not a call for destruction. It’s a call for equality. It threatens no one’s life—only the political system that insists Jewish supremacy is permanent. But somehow, that position has become a source of crazed controversy in a municipal election. The mayor of New York doesn’t get a vote on foreign aid or arms sales. He’s supposed to fix subways, not solve the Middle East. Yet the first question in a city debate was about Israel. That tells you everything about who really calls the shots in New York politics. (Although if Mamdami wins, those days will be over). New York has always been a city of passionate immigrants. It’s full of people who still care deeply about where their families came from. But no other group has ever demanded that its homeland dominate local politics. During the Irish Troubles—one of the bloodiest, most emotional conflicts of the 20th century—New York’s Irish population was enormous. People had family in Belfast and Derry. They raised money, they protested, they argued. But no one demanded that mayoral candidates choose sides between Sinn Féin and the Orangemen. No one opened a debate by asking Ed Koch whether he condemned Margaret Thatcher or supported Irish unification. Everyone understood that the city’s problems were here, not in Ulster or in the Republic. The same is true today with Ukrainians. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian New Yorkers have family members being bombed right now. They send money, they volunteer, they grieve. But no one demands that the next mayor outline their stance on Crimea or explain their policy toward the great President Zelensky. Ukrainian-Americans care about Ukraine, but they don’t hijack the local ballot to force everyone else to pretend they’re electing a secretary of state. (Imagine if the slaughter in Ukraine got one percent of the attention here that the 20 Israeli hostages got. Like the 67,000 Palestinians slaughtered in Gaza, they are invisible). Only Israel gets this obsessive treatment. Only one foreign lobby is allowed to try to dictate the agenda of every election in America’s biggest city. And the reason is simple: money and intimidation. AIPAC and its allies spend millions to crush anyone who won’t repeat the approved script. Candidates know it. Journalists know it. Everyone knows it—and most just go along because they’re afraid. But here’s the thing: most New Yorkers aren’t Jewish, and most don’t care about Israel beyond the headlines. What they do care about is their rent, their safety, their schools, their city. And every time they turn on a debate and hear candidates tripping over themselves to prove their love for a country they’ll never visit, they know something’s off. They may not say it out loud, but they feel it: their democracy is being held hostage to someone else’s foreign agenda. That’s what this city has become—a place where local elections serve as tests of loyalty to a foreign state, where candidates fear donors more than voters. And the worst part is how normal it’s all become. It shouldn’t be normal. It shouldn’t even be tolerated. The day New Yorkers decide they’ve had enough—enough of their elections being turned into AIPAC auditions, enough of being told what they must “love”—that’s the day politics here might finally be normalized. Hopefully, that day is only 18 days from today. PS. It is worth noting that every other bloc of New Yorkers who have ethnic ties to a homeland are actually from, or descended from people who lived in that homeland. Jewish New Yorkers are not from Israel/Palestine. They just have been taught that they were 3000 years ago. (Palestinian New Yorkers, on the other hand….) |
