Whilst Zohran Mamdani has repeatedly critiqued Israeli apartheid and genocide, he has also reinforced Zionist legitimacy by repeating affirmations of Israel's existence and refusing to acknowledge how, Israel slaughtered most of its own civilians as per the Hannibal Directive.
Since 2020, Zohran Mamdani critiques Israeli apartheid but reinforces Zionism by affirming Israel's "right to exist" & absolving IOF massacres of their own citizens through the Hannibal Directive and the reframing of Israel as the victim despite decades of occupation and murder.
POLITICS
Zohran Mamdani, a Ugandan-born New York State Assemblymember representing Queens' District 36 since 2021 and Democratic nominee for NYC mayor, positions himself as a progressive democratic socialist focused on housing justice, universal childcare, and public transit.
Yet, in decolonial terms, his rhetoric on Palestine exemplifies liberal Zionism's insidious role: offering performative critiques of Israeli settler-colonialism while upholding the foundational legitimacy of a state built on the dispossession of Palestinians, thereby diluting anti-Zionist solidarity and enabling the continuum of violence from the Nakba to Gaza's current annihilation.
Central to Mamdani's "service" to Zionism is his repeated affirmation of Israel's "right to exist" as a Jewish state — a phrase that, in Zionist discourse, inherently privileges Jewish ethno-nationalism over Palestinian self-determination and equal rights under international law.
During his mayoral campaign, Mamdani stated he believes "Israel has a right to exist as a state that provides equal rights to all residents," a qualification that, while nodding to equity, still concedes the permanence of a regime rooted in apartheid and occupation, as documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
While this was called out by anti-Zionist activists who viewed it as a betrayal of BDS principles and decolonial imperatives at a May 2025 event, his statement garnered endorsements from liberal Zionist figures like NYC Comptroller Brad Lander, who praised Mamdani's "commitment to keeping all New Yorkers safe — including Jewish New Yorkers, who, like me, are Zionists."
Mamdani's handling of October 7, 2023 — the catalyst for Israel's escalated genocidal assault on Gaza — further illustrates this dynamic. In his October 7, 2025 anniversary statement, he condemned Hamas' attacks as a "horrific war crime," mourning "more than 1,100 Israelis" killed and praying for the "safe return of every hostage still held," without any reference to the Hannibal Directive and how Israel actively - and openly - murdered their own civillians to prevent capture.
This Israeli military protocol, reactivated on October 7, explicitly prioritizes preventing captures over soldier lives, leading to documented instances of Israeli forces firing on their own citizens and comrades to thwart abductions — contributing significantly to the death toll, as reported by Haaretz and UN investigators. By omitting this context, Mamdani absolves the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) of responsibility for a substantial portion of the casualties, framing the violence as solely Hamas' and echoing Zionist atrocity propaganda that erases Palestinian resistance to 75+ years of subjugation.
This selective narrative sustains the false binary of Palestinian "terrorism" versus Israeli "self-defense," and is used to stifle decolonial dialogue on the root causes: decades of blockade, settlement expansion, and ethnic cleansing. Mamdani's statement pivots immediately to Israel's "genocidal war" response — "a death toll that now far exceeds 67,000" — acknowledging US complicity but stopping short of fully dismantling the Zionist framework that justifies such asymmetry.
Whilst Mamdani has consistently and vocally called for a ceasefire, protested against arms sales (e.g., blocking the NYSE in October 2024), and supported UNRWA funding — actions that challenge liberal Zionist orthodoxy; by affirming Israel's existence, he participates in the dehumanization of Palestinians as perpetual aggressors, undermining the urgency of immediate decolonization, right of return, and dismantling of the apartheid regime.
As Mondoweiss notes, his ascent signals liberal Zionists "paving the way" for anti-Zionist gains, but only by conceding ground that perpetuates the very structures of oppression his critiques ostensibly target. In a city like New York — home to robust Palestinian solidarity yet rife with Zionist lobbying — this duality risks co-opting progressive energy into palatable reformism, delaying the full reckoning with settler-colonial legacies.
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🔒mondoweiss.net
🔒Affirming Israel's "right to exist":
The phrase “Israel’s right to exist” is not grounded in international law but functions as a political demand designed to erase and neutralize the foundational violence upon which the Israeli state was established. No country has an enshrined “right to exist” under international law; what is codified, instead, is the right of peoples to self-determination. Yet Palestinians — an indigenous population subject to forced displacement, occupation, and apartheid — are uniquely coerced to affirm not just Israel’s existence, but its existence as a Jewish ethnostate. The demand to recognise an illegal state built on the erasure of Palestinians serves a clear colonial function: to reframe a settler-colonial project as a matter of mutual recognition, while masking the dispossession and ongoing subjugation of the native population.
Reaffirming this “right” without condition is not neutral — it is a weaponized narrative that forces the oppressed to validate the conditions of their own oppression. It silences the Nakba, the mass expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians in 1948; it ignores the demolition of over 500 villages; it legitimizes the denial of the right of return, a right Palestinians hold under UN Resolution 194. In reality, this dog-whistle turns a settler-colonial enterprise into a moral imperative, requiring Palestinians to grant legitimacy to a state that continues to colonize their land, suffocate Gaza, fragment the West Bank, and implement apartheid policies across all territories it controls.
This language operates as a form of colonial gaslighting by shifting the global discourse from justice, land, and liberation to “recognition,” painting Palestinians as irrational or hostile if they refuse to validate a system structured on their displacement. It allows Israel to demand unconditional acceptance while giving nothing in return — not rights, not reparations, not even a meaningful recognition of the Palestinian people as equals. Internationally, it upholds a model where settler-colonialism is not only protected but sanctified, positioning Israel as eternally under threat while Palestinians are cast as aggressors for simply insisting they too have a right to exist with dignity on their ancestral land.
In this way, the assertion that “Israel has a right to exist” functions not as a principle of peace, but as a discursive tool of imperial domination, maintaining asymmetry and preventing justice. To challenge it is not to deny Jewish safety or personhood — it is to refuse the erasure of a people whose lives, land, and future have been systematically stripped under the banner of legitimacy. True peace cannot be built on the demand that the colonized affirm the righteousness of their own dispossession.
Liberal Zionism:
Liberal Zionism masquerades as a "moderate" or "progressive" strain of Zionism, blending Jewish nationalism with cherry-picked liberal values like democracy and human rights as a means to justify the existence of the illegal settler colonial ethnostate known as “Israel” [1].
And Liberal Zionism is one of the greatest threats because of its political camouflage [2]. By co-opting progressive language, Liberal Zionism inoculates Zionism against true anti-colonial solidarity, dividing the left and derailing BDS movements [3]. It ensures the ongoing Nakba – from Gaza's ruins to Hebron's checkpoints – persists under a democratic veneer, making decolonization seem radical rather than just [4] [5].
Emerging from early 20th-century Labor Zionism — the very movement that orchestrated the 1948 Nakba which ethnically cleansed over 750,000 Palestinians through mass expulsions and village destructions — liberal Zionism has always served as the velvet glove over the iron fist of settler-colonialism [6] [7].
Despite claiming it merely seeks a "Jewish and democratic state," this rhetoric is actually code for an ethnostate where Jewish supremacy trumps Palestinian equality, enshrined in laws like the 2018 Nation-State Law that demotes Arabic and prioritizes Jewish settlement [8] [9].
At its core, liberal Zionism rejects the colonial origins of Israel and instead attempts to frame the Zionist project as a "return" or "liberation" rather than a European settler invasion that erased indigenous Palestinian society [10].
As a political movement, liberal Zionism emerged as a response to antisemitism and the Holocaust but quickly pivoted to justifying land theft under the guise of "self-determination," ignoring how Zionism fits classic colonial patterns: displacement of natives, resource extraction, and demographic engineering to maintain a Jewish majority [11].
As of 2025, amid the Gaza genocide and West Bank annexation pushes, it clings to a fading two-state illusion, providing diplomatic and financial cover for Israel's crimes while silencing Palestinian voices as "antisemitic" [12].
“Zionism is a colonialism, not a simple radical nationalism: even in its left-wing version, it is a colonialist nationalism." – Zeev Sternhell, liberal Zionist historian exposing his own ideology's flaws [13].
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