Throughout American History, Movements For Freedom Have Moved from the Streets into the Political System. That’s Happening Now on Gaza

Sources Cited in This Video

According to a Pew poll this April, 69 percent of Democrats have a negative view of Israel.

According to a Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs poll last May, 30 percent of American Jews—and 38 percent under the age of 44—thought Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.

Andrew Cuomo won his biggest margin in largely Orthodox neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

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Transcript

So I wanted to say a couple of things about Zohran Mamdani’s kind of remarkable victory in the first round of the New York City mayoral primary. There still has to be the second round you have to get to with the ranked choice voting. You have to get to 50 percent.

But it seems overwhelmingly likely that he will in a really, really huge upset, given that he was really unknown when he began this race. And so I think a couple of things. First of all, There is a history in the United States of social movements moving their way into the political system.

And so I think this is what we’re seeing now. with the kind of movement for Palestinian freedom. Obviously, that wasn’t the central element of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. It was very relentlessly focused on making a city, making New York affordable for working class people. And any Democrat, of course, would naturally focus on these bread and butter issues.

But what was significant about Mamdani’s campaign was that he integrated supporting Palestinian freedom into a larger progressive message. Unlike, let’s say, Bill de Blasio, just not too long ago in New York, who was very progressive on many issues, but kind of made a clear exception for this issue. Zohran Mamdani didn’t make an exception.

And I think that reflects the shifting, the power of this movement for Palestinian freedom and the way it’s moved from activism now into politics. So it might have appeared now with the encampments destroyed and all of this repression on campus, that this movement is essentially dead.

But I think if you look at the history of these kind of movements that change American consciousness, they flare up in one form and are put down and emerge in another form. And oftentimes what happens is they move into the political system. So if you think about the anti-war movement in Vietnam,

the huge protests at the 19, you know, in the 19, starting in the mid 1960s. Then you see in 1968, a lot of these antiwar activists support Gene McCarthy. They go clean for Gene. They enter into the democratic process to support the McCarthy campaign.

They lose in the Democratic primary to Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and then to Richard Nixon. But then they helped to nominate George McGovern in 1972. and then to elect the Democrats in the midterm elections in 1974 that cut off US funding for Vietnam. So this activism,

although it seems to be defeated in the late 60s and even the early 70s, ultimately changes the Democratic Party by the mid-1970s. Similarly, with the Occupy movement, which if you remember in the wake of the financial crisis, it emerges, it flares up in 2011. You have hundreds of these kind of Occupy encampments basically all over the country.

It quickly fizzles, seems like it’s dead. But then that energy enters into the political process in Bernie Sanders’ campaign. when Sanders kind of comes from nowhere in 2016 and then really changes the agenda of the Democratic Party on trade and economic issues to a significant degree, moving it to the left.

And so I think Mamdani is an example of this happening in the pro-Palestine movement. in the Democratic Party. Obviously, it’s not easy to replicate what he did on a national level. New York is much more liberal than even the Democratic Party nationally. And Mamdani had the advantage of running against an extremely flawed candidate in Andrew Cuomo.

And Mamdani was just a really, really good candidate. Like AOC, he was extraordinarily good on social media, and he had a really, really strong, clear message. But I do think that this shows that in the Democratic Party, There’s a huge opportunity in the presidential race for a candidate who doesn’t make, of course,

Israel-Palestine the center of their campaign. No one would do that. But like Mamdani, integrates it into a larger progressive message, which has as its center the concerns of working and middle class Americans in the United States. And I just think the media has not quite caught up to how rapidly public opinion inside the Democratic Party has changed

on the subject of Israel. The Pew Research Center did a poll earlier this year. It found that 69% of Democrats now have a negative view of Israel. And this is moving very fast, not even just year by year, but almost month by month. And what’s striking about the Pew poll is that we’re accustomed to thinking about a

huge generational gap among Americans on Israel. But in the Democratic Party, the generational gap is actually closed. Older Americans have also become much more unfavorable. The generation gap now really exists within the Republican Party, where older Republicans are the last cohort of Americans, really, who are very, very strongly supportive of Israel, while younger Republicans,

50 percent of them have a negative and unfavorable view of Israel. But in the Democratic Party, actually older and younger people have really come together nationally. So I think there’s very little support among Democratic voters for a kind of Biden or AIPAC-like policy position on Israel.

And I think the advantage in a Democratic Party presidential primary is that Democratic candidates and the presidential level, if they like Mamdani, can really capture the imagination of voters. They can raise so much money online like Bernie Sanders did, like Howard Dean did in 2004, that they can compete with the amount of money that big donors have.

The problem Democrats have had in congressional elections, especially House races, is that when AIPAC and its associated groups pour all this money into a House race, unless you’re a celebrity candidate like AOC or Rashida Tlaib, you just can’t raise enough money to really compete. But in a presidential election, you can.

And that’s why I think Mamdani really is going to be a template for at least one, if not multiple Democrats, in 2028 who are basically going to run against the Biden-APAC line. And I think they’re going to find if they have any political, you know, tact, if they have any political capacity at all,

they’re actually going to find a very responsive audience. The second thing to say about Mamdani is the way the media talks about his relationship to Jews, right? So the media narrative is that the Jews are very frightened, Jews are very alarmed, that it’s kind of Mamdani versus the Jews. And it’s frustrating to see this again and again,

because the polling just does not bear this out. I haven’t seen any polling since the election, but the polling that happened before the election showed that Mamdani was running in second place among Jewish voters. Cuomo, I think the poll showed Cuomo had 31 percent and Mamdani had 20 percent.

And that’s really not surprising at all if you look at what we have, the data we have on American Jews, which is that American Jews are deeply, deeply divided on Israel, particularly along generational lines. And so it’s no question that there are a group of older and especially Orthodox American Jews

including particularly in this place like New York, who are very, very hostile and threatened by Mamdani. It’s not for show. It’s real. And I think there was a I saw that actually Cuomo’s largest margin over Mamdani was in the neighborhoods of Borough Park and Midwood, which are very heavily Orthodox neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

But among younger and more secular Jewish voters, there’s huge enthusiasm for someone like Mamdani, partly just because of his economic message and the fact that he’s a younger and more appealing progressive candidate, but also because there are just a huge number of American Jews, especially younger American Jews, who have views that are closer to Mamdani’s

than they are to the American Jewish leadership. And the American Jewish leadership, and what the problem is, and so, you know, just as one statistic, right? Last year, there was a poll last May, which found that among American Jews under the age of 44, 38% thought Israel was committing genocide, 38%.

There was a significant percentage that didn’t know. So the percentage that said it wasn’t committing genocide wasn’t much larger than the percentage that it was, that American, younger American Jews were really split. It was 30% of American Jews overall. 30% thought Israel was committing genocide and 38% under the age of 44.

And that was May of last year, before the amnesty. report before Israel stopped allowing any humanitarian aid in for more than two months. I’m sure it would be higher than that. And so the problem is that the media often takes its cues from these establishment Jewish organizations and they use terms like Jewish community or Jewish leaders.

Those terms should really be kind of like exiled from the media coverage because there is no actual Jewish community. There are a lot of different Jews who are very, very deeply divided, partly very deeply divided in the way they experienced Judaism, but also very, very deeply divided in their views of Israel-Palestine.

And Zohran Mamdani alienates one group of Jews and scares them. And he really appeals to a different younger group of American Jews who are often erased in this kind of imagined, cohesive American Jewish community, which just doesn’t exist. And you just ask American Jews whether they agree with their parents or grandparents in Israel.

And you see these fractures are just everywhere. But the media often, I feel like, doesn’t pick them up. And then the last… point I would make is just that this American Jewish establishment, which rallied around Andrew Cuomo, now may rally around Eric Adams in order to try to defeat this.

And it’s just to me another sign of how profoundly depressing and frankly immoral the American Jewish establishment’s perspective is. Andrew Cuomo is a sexual harasser, right? You know, Eric Adams is deeply corrupt and now basically made a deal with the Trump administration. What this shows is that you’re willing to get in bed.

The American Jewish establishment in New York and nationally is basically willing to get into bed with anybody, no matter how sleazy, no matter how discredited, as long as that person is willing to support unconditional support for Israel. right? It’s not like anyone even really believes that Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams believe this stuff.

It’s not about their conviction. It’s basically just that they’re willing to basically make this political deal. And the American Jewish establishment is willing to make a deal with the devil again and again and again, whoever it takes, including Donald Trump, in order to support this unconditional support for Israel. And it’s really shameful.

It’s not only shameful because it shows absolute disregard for Palestinian humanity, but it’s shameful in terms of its relationship to the United States. I mean, Zohran Mamdani is running on things like making groceries affordable, making buses free, allowing New Yorkers to be able to have lower rents. These are things that American Jews should care about. Instead,

we have billionaires like Ackman and Bloomberg, who don’t have to worry about these things at all, basically throwing money into defeating a progressive agenda that actually could make life better for ordinary New Yorkers because The thing that they’re focused on is maintaining unconditional support for Israel.

It’s not only a betrayal of our obligations to Palestinians as fellow human beings, it’s a betrayal of our obligations to other Americans. No one is even pretending that the American Jewish establishment really thinks that for the city of New York, Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams would be better. They don’t give a shit.

They’re only concerned about maintaining this unconditional support for Israel and smearing anyone as antisemitic who challenges it. And, you know, people who really care about New York City and people who really care about America and the struggle for liberal democracy against Donald Trump in America, we should just be doing better than that.

And the fact that Zohran Mamdani will win and that he’s going to win with a significant share of the Jewish vote gives me hope because it shows that actually there are just a lot of ordinary Americans and a lot of ordinary American Jews who don’t think that way.