Zohran Mamdani’s victory marks the end of Israel’s central place in U.S. politics

Zohran Mamdani's victory over Andrew Cuomo is a historic turning point for Palestine in U.S. politics. It reflects a growing fatigue with Israel’s role in American life and the slow implosion of Zionism under the weight of its own excess.

By Abdaljawad Omar  June 25, 2025

https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/zohran-mamdanis-victory-marks-the-end-of-israels-central-place-in-u-s-politics/

It may appear, at first glance, irrelevant—even absurd—that a mayoral contest in New York City, or the electoral fate of a councilwoman in Brooklyn, should hinge upon one’s position vis-à-vis Palestine. What, after all, does municipal governance—zoning, sanitation, housing affordability—have to do with the devastation of Gaza, the starvation of a people, the slow-motion spectacle of death under bombardment? And yet, this apparent disconnect—between the intimacy of local issues and the enormity of geopolitical violence—is precisely the condition under which American politics operates.

It is also within this disjuncture between scale and intensity, between geographic distance and ideological proximity, that something more fundamental becomes visible.

In this context, the victory of Zohran Mamdani over a figure so emblematic of institutional continuity and dynastic power as Andrew Cuomo is not a mere electoral anecdote. It is a political event. One that must be read not through the metrics of personality or campaign mechanics, but through the symbolic grammar of what is now speakable, representable, and electorally viable. Mamdani’s triumph indexes a shifting horizon—where Palestine, long treated as a “third rail” of American politics, no longer electrocutes those who dare to touch it. It is, perhaps, not yet a mainstream moral consensus, but it is no longer a guarantee of political suicide.

To be clear, Mamdani did not run as a firebrand of unrepentant anti-Zionism. He conceded, symbolically and rhetorically, to the anxieties of some the liberal Zionist electorate. He sought a middle ground—tempering his moral commitments with gestures of reassurance, striking a posture that neither retreated from his history of solidarity with Palestine nor fully embraced the uncompromising clarity that Palestine often demands. And that, too, is telling. 

It is precisely this calibrated ambivalence—this oscillation between affirmation and reassurance—that invited criticism, even from within Mamdani’s own base, and for those who worked with him in building and disseminating the Palestine movement. His campaign’s equivocations around the question of Israel’s “right to exist,” and his hesitant invocation of a long-standing grounding in pro-Palestinian politics, sparked unease. For some, it echoed the familiar choreography of moral retreat: a gesture of concession that risks metastasizing into posture, then into position, and eventually into principle. The fear, voiced not out of cynicism but historical memory, is that one concession invites another—and that, over time, the cumulative weight of these concessions will fold Mamdani into the very establishment his victory seemed to defy. There is, in other words, a profound anxiety that the dialectic of incorporation is already in motion: that the system, unable to fully neutralize Palestine as a politics, will instead absorb it as discourse—sanitized, defanged, and made legible only through the grammar of “balance”, “two sidism”, and lack of empathy for Palestine. Mamdani’s electoral success may mark the symbolic end of Palestine as a third-rail issue, but it also raises the unsettling possibility that this normalization comes at the price of its radical edge. That to enter the political bloodstream is also to risk being filtered by it, and conceding too much ground for it, too.

His win, then, is not solely an endorsement of Palestine as a cause, but a testament to Palestine’s altered status as a question. No longer a line that cannot be crossed, it has become a contested terrain—one in which candidates can engage, hedge, affirm, or deflect without automatic disqualification. That shift is monumental. It speaks to the cumulative force of decades of organizing, to the moral aftermath of Gaza’s unendurable visibility, and to the weariness of younger voters and many progressives with the cold, procedural evasions of their predecessors. In that sense, Mamdani’s success is not only about what he said, but about what no longer needs to be unsaid. The enforced silences are cracking—not with revolutionary rupture, but with the slow, grinding attrition of imperial consensus. What once had to be hidden can now be tentatively named, even if symbolic concessions are also made. What once marked the outer edge of the acceptable is now folded—awkwardly, cautiously, but definitively—into the domain of the political.

To be clear, there are contingencies—many, in fact. Mamdani’s victory cannot be abstracted from the particularities of this race. He was, after all, running against a disgraced former governor, whose name—once a shorthand for executive dominance in New York—now lingers with the stale odor of scandal and the exhausted theatrics of establishment redemption. Moreover, Mamdani’s campaign was unusually precise in its architecture. It moved with clarity, discipline, and a distinct communicative cadence—earnest but composed, clear but tactically agile. His appeal was not cultivated through demagoguery or cultic charisma, but through an almost anachronistic fidelity to program: free public buses, expanded child care, rent stabilization—not as isolated policy demands but as part of a larger moral and political imaginary shaped by his socialist commitments. That this message resonated, and not only in progressive enclaves but across disparate urban constituencies—young people, immigrants, tenants, cultural workers, the politically disenchanted—is itself a signal: not of a messianic candidacy, but of a deeper hunger. A hunger for coherence, for principle, and for a politics unafraid to name power, yet disciplined enough to speak of what can be built.

But what is also becoming increasingly palpable—though still spoken of in hushed or disavowing tones—is a growing fatigue within the United States itself. A kind of political and psychic exhaustion, faint at first but now unmistakable, that has begun to gather around the place of Israel in American public life. Among pundits, podcasters, and the constellation of media-facing personae who orbit the centers of alternative mediums, there is an emerging discomfort—an irritation, even—with the obsessive centrality of Israel to American identity, to its political rituals, and to the compulsive performances of allegiance it demands. It is not only the confrontation within the right wing with an “America First” that excludes Israel, and one that folds Israel into the meaning of “America First.” It is not only in the rising voices that center Palestine, although still on the margins, but growing in power.

But it is also in the very emergence of the question itself—the question of Israel’s “right to exist,” of the politician’s obligatory fealty, of the ritualistic declarations of support—that a deeper malaise becomes legible. What was once treated as settled, as axiomatic, as sacred, is now weighed down by its own performative burden. These questions no longer float as self-evident truths; they fall under the weight of their own exhaustion. To even ask them now is to register that something has shifted—that these affirmations, repeated ad nauseam, have become signifiers not of moral clarity but of ideological bankruptcy.

Increasingly, the insistence upon Israel as a litmus test is no longer heard as a signal of moral seriousness, but as the worn-out reflex of a ruling class—political, media, institutional—whose ethical coordinates are collapsing under the weight of their own contradictions. The repetition of allegiance now functions less as a marker of conviction than as a symptom: of fear, of ideological decay, of a desperate clinging to an order whose foundational myths are beginning to unravel. One need only examine the New York Times’ implicit endorsement of Andrew Cuomo, and its barely veiled aversion to Zohran Mamdani—a gesture not of policy disagreement, but of retaliatory contempt for the very fact of his pro-Palestinian record. Or one might turn, with no illusions, to the likes of Tucker Carlson, whose remarks on the obsessive centrality of Israel in American political life directed at Senator Ted Cruz are not born of solidarity with Palestine, but of exhaustion—an exhaustion nonetheless symptomatic of a wider unease. Let us be clear: this is not the emergence of a coherent pro-Palestinian mainstream. Far from it. But what is beginning to erode is the sanctity of Israel’s place in American moral life. The shift, at this stage, is not from marginality to centrality for Palestine—but from unquestioned centrality to uneasy displacement for Israel.

For instance, one should resist the temptation to assume that the relentless deployment of antisemitism accusations by Israeli hasbara is primarily about silencing criticism of Israel. On the contrary, what we are witnessing is something far more interesting: the obscene excess of this rhetorical strategy is beginning to backfire—not because people suddenly become more pro-Palestinian, but because they are growing tired, even disgusted, with being forced to perform the ritual of exceptional concern for Israel’s symbolic centrality. Let us be clear: this exhaustion is not the result of some decolonial awakening. Rather, it is the inevitable result of ideological overproduction. When every critique becomes a potential hate crime, when every call for ceasefire is labeled incitement, and when every protest is framed as an antisemitic gathering—something begins to shift in the symbolic order. The very machinery meant to preserve Israel’s hegemonic position in American moral life begins to unravel it. The more Israel insists on its unique status, the more visible its violence becomes. The more it accuses, the more it reveals, the more it demands silence or fealty the more it weakens. And here is the twist: the current dislocation of Israel’s symbolic place in the American imaginary is not only the result of pro-Palestinian activism. It is also—perhaps primarily—the result of Israel’s own actions: its insistence on exceptionalism, its ongoing genocide in Gaza, and its attempt to drag the United States into a region-wide war.

In the end, the shift we are witnessing is not the triumph of an alternative narrative, but the slow implosion of the dominant one under the weight of its own excess. What we are living through is not merely a crisis of legitimacy, but a crisis of legibility—a moment when the coordinates that once made support for Israel appear natural, moral, even inevitable, begin to blur. And paradoxically, it is not anti-Zionist discourse that has produced this rupture, but Zionism itself—its saturation of the symbolic space, its demand to be centered in every moral reckoning, its compulsion to speak even when no one is asking. This is the logic of ideological overproduction: when a system can no longer sustain its own fictions, not because they have been disproven, but because they have been repeated too often, too loudly, with too little shame. In that moment, ideology ceases to function as belief and begins to curdle into farce. And perhaps that is where we are now: not in the presence of a victorious counter-hegemony, but in the ruins of a narrative that exhausted itself by insisting too much, too often, and at the expense of everything else.