There is a new trick in progressive politics. First, spend your career demonising the Jewish state. Then, when Jews complain that antisemitism is soaring, grandly unveil a plan to protect them from it and take a deep bow.
Enter Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York, whose “Strategy to Combat Antisemitism” in the Big Apple was launched this week. In cash terms, this included $6.4 million for community groups fighting hate, $1 million for security at smaller synagogues and other institutions, $2 million for a Holocaust memorial in Queens and $2.5 million for a new centre for Jewish culture in Brooklyn. “We hold a responsibility to sustain and protect our Jewish neighbours,” the mayor declared.
How touching. Almost enough money to make you forget that Mamdani was unable to condemn the slogan “globalise the Intifada” when questioned about it repeatedly. There is just one rather important omission from his plan to fight antisemitism, however, and it concerns antisemitism itself.
Mamdani’s 30-page strategy doesn’t define the thing it claims to be fighting. The city, it announces, can combat antisemitism “effectively without needing to adopt a definition for this specific form of hate”.
Surprise, surprise, on anti-Zionism, the ideology that has driven so much of the hatred since October 7, it has almost nothing to say. It even takes care to note that neither the NYPD nor the FBI regards protests outside houses of worship as inherently hateful. So the synagogues will get their security guards, and the mob outside will get the green light. Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, president of the New York Board of Rabbis, called the omission “preposterous”. That’s putting it mildly.
Which brings me to the great progressive confidence trick of our age. Mamdani will protect the Jews. He will fund their synagogues and celebrate their culture: their bagels, perhaps, their klezmer and their contribution to New York. What he will not do is listen to those Jews who tell him that the relentless portrayal of the world’s only Jewish state as uniquely evil, genocidal and illegitimate – something that Mamdani has rather dabbled in himself – is what created the need for all this protection in the first place.
The danger is real enough. Jews make up roughly one in nine New Yorkers, yet in the first seven months of this year they were the victims in 57 per cent of the city’s reported hate crimes. Mamdani acknowledges the scale of the problem. Yet he insists that Israel is committing “genocide”, boycotted the Israel Day Parade and has vowed to have Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if he sets foot in the city.
Moreover, one of his first acts as mayor was to tear up his predecessor’s executive order adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which recognises, among other things, that denying Jews the right to national self-determination crosses the line into Jew-hatred.
Then along comes Ed Miliband. The two men met in New York last week, and the foreign secretary could barely contain his glee. “Progressive parties are so much stronger when we learn from and stand with each other,” he posted, listing “peace in Israel and Palestine” among their common causes. Excuse me while I puke. The following day, he found time at the United Nations to shake hands with Iran’s foreign minister. Hand me that sick bag again? Oh, it’s full.
Of course the two men found common cause; a cynic might suggest that the Iranians do as well. Not only that, but they also use a common technique. Gaslighting.
How else to explain Miliband’s habit of proclaiming his abhorrence of antisemitism while doing his utmost to turn Israel into an international pariah? He insists that his quarrel is merely with the Israeli government while slapping sanctions on the country – rather than on the other side, where the terrorism is – and telling Labour’s Gaza obsessives: “We hear you, you were right.” His answer to Jewish alarm is the same as Mamdani’s: you are imagining things. Shut up.
Heads they win, tails Jews lose. If we stay silent, the demonisation intensifies. If we object, we are accused of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
In fact, last week, Zack Polanski supplied an unusually pure version of the argument. At a Board of Deputies hustings for the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, where he is standing for Keir Starmer’s old seat, the Green leader declared himself “an anti-Zionist”. Zionism, he explained, had become associated with “displacement and genocide”. This was a magnificent piece of circular reasoning: redefine Zionism as racism, then announce triumphantly that Zionism is racist.
But Polanski went still further. When Jews condemn swivel-eyed hostility to Israel antisemitic, he suggested, they are making themselves less safe. “You are the problem,” shouted one member of the audience. Quite.
So there it is. Antisemitism is surging. Obviously, the demonisation of Israel is a big part of the problem. Yet the people doing the demonising reply that the real problem is the Jews complaining about it. It’s gaslighting, pure and simple, and it has become a political programme on both sides of the Atlantic.
Sure, put guards outside synagogues and prosecute those who assault Jews. But if you spend the rest of your time telling the world that the collective expression of Jewish nationhood is racist, colonialist or genocidal, don’t congratulate yourself on protecting us from the consequences.
And please don’t tell us that by making a fuss, we are making ourselves less safe. Jews have heard that one before, and we’re not going quietly this time.
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