Zohran Mamdani and Anti-Zionism

Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor of New York who calls himself a Muslim and a socialist has raised hopes of anti-Zionists that Zionist control over the United States is diminishing. The anti-Zionist protestors in the segment of the Katie Halper show below do not like the City Council law about street protests that caused them to be separated by 250 feet from the synagogue where the Zionist auction of Palestinian West Bank land was being held. They want Mamdani’s actions to match his anti-Zionist rhetoric. We have heard some anti-Zionists like George Galloway say Mamdani is a phony. So far, I don’t see this in Mamdani’s response. He never endorsed the City Council resolution. It was passed with a veto proof majority without his signature. He could remove the Zionist Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a Zionist who serves the Israel Lobby and its billionaires, not the people of New York.

Israel and its Lobby claim to represent “all Jews”, and this has done terrible damage to Jewish people all over the world. Israel began its existence as a British colony with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 giving Jewish people a homeland in Palestine. This was advocated at the turn of the century by the founder of Jewish political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, as a solution to the problem of “antisemitism” i.e. discrimination and oppression of Jewish people. Herzl popularized the word “Zionism” globally. He initially used the word in his diaries and his seminal 1896 manifesto Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). He subsequently established it as the formal name of the political movement during the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897.The majority of Jews all over the world didn’t buy it. They opposed racial discrimination against their own people, but European and American Jews had been quite successful as minorities, lived comfortable lives, and had no wish to leave the countries where they were born and whose language they spoke to fight Arabs in some foreign desert. They saw this as the crackpot idea that it was. It was not even really Jewish, it was a British idea to have a colony in the Middle East. The “Homeland for the Jews” idea was just clever disguise. Then came Hitler and Nazism, which used Jews as scapegoats for Germany’s economic problems, which lead to the Holocaust. At the end of the war, you had millions of displaced Jews, and they were susceptible to the idea that they could find safety and security in a national home of their own. And so they bought what was essentially a British con and became colonists in what they were told was “a land without a people for a people without a land”. The fly in this British ointment, of course, was that the land was not without a people, it had a people who already lived on the land and had for many centuries, and they had to be dispossessed to realize this nationalist dream. The Zionists were mightily aided by the Anglo-American imperialists, whose desire for control of the area and its resources had never changed and only increased with the discoveries of oil in the region. The initial Zionists who went to Israel did not think of themselves as colonists, they were idealists who were “going to make the desert bloom” in socialist kubutzes. The native inhabitants of the region were seen as 19th century America saw native Americans – as nuisances to be eliminated. This had led to eighty years of dispossession and genocide by Zionism, and now, Jews everywhere have been endangered, as Zionism has falsely come be identified with being a Jew (whatever that is) by ignorant people everywhere.